Boudewijn de Bruin - Ethics and the global financial crisis: Why incompetence is worse than greed
Update: 2014-11-05
Description
To the extent that the global financial crisis is a moral crisis, most commentators have focused on banker bonuses, cultures of greed, shameless self-enrichment, and other forms of egoism.
But while unrestricted egoism is certainly a vice, I argue that the more serious moral defects in finance lie somewhere else. They have to do not so much with the motivation of bankers and other finance professionals, but rather with their competence, that is, with the way they gain and process information, make predictions, assess business risks, scrutinise clients, and so on.
Using insight from a recent strand in philosophy called ‘virtue epistemology’, I consider in this talk such things as the ethics of sub-prime mortgages, credit rating agencies and banks, as well as the way in which ‘epistemic virtues’ assisted in the uncovering of the Madoff scam.
But while unrestricted egoism is certainly a vice, I argue that the more serious moral defects in finance lie somewhere else. They have to do not so much with the motivation of bankers and other finance professionals, but rather with their competence, that is, with the way they gain and process information, make predictions, assess business risks, scrutinise clients, and so on.
Using insight from a recent strand in philosophy called ‘virtue epistemology’, I consider in this talk such things as the ethics of sub-prime mortgages, credit rating agencies and banks, as well as the way in which ‘epistemic virtues’ assisted in the uncovering of the Madoff scam.
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