Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Review of Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists

My review essay on Donald Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics (SUNY Press, 2009) is now out in Business Ethics Quarterly. Subscribers to BEQ can access the issue here.

Cite: Hicks, Stephen R. C. 2012. “Review of Donald Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics.” Business Ethics Quarterly 22.1, 186-193.

Michael Strong on Socratic teaching

I like this paragraph from Michael Strong’s The Habit of Thought:

“The effort of Socratic Practice is to develop students’ own standard of intellectual judgment by means of placing the onus of responsibility for understanding entirely on them and providing them with the tools and experiences necessary to develop their intellectual judgment. ‘Does it make sense to you?’ is the central question to students whenever we are working to understand a text. As long as the student knows that, whether by didactic instruction or by subtle conversational manipulation, she will ultimately be led to the ‘right’ answer, she will never rely on her own judgment in the deepest sense. In order to come to rely on her judgment, and to feel a need to refine it, she must continually be put in situations where she is completely on her own.” (p. 15)

This semester Marsha Enright and I are experimenting with Socratic Seminars in my Philosophical Foundations of Education course. So far we have done sessions with selections from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave [pdf] from The Republic, John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [pdf], and John Dewey’s Democracy in Education [pdf] .

Interview with Phyllis Johnson on entrepreneurship, coffee, and empowering women in Africa

In my interview with Phyllis Johnson after her talk at Rockford College, Ms. Johnson and I discussed her entrepreneurial career as well as the challenges faced by coffee farmers in Africa–most of them low-paid women with little-to-no business education and who, in many cases, are not allowed to own farmland due to cultural, religious, or legal barriers. Without property rights, business education, and equal status, women face an uphill battle out of economic poverty.

My nineteen-minute follow up interview with Ms. Johnson after her talk is below:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Cross-posted at the CEE site.

Interview with Alexei Marcoux on moral partiality in business

Alexei Marcoux of Loyola University Chicago spoke at Rockford College on whether ethics requires moral partiality or impartiality in business decision-making. Below is my follow-up sixteen-minute interview with Professor Marcoux. Along the way, we discuss nepotism, conflicts of interest, fiduciary obligations, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and contemporary business ethicist Norman Bowie.

Part I:

Part II:

Cross-posted at the CEE site.

Phyllis Johnson to speak at Rockford College

Phyllis Johnson will speak on “Entrepreneurship, Coffee, and Empowering Women in Africa” to my Business and Economic Ethics class on Thursday, October 6.

Johnson is the President and Co-Founder of BD Imports, a Rockford-based company known for giving starts to African women and small businesses engaged in the production and trade of coffee. Johnson is a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville with a B.S. in Microbiology, is a board member of the International Women in Coffee Alliance, and has spoken on women in trade at the Joint Advisory Committee Meetings at the United Nations of Geneva, Switzerland.

Please see the flyer for details about the talk’s time and location. Johnson’s visit is sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.

Alexei Marcoux to speak at Rockford College

Professor Alexei Marcoux will be visiting from Loyola University Chicago, where is a professor of business ethics, to speak on moral partiality in business. Time and location information for his talk are in the enlargeable poster image.

Alexei Marcoux is co-author wth Al Gini of a widely-used textbook in the field, Case Studies in Business Ethics, now in its sixth edition. Also notable is his fine article entitled “Retrieving Business Ethics from Political Philosophy” in the Journal of Private Enterprise.

In 2009 BusinessWeek magazine ranked Loyola University Chicago’s Business Ethics program Number One in the Country.

Interview with Douglas Den Uyl on “The Essence of Capitalism”

Douglas Den Uyl spoke at Rockford College on four competing (and/or compatible?) theories of the nature of capitalism: Milton Friedman’s “Utility” account, Friedrich Hayek’s “Epistemic” account, Adam Smith’s “Aesthetic” account, and Ayn Rand’s “Self-Fulfillment” account.

Here is my sixteen-minute interview with Dr. Den Uyl following his lecture:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Cross-posted at the CEE site.

Kaizen 18 — the Francesco Clark interview

The latest issue of Kaizen features my interview with entrepreneur Francesco Clark.

The theme of the interview is Entrepreneurship and Overcoming Adversity, about which Clark is perfectly positioned to speak. At age 24 he became paralyzed from the neck down after a swimming pool accident. Some physicians thought he would never move or breathe without assistance again. But with great effort over several years, Clark made strong progress and, given his physical-therapy experiences, developed an award-winning line of skin-care products that became Clark’s Botanicals, now sold in Europe, Asia, and the United States.

I met with Clark in New York to discuss coming back from tragedy, what it takes to fight against overwhelming odds, and entrepreneurship as an option for people with disabilities and special challenges.

Also featured in this issue of Kaizen [pdf] are student essay contest winners Nicole Schnack, Jake Maliszewski, and William Newkirk, and reports on our High School Entrepreneur Day, Professor Jules Gleicher’s new course, and guest speaker Dr. Al Gini.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.