Ethics of Economic Responsibility

Ralf Lüfter is Assistant Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Innsbruck. Major areas of interest are Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Economics, and Poetical Sources of Economic Knowledge. His research focuses on the fundamental structures of sense that inform key concepts of economics

"Routledge recently launched a series named `Economics and Humanities` where several contributions enrich our understanding of economics by reasoning merely with words at the expense of numbers...Several fundamental questions regarding key economic concepts like wealth, gain, loss, truth so on and so forth are tackled in eight different books. Ralf Lüfter’s small book fits perfectly into this context by addressing fundamental questions about responsibility in economics."Toni Gibea, HAL

• Preliminary Remarks. 1. The Rise of Responsibility to Become a Key Concept of Our Time. 2. Two Kinds of Responsibility. 2.1. The Guiding Question of Modern Ethics. 2.2. Operability-Based and End-in-Itself-Based Responsibility. 2.3. Operative Concepts and Ontological Concepts of Responsibility. 3. Reduction to the Necessary. 3.1. Constraints of Being. 3.2. One Foot in the Air. 3.3. The Premise of Reason. 3.4. Contingent Ground and Entruing Element. 4. The Conceptualization of Economic Responsibility. 4.1. Contextual Economic Responsibility. 4.2. No-Man’s-Land of Ethical Theory. 4.3. John Maurice Clarke’s Changing Basis of Economic Responsibility. 4.4. The Friedman Doctrine. 4.5. Economic Responsibility and Truth. 5. Outlook. Bibliography.