Hardy Bouillon : Business Ethics and the Austrian Tradition in Economics

Life is short and time for reading books on business ethics is scarce. Those readers who are interested in the argumentative foundations of business ethics, but do not want to struggle through several hundred pages, can find a compact presentation in Business Ethics and the Austrian Tradition in Economics, written by Hardy Bouillon. The book is composed of four chapters: 1. Ethical Preliminaries, 2. Economics, 3. Justice, and 4. Business Ethics. It ends with a single page of concluding remarks. The headings alone give a good indication of the author’s methodological program: Doing business ethics means considering the moral rightness or wrongness of economic actions. Therefore it is necessary to clarify the characteristics of what makes an action the object of moral judgement (chapter 1), the characteristics of economic actions (chapter 2), and the characteristics of just economic actions (chapter 3). In chapter 1 Bouillon sets out the principles and definitions that will guide him in the rest of the inquiry: With respect to normative propositions he declares (appealing to a correspondence theory of truth): “Normative propositions cannot have any truth value.” (11) As a consequence, he allows that his own normative statements have to be interpreted as hypothetical recommendations. If one wants to achieve or avoid a certain state, then one should accept a certain principle or norm. Another principle that plays an important role in the overarching argument is the principle of Pareto inferiority: Requests by a person A (or a group of persons A’) directed towards another person B (or a group of persons B’) are inequitable if their fulfilment would worsen the status of B (B’) while not worsening the status of A (A’). The principle paves the way for a rejection of requests to change certain property relations, set out in the later chapters. Bouillon’s ethical framework is based upon an individualistic perspective on actions: Explaining or describing situations using methodological individualism means explaining a certain constellation by reference to the actions of individuals, not collectives. In individualist ethics, the author suggests, the objects of moral judgements are actions or omissions of individuals. As a consequence, in order to hold someone responsible for a certain state of affairs, one has to trace