The Global Economic Crisis Requires a Global Ethic The Manifesto for a Global Economic Ethic

A couple of years ago, when I would speak on ethical aspects in economics, I felt often like a voice calling in the desert. With the present global economic crisis, however, it has become much easier for me to address this issue. More and more people realize that this crisis has also to do with common ethical values and stan-dards. One might argue: do we not have laws which need just to be enforced? Sure, solutions to this crisis require all provisions of the law. But laws are not enough. As you know the political will to fight greed, fraud, corruption and self-aggrandizement is often weak, because it is not supported by an ethical will. Laws without morality cannot endure, and no legal provision can be implemented without moral conscious-ness based on some elementary ethical standards. But is this not just an issue of individual morality? Not at all, it is also an issue of corporate morality and concerns the global market economy as a whole. Hence my first reflection: 1. The failure of markets, institutions and morality calls for an ethical framework Recent experiences have proved that the sustainability of the market economy is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, one cannot escape the fact that the emergence of global capitalism has brought with it an entirely new set of risks. Trying to find a single reason for, or solution to the challenges of the global market economy in a particular country or in a particular region is unlikely to be successful. In fact, what we often observe is that, in such a situation, mutual recriminations occur: economists accuse politicians and politicians accuse economists; while the average citizen frequently sees the moral defects of both protagonists. In any case, if only one of the 2 three elements, whether it be economics, politics, or morality, does not work, it can cause serious difficulties for the market economy. Scholars distinguish between three types of failures of the capitalist system (cf. Joh