Abstract
Market economy is based in the acting person within her socio-cultural framework. Creativity is not dynamic because it is developed in time, but because it goes beyond what is immediately given. This dynamism which creativity develops is the transformation of the action. This is the basic concept to understand the capitalistic process, that the end is an imagined reality and that the means must be constituted. In this view the social practice of the firm is huge: the firm’s social practice is to enhance the possibilities of persons. The greater these possibilities, the greater the possibilities of monetary profit. This involves taking account of the following efficiency criterion: entrepreneurial coordination and wealth increase if the process of creating culturally transmitted personal possibilities for action in firms is extended.
Market economy based in firms has a very positive moral content: the possibility of excellence of human action. Market economy is the mean to economic development and prosperity. Firms based in people acting together, sharing the culture of the organization, towards virtue-based ethics, create and distribute most of the economy’s wealth, innovate, trade and raise living standards.
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Notes
- 1.
E. Hartman (2011) makes a pertinent defense of profits from an Aristotelian point of view.
- 2.
The same idea was masterfully expressed by Professor Julián Marías in the following words: “My life is not a thing, but rather a doing, a reality projected into the future, that is argumentative and dramatic, and that is not exactly being but happening” (J. Marías 1996, p. 126). More bluntly, Peter Drucker says: “the best way to predict the future is to create it” (P. Drucker 1998, p. 197).
- 3.
As the Spanish philosopher X. Zubiri points out: “This with (with things, with other men, with-me myself) is not something extra, an extrinsic relation, added to man in the exercise of his life. This would be absolutely chimerical. It is something much more radical. The with is a formal structural stage of life itself and therefore of human substantiveness in its vital dynamism” (Zubiri 2003, p. 255).
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Aranzadi, J. (2018). The Morality of Market Economy. In: Human Action, Economics, and Ethics. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73912-0_9
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