ABSTRACT
Financial ethics – as proposed in this book – is developed as a new concept. Whereas ethics and economics are as old as the world, new financial ethics is an attempt to revive moral standards as axioms for economic behaviour, instead of the current strict rationalistic assumptions. The previous chapter kicked off, among other issues, with a brief historical sketch of how the culture of global financial capitalism has evolved from an agricultural society and industrial economy into today’s financially capitalistic information society. If we consider economics from the historical perspective, it is nowadays above all a specific type of entrenched and materialised human behaviour. The very moment that the role of self-interest – in the sense of Ayn Rand – turns into the current greed of financial capitalism, the character of economists and the economy changes drastically. This chapter therefore opens the discussion on ethics in general to stimulate moral impulses that are needed as new a priori to economics and finance.
