The European Union is a new subject for theories of legitimacy, posing fundamental questions to the established concepts and principles of democratic theory. General compliance and popular acceptance and respect for European law is at stake. The volume addresses the main challenges of the European Union to democratic theory. The legitimacy of such transnational institutions born by political integration has so far received some but scant attention. The mere existence of the Union proves that the sovereign state cannot remain the sole focus of normative reflection. Indeed, the very conception...

The approaches to economic ethics and business ethics in Continental Europe and those in America show considerable differences but also a shared interest in turning business ethics into a subject relevant and useful for business practice as well as for the philosophical debate on ethics. The volume collects original essays on the major approaches to economic ethics and business ethics in Germany, the USA, and Europe. It provides the reader with a comprehensive overview about the discussion on modern economic ethics and business ethics. It introduces the German approaches to economic ethics...

The Ethics of Banking analyzes the systemic and the ethical mistakes that led to the crisis. It keeps the middle ground between excusing all failures by the argument of a systemic crisis not to be taken responsibility for by the financial managers and the moralistic reproach that only moral failure is at the origin of the crisis. It investigates the role of speculation in the formation of the crisis and distinguishes between productive speculation for hedging and for securing market liquidity on the one hand, and unproductive and even detrimental hyper-speculation going far beyond of the...

The transformation process from the planned to the market economy in the East Central European countries is a laboratory of applying economic theory and business ethics to an enormous historical transition in the economic and political system. Authors from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia analyse the economic, philosophical and political problems of the transition process. They discuss the economic and legal questions of the privatization of socialized property, examine critically whether pure Liberalism has been and is able to cope with the transition problems, and...

Konsum ist schon lange nicht mehr nur eine Notwendigkeit. Zum Sommerschlussverkauf 2004 lud ein grosses britisches Kaufhaus mit dem Slogan ein: „I shop, therefore I am“. Menschen definieren sich nicht mehr nur über das, was sie produzieren, sondern auch über das, was sie konsumieren. Konsumentenstile werden zu Lebensstilen. Konsumentenvereinigungen und Konsumentenboykotte haben den Konsum als ein Mittel der politi-schen Auseinandersetzung entdeckt. Der Konsumismus scheint zur Ideologie des Zeitalters zu werden. Der vorliegende Band geht den philosophischen, wirtschaftsethischen,...