How Kantian a Theory of Kantian Capitalism?: A Response to Bowie’s Ruffin Lecture
回应鲍伊的康德式资本主义理论，指出当前商业伦理研究多局限于应用道德原则，忽视了资本主义概念基础的系统性反思，呼吁从道德概念出发重新诠释资本主义。
In his Ruffin Lecture, Bowie attempts to offer a Kantian theory of capitalism, and this strikes me as a constructive and important thing to do. Bowie’s proposal contributes to a new direction in research that I believe is critical: offering alternative interpretations of capitalism, specifically, theories based in moral concepts which are designed to make room for normative inquiry. In contrast, much of the work in business ethics has focused on the application of moral principles or ideas to specific problems in business. These efforts work largely within the accepted meanings of “business” offered by economists, strategists and others, and then try to import moral concepts to identify and analyze various ethical problems. Several recent works in ethics suggest that this approach hasn’t addressed underlying assumptions about ethics and business which tend to make “ethical” approaches either directly conflicting with the logic of “business” (i.e., business ethics as “oxymoron”) or largely irrelevant to it (i.e., business ethics as vacuous). As such, the “problems” approach to doing ethics doesn’t address the substantial difficulties created by the conceptual terrain to which it was applied. Without more comprehensive and systematic attention to how researchers understand the conceptual underpinnings of capitalism, the contributions of such efforts will be limited and tenuous—that is, they will make projects which attempt to “apply” ethics onto business seem naive or implausible to people outside the community of business ethicists.