IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/buetqu/v22y2012i02p319-350_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Adam Smith’s Bourgeois Virtues in Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Wells, Thomas
  • Graafland, Johan

Abstract

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society.

Suggested Citation

  • Wells, Thomas & Graafland, Johan, 2012. "Adam Smith’s Bourgeois Virtues in Competition," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 22(2), pages 319-350, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:buetqu:v:22:y:2012:i:02:p:319-350_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1052150X0000498X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joan Fontrodona & Alejo Sison & Boudewijn Bruin, 2013. "Editorial Introduction: Putting Virtues Into Practice. A Challenge for Business and Organizations," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 113(4), pages 563-565, April.
    2. Matthias P. Hühn & Claus Dierksmeier, 2016. "Will the Real A. Smith Please Stand Up!," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 136(1), pages 119-132, June.
    3. Marta Rocchi & Ignacio Ferrero, 2014. "Systematic Shared Value in Finance: Expanding Porter's Approach," Faculty Working Papers 07/14, School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Navarra.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:buetqu:v:22:y:2012:i:02:p:319-350_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/beq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.