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Editorial

Monkey Business

by Rick Lewis

Bored by banking, irritated by investors, enervated by economics? You shouldn’t be! Philosophers tend to ignore the intricacies of international trade and the world of commerce. People sometimes sneer about economics being the ‘dismal science’, but if it was good enough for a thinker like Adam Smith/Karl Marx (please delete according to your political preferences) then surely it is good enough for the rest of us?

Philosophy, among other things, involves thinking systematically about the problems we encounter in life, so the health of the system which brings us our daily bread must surely be worth the occasional thought. Last summer, collapsing corporations crowded the front pages. Most people blamed the ‘company cultures’ of corporations such as Enron and the colour supplements have been full of lurid stories about get-rich-quick executives, dodgy accountants, misled shareholders, inflated expense accounts and business meetings held in lap-dancing clubs. We could fulminate grandly about the need for morality in business, thunder socialistically about the inherent rottenness of capitalism or, even more fun, we could suggest that business requires morality, so that immoral business practices eventually result in their practitioners coming unstuck and going bust.

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