Rethinking business ethics in an age of crisis

Abstract

The new millennium has been plagued by several crises, of which the financial and climate crises have gained most public attention. The financial crisis cast a vast number of people into unemployment while their lifetime savings evaporated and many lost their homes. The inequality between the poor and the rich significantly increased. During the last decades in the US, the top 1 percent managed to obtain a fifth of the national income; wealth became even more unequally distributed than before (Stiglitz 2012). Among the manifold consequences of this growing inequality are lower health and lower life expectancies in many countries. In this respect, the real price of the financial crisis is not first and foremost an economic problem, but rather a serious human one (e.g., Kentikelenis et al. 2011).