An understanding of the relationship between ethics and economics is fundamental to an understanding of social life. Yet on close examination this relationship appears paradoxical and intractable. Both ethics and economics are concerned with the determination of what is valuable and what this prescribes, yet each approaches these matters in substan? tial disregard of the other. Thus either ethics and economics lack any significant relation, which seems implausible since both concern but one social life, or a matter fundamental to the understanding of society appears all but impervious to centuries of reflection. Despite such difficulties, the relationship between ethics and economics was the focus of a recent conference at Marquette University, Community Dimensions of Economic Enterprise,1 at which a number of participants expressed important insights that can be argued to lay the basis for an understand? ing of these fundamental relationships. Peter Danner noted the pre-eminence of economic thinking in social life, and argued that it would be quixotic to deny that gain-seeking has occupied a crucial role both in the material and cultural advance? ment of modern civilization. He reasoned that the notion of economic gain, properly conceived, is informed by moderation, justice, and the spirit of poverty, and thus should function as a principle of action in a social economy. The question at hand, he concluded, is not individuals pursue gain fully oblivious of moral constraint, such that a moral life only seems possible upon suppression of an economic orienta? tion to the world, but rather whether people, seeking economic better? ment through profits and gains, can form true community among themselves. [Danner, p. 232] Ethics and economics, that is, do not occupy distinct spheres of social life, competing for attention as the priorities of material well-being or just relations with others alternate in our concern. Ethics and economics are mutually related in a manner that permits human personality both economic rationality and moral intelligibility.