Creating Value: the Common Goal of Business and Ethics

In the age of the need to secure our future more firmly (i.e. in the age of the need to become more sustainable, it is useful to remind ourselves that business (and economic growth) share the same goal as ethics: they both seek to increase value in the world.

As long was we understand that only one form of value is monetary (and that there are manifold other forms of incommensurable, but nonetheless more important, value) and that it need not accrue primarily or only to the business operator, then we have a powerful conception of our social place in the world and on earth.

We also need to understand that the question of "to whom the value will accrue" is irrelevant except to the extent that the wealth creator needs enough to nourish a foundation for continuing to provide it (e.g. shelter, sleep food, happiness, family etc.) Creating more value benefits all who partake of it, and this should be an agreeable result for the those truly engaged in increasing value in the world (with due exceptions based on reasonable ethical grounds and distinctions - e.g. perhaps those who actively and deliberately detract from the value created.)

Aye - here is the rub: how do we define this and who places limits on it? While liberty recognizes that the self is the best knower of the self and therefore the best one to determine what is needed to nourish its foundations for social and ecological contibutions to value, it is also the self that is the best deceiver of the self. How can we protect the self from the self. Another way of putting this question might be to frame it in collective action parlance: "How can we ensure that the individually rational is 1. indeed individually rational (beneficial for that individual) and 2. does not overwhelm the socially and collectively rational by disproportionately attempting to acquire that value for itself at the expense of social value (e.g. standing on one's tiptoes in a concert hall to gain a better view at the expense of those behind us)?