Beyond Selfishness: Adam Smith and the Limits of the Market

Abstract

prevailing that, as one recent book title puts it, Adam Smith discovered modern economics and put an end to morality. In business ethics, accordingly, Adam Smith typically proves to be a stumbling block rather than a resource. He is all too often taken to have successfully defended, once and for all, greed and self-interest, the magic ofthe and the irrelevance of morals in business. His latter-day celebrants, notably Milton Friedman and his Chicago-school Brethren, typically glorify what they take to be the underlying message of the Wealth of Nations without much troubling themselves about the philosophical and ethical framework within which that great book was conceived and written, indeed, without paying much attention at all to the deep ethical tensions within the book itself. But from across the city of Chicago, philosopher and well-known business ethicist Patricia Werhane has taken on the prevailing view and its anti-ethical implications and issued a welcome challenge to the Friedmanesque reductions of Smith to a mere free marketeer. Her new book, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism, is an extended study and vindication of Smith as a rich and complex thinker in both ethics and business. The argument is not new, of course, but the emphasis on Smith's insistence that a free market is possible only within the framework of justice can never be repeated often enough and it has rarely been stated so well. As everyone in business ethics knows, Adam Smith wrote two books, not one, although this fact seems to come as a surprise to many avid Smith supporters. ?1993. Business Ethics Quarterly, Volume 3, Issue 4. ISSN 1052-150X. 0453-0460.