Finance Ethics: The Rationality of Virtue

The first book ever to integrate business ethics with financial economics, Finance Ethics shows how ethical behavior fits within the rational, profit-maximizing, finance paradigm. Dobson argues that even in economic terms the finance paradigm has a serious flaw: it views the firm and financial markets in general as contractual nexuses yet it fails to supply any adequate mechanisms for enforcing those contractual relations. Finance Ethics is therefore not just a moral critique of the finance paradigm, arguing that self-interested profit making must be constrained by ethics. Rather, it is a critique from within that paradigm, in which truth becomes a rational mechanism to enforce contracts, and virtuous behavior is shown to make the most business sense.