Abstract
Call for ethics and disorientation in the markets seem to proceed in parallel. From a sociological point of view the appeal to ethic is quite problematic: it is difficult to translate ethical values into decision programs and moralizing itself tends to have polemogenous effects. Ethics has to face a paradox: the unanswerable question if the distinction good/bad as such is good or bad.
On financial markets the relationship with risk has changed. In a supposed risk-neutral market, it looks more prudent to risk than to keep one’s own wealth, because the activity on the market is supposed to increase the availability of wealth for everyone. In conditions of risk a much more complex ethical attitude is needed, which abandons the assumption that there are principles of behavior that allow to univocally discriminate a good position from a bad position. The task of ethics would be to watch over defuturizations and to signal the behaviors that reduce the openness and variety of future possibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. typically Akerlof (1970).
- 2.
Sinclair (2010) argues that in the case of rating agencies the conflict of interest is a much less plausible explanation than commonly thought: the reasons of the unreliability of the assessments are deeper and more complex.
- 3.
Especially the curious implied volatility, adventurously measured with the help of the Black-Scholes formula to price options (MacKenzie 2006, Chap. 5) – a way to calculate the unpredictability of the future starting from the (now known) unpredictability of the past.
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Esposito, E. (2014). The Present Use of the Future: Management and Production of Risk on Financial Markets. In: Luetge, C., Jauernig, J. (eds) Business Ethics and Risk Management. Ethical Economy, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7441-4_2
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