I’m happy to announce a new audio edition of my “Ayn Rand and Business Ethics” has been published at Audible. Thanks to the team at The Atlas Society for producing it.
The essay was originally published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy and has since been translated into Korean, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Portuguese. It’s also available in a booklet edition.
Abstract: Most traditional systems of business ethics hold that business is essentially amoral or immoral. Such systems share a common assumption: that conflicts of interest — either because of scarce resources (most often assumed by those on the Left) or innate human badness or sin (most often assumed by those on the Right) — are basic to the human condition. That assumption of fundamental conflict is rejected in Ayn Rand’s system of ethics. Rand’s system, by contrast, emphasizes the power of human reason to shape one’s character and beliefs, and it makes fundamental reason’s power to develop new resources and cultivate win-win social relationships. In this essay, Stephen Hicks applies Rand’s radical ethical perspective to key issues in business ethics and contrasts it to those perspectives based on the assumption of the amorality or immorality of business.