For undergraduate/graduate-level courses in Business Ethics, Business Policy, Business/Government Relations. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to many of the practical ethical issues that business students and business persons must face in their work.

Recent economic development and the financial and economic crisis require a change in our approach to business and finance. This book combines theology, economy and philosophy in order to examine in detail the idea that the functioning of a free market economy depends upon sound cultural and ethical foundations. The free market is a cultural achievement, not only an economic phenomenon subject to technical rules of trade and exchange. It is an achievement which lives by and depends upon the values and virtues shared by the majority of those who engage in economic activity. It is these values and virtues that we refer to as culture. Trust, credibility, loyalty, diligence, and entrepreneurship are the values inherent in commercial rules and law. But beyond law, there is also the need for ethical convictions and for global solidarity with developing countries. This book offers new ideas for future sustainable development and responds to an increasing need for a new sense of responsibility for the common good in societal institutions and good leadership.

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

This book deals with some aspects of the future shape of the socio-economic order which would be founded on sustainability principles and the role of law therein, instead of on the prevailing capitalist economic order. The volume elaborates in particular on how innovation, a crucial aspect of free-market capitalism and its laws which constitute the current socio-economic order, could result in a more sustainable economy which, in turn, could lead to a more sustainable society. Moreover, the book analyses current developments in financial and economic law and evaluates their perks, risks and sustainability levels. The book contains no less than 11 chapters in which a variety of experts share their state-of-the-art insights regarding specific domains of socio-economic life. As such, the book deals with topics that are at present fully under debate in societies, such as student credit and the dangers it entails, cryptocurrencies and how the law tries to regulate this basically private law instrument, groups of companies under Belgian (company) law, a proposal for improving the international monetary system, and seeds and intellectual property rights, besides various other similar themes. The book forms the latest volume of the book series Economic and Financial Law & Policy – Shifting Insights & Values, and fully complies with the series’ goal of critically examining the legal methods and mechanisms that shape the global free markets and proposing alternatives to them. The book will hereby prove a valuable instrument for all researchers investigating these matters, besides policymakers and their advisers as well as all lawyers active in the field of economic law who look for a new perspective on the subject matters dealt with.

​FairEconomy is a concept for a free and fair market economy. In response to the financial and economic crises of the past years, the authors develop fundamental ideas of how a market economy works, what rules markets need and who safeguards fairness and equal opportunity in such an economy. The book sets out the design of a sustainable market order: Going back to the very roots of doing business it offers a fascinating insight into the cultural and anthropological premises of the market economy. Fairness and free competition can be identified as key elements of successful markets, sometimes neglected in politics and business. Legal rules need to ensure that fairness and economic freedom work. The same holds true for the relationship of risk and liability that has been overlooked in the banking sector. The ideas of a FairEconomy, sketched in this book, are fit to become a reality: The authors point to institutions and mechanisms that could integrate the concept into global law. They place their trust less upon ever-larger institutions and more on private entitlement and enforcement at the global, regional, and local levels. ​

Well-functioning financial markets are crucial for the economic well-being and the justice of contemporary societies. The Great Financial Crisis has shown that a perspective that naively trusts in the self-regulating powers of free markets cannot capture what is at stake in understanding and regulating financial markets. The damage done by the Great Financial Crisis, including its distributive consequences, raises serious questions about the justice of financial markets as we know them. This volume brings together leading scholars from political theory, law, and economics in order to explore the relation between justice and financial markets. Broadening the perspective from a purely economic one to a liberal egalitarian one, the volume explores foundational normative questions about how to conceptualize justice in relation to financial markets, the biases in the legal frameworks of financial markets that produce unjust outcomes, and perspectives of justice on specific institutions and practices in contemporary financial markets. Written in a clear and accessible language, the volume presents analyses of how financial markets (should) function and how the Great Financial Crisis came about, proposals for how the structures of financial markets could be reformed, and analysis of why reform is not happening at the speed that would be desirable from a perspective of justice.