Ethics, self-interest, and the public good

              28
Ethics, Self- Interest, and the Public Good
32 Sacks, Morals and
Markets p. 24
33 Ibid pp. 23– 24
34 “ KPMG for Mayor!:
Corporations could do
a good job of running
corrupt Third World
governments,” March 26,
2007, p. 40
of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, has written:
“ What then might be the lesson of [ Friedrich von Hayek’s] The Fatal
Conceit for our time? That socialism is not the only enemy of the
market economy. Another enemy, all the more powerful for its
recent global triumph, is the market economy itself. When everything
that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be
broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping
becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when
our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the
market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run
it depends.” 32
And Rabbi Sacks goes on to write:
“ The concept of the holy is precisely the domain in which the worth
of things is not judged by their market price or economic value. And
this fundamental insight of Judaism is all the more striking given its
respect for the market within the market- place. The “ fatal conceit”
for Judaism, as for Hayek, is to believe that the market governs the
totality of our lives, when it in fact governs only a limited part of it,
that which concerns goods which we think of as being subject to pro-duction
and exchange. There are things fundamental to being human
that we do not produce; instead we receive from those who came
before us and from God Himself. And there are things which we may
not exchange, however high the price.” 33
A recent opinion piece in Forbes Magazine 34 by Eric Werker, a Harvard
Business School assistant professor, takes the opposite position, suggesting that