ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about civilizing the 'barbarians'. These 'barbarians' are said to be students of business, management and economics who are said to be a generation completely different from the old protest generation of 1968 and so on. The chapter discusses some contemporary philosophical positions, which–except for the last one (K. Binmore)–argue that modern societies do indeed require a moral surplus to prevent human societies from destabilizing. The positions analyzed are the discourse ethics of J. Habermas, J. Rawls' political liberalism, and K. Binmore's game theory-based contractarianism. The chapter argues that the question whether the moral surplus can remain stable must be answered negatively in the cases of Habermas and Rawls. Habermas, in arguing for the importance of discourses as grounds for normative theory, makes a fundamental assumption: the participants of a discourse must allow their behaviour–at least partially–to be guided by a rational motivation.
