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Capitalism and ethics: how conflicts‐of‐interest legislation can be used to handle moral dilemmas in the economy *
Author(s) -
Swedberg Richard
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
international social science journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.237
H-Index - 43
eISSN - 1468-2451
pISSN - 0020-8701
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2005.00565.x
Subject(s) - legislation , capitalism , guard (computer science) , economics , political economy , law , law and economics , political science , economy , market economy , sociology , politics , computer science , programming language
In this article I look at the way that conflict of interest‐legislation is used to handle moral dilemmas in the US economy. The key idea of this type of laws is that it is possible to prevent a certain type of moral conflicts from arising by forbidding all the actors who have been set to guard a general interest to enter into a situation where their behaviour may be influenced by their private interests . In an attempt to better understand how this type of legislation works in reality, I use as my empirical case what happened when the US bull market of the 1990s fell apart and a number of corporate scandals broke out. The reason for using just this example is that conflicts of interest figured very prominently in the scandals that followed the bull market, especially in the accounting industry which this article covers in detail. An effort is also made to see how suggestions were made, in response to the scandals, to improve upon the existing conflicts of interest‐legislation in various ways.