infonet-economy

Ingo Pies (2016b) provides an engaging review of our article “Locating Responsibility” (see Kolmar/Beschorner 2016), published in one of the past issues of the zfwu. In his thoughtful comments, he discusses our suggestion of a multi-level approach in economic ethics against the background of his own ideas of “ordonomics”, which is an alternative conceptual framework that allows to get a grip on the different analytical levels that are potentially relevant in order to address theoretical as well as very practical ethical issues. This discussion makes both similarities as well as differences between “locating responsibility” and “ordonomics” visible and seems therefore fruitful to elaborate on some crucial aspects on the relationship between business, economics, and ethics.

In this reply to Ingo Pies’ review we will – for the sake of simplicity and to hopefully stimulate further discussion – focus on misunderstandings and disagreements rather than on the significant common ground between the two different approaches. While we are aware that there are many remaining issues in our “Locating Responsibility” paper that need to be addressed in future research, we want also to point to some of the issues that we are having with “ordonomics” and that, ex negativo, shed some light on the deeper reasons why we have developed the “locating responsibility” approach. Our arguments unfold around a common theme: There is no and there will be no convincing concept of economic ethics that is merely based on the paradigm of homo oeconomicus as it is commonly used. In a more positive and a more constructive manner: From our perspective, “ordonomics” would need to develop a more complex theory of individual wellbeing and action as well as the inter-relationship between individual and society to be able to tackle the relationships and the interactions between the different levels of “games, meta-games, and meta-meta-games” (which are at the heart of “ordonomics”) in a more convincing way.