The Immoral Investment: A Kantian Moral Constraint of Free-Market Enterprise

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of avoiding immoral investments as a fundamental Kantian categorical imperative for free-market enterprises that produces goods, services, or knowledge. Related to the concept of an economic externality, an immoral investment is defined as a sacrifice or loss that a firm imposes on non-shareholders without their consent to boost its profitability from both supply-side and demand-side investment perspectives. Furthermore, these victims are also denied the financial entitlements of formal shareholders or owners. The utility of this concept will be demonstrated by analyzing cases from biomedical, engineering, and business ethics from the perspective of product design and production investment on the supply-side, as well as marketing and advertising investments on the demand-side. The article concludes by discussing the value of this approach by offering a more systematic, rigorous, and deductive approach to ethical reasoning in a business context.