180154 SE Ethics and Profit: A History of Ideas (2025S)

Traders make profit by buying products cheaply and selling them more expensively. Capitalists make profit by employing labourers and selling the fruit of their labour for more than the wages paid to the worker. Workers try to get the most money for their work, and consumers go bargain-hunting to spend as little as possible for the goods they buy.

But when, if at all, is it appropriate to thus profit from, or even on the back of, our fellow human beings? When does someone profit unfairly, or just plain too much? Are some forms of profit perhaps to be shunned altogether, or should profit-seeking be encouraged, so as to generate a societal benefit?

In this seminar, we approach these very much contemporary ethical questions about profit-seeking by studying historical texts on these questions from the body of Western philosophical and theological thought. The aim of this seminar is to understand the philosophical issues at stake in these questions, to understand and critically appraise a range of different ethical positions that may be partly alien to us, and to lay the foundations for formulating and defending our own answers to ethical questions about profit-seeking that we encounter today. While the seminar studies historical texts, its approach is largely systematic: Rather than doing source critique and detailed historical investigations, we take the historical texts at face value and try to understand their contribution to a systematic inquiry into the ethics of profit-seeking.

List of topics (subject to change):
- Plato Against the Merchant
- Aristotle on types of exchange and profit
- Jerome against wealth, Cicero on profit and fellow-feeling
- Augustine and Aquinas on justified profits from trade
- John Wesley and Josef Butler: A protestant twist on the profit motive
- Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith: Private profit, social benefit
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Fourier: Early socialist criticism of the profit motive
- Karl Marx: The capitalist's profit
- Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin: Altruistic motivation as part of evolved human nature
- Ayn Rand and Jean Hampton: In defense of self-interest
- Milton Friedman: The duty to make profit
- Stephanie Collins and Luara Ferracioli: The profit motive in the care sector
- Gerald Cohen (and John Rawls): Demanding profit to serve the common good
- William MacAskill: Earning to give

After successful completion of the seminar, you will be able to
- explain key historical positions in the morality of profit in your own words in speaking and writing,
- contextualise contemporary ethical questions in the context of the historical texts we studies, identifying relevant historical texts and using these to increase your understanding of the contemporary questions,
- reconstruct and critically evaluate arguments from historical and contemporary texts, in speaking and writing,
- position yourself with regard to selected questions about the ethics of profit-seeking.

The seminar is taught and assessed in English, and will feature extensive small group discussions which require everyone's preparation and contribution to succeed. In preparation of each seminar, you will read the assigned core text and complete some short preparatory reading tasks and other research exercises on Moodle.

Prerequisites: Open for MA-level students of all disciplines.
Economics: Willingness to engage with concepts and ideas from contemporary economics is required. Prior knowledge of economics is an asset, but not required. Relevant economic concepts and ideas will be explained in class where needed.
Ethics: Willingness to read longer historical texts of different genres is required. No prior experience of such readings is required, but if you are not yet experienced in reading historical texts, please budget in additional class preparation time. Experience in philosophical ethics is an asset, but not required.