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This chapter presents an examination of Habermas's ‘Discourse Ethics’, originally read in his presence in 1998. The chapter proceeds with a close reflection on Plato's Gorgias, which demonstrates that Habermas's ‘discourse ethics’ is unreasonable in proposing the criterion of ‘acceptability from the perspective of every other person's understanding of himself and the world’. Plato's Socrates has already shown that this is self-refuting. Socrates also shows the basis for human equality and justice: recognition that intrinsic human goods such as knowledge and friendship are realizable in others' lives as much as in my own. The Socratic/Platonic transformation of the Sophistic opposition between nature and law into an understanding of natural law is traced out, along with the advance from first principles to exceptionless moral norms excluding the killing of the innocent. The distinction between ethics and morality is shown to be as ungrounded and misleading as Rawls's ‘public reason’.

This chapter clarifies the most fundamental concepts of business ethics. Business ethics problems are characterized as interaction problems emerging from the interdependence of at least two actors. The problem of scarcity and the limits of individual moral action are introduced: business ethics starts where individually virtuous behavior cannot solve the problem of scarcity. The terms ethics and economics are defined. Business ethics is interpreted as an ethics from a broad economic perspective that examines which norms can be established under conditions of global economies. In this context, normative implications of economics are emphasized. Business ethics is then situated within philosophy, and the essential tension between two basic approaches to business ethics, the dualistic and the monistic, is discussed.

The introduction introduces the aims and scope of the book and its over-arching arguments. It situates the book’s ethnographic material on Afghan traders in relationship to scholarly work on Afghanistan and Central Asia, trade and traders, globalisation, markets and the economy, as well as anthropological work on Islam, ethics and morality, and neoliberalism. The introduction critically analyses discourses concerning the development of the so-called new Silk Route. It also introduces the multi-sited fieldwork methods upon which the ethnographic material presented in the book are based, and describes the locations in which this fieldwork was conducted.

This chapter explores the ways in which traders reflect upon the wider implications that the forms of flexibility, skill, wit, and cleverness which are so central to their working lives have for their own moral worth. It is critical to explore the moral dimensions of their thinking and everyday lives given how easy it would be to assume that if these men possess “economic agency” then they are ultimately the hard-nosed and inherently immoral profiteers that both some scholarship and local communities widely depict traders in this and other contexts as being. The chapter addresses in particular the ways in which the traders frequently refer to themselves as diplomats, and, in doing so, seeks to present an ethnographic approach to the study of diplomacy.

The second chapter takes up the harder case of false consciousness. It first attempts to show how the more limited methodology of its predecessor relates both to the three historical examples and to the long sweep of human ethical practice. Drawing on an account of the evolution of moral life (presented in The Ethical Project), it argues for the primacy of practices to address moral issues (to provide patterns for conduct). Ethical life emerges only when there are alternative ways for people to live, when the question “How to live?” acquires a significance. Ideals of the self provide answers to that question. False consciousness (in one important sense) arises when such ideals are denied to some groups of people.

Chapter 2 asks the critical question of whether healthcare is different from other consumer-driven markets. In the past, many pushed back on the notion that healthcare could be a consumer-driven industry, arguing that it is fundamentally different from other markets. This chapter acknowledges and reviews these critiques, highlighting four areas that might present challenges to increasing consumer choice in healthcare: the special relationship between doctor and patient, ethics and morality, individual choice versus collective benefit, and the health consequences of consumer choice. In doing so, this chapter also presents a schematic for thinking about the different types of healthcare choices, arguing that not all choices are equal and consumers may be more prepared to make decisions in some areas as opposed to others. In presenting the counterargument to consumer choice, this chapter asks the reader to consider the drawbacks and potential limitations of consumer choice in healthcare.

This chapter turns its attention to the activities of Afghan traders in London and seeks to brings together three key themes that have been important to the ethnography presented across the book. Firstly it examines the nature of debates among the traders about what constitutes a good life and where best to live it. A second theme addressed by the chapter is the traders’ notions of “the well-lived life”: the family is of great significance to traders’ attempts to live “the good life”, but many of them also say that “passing time well” involves living in the type of circumstances that they prefer not to share with their families. A third theme explored throughout the chapter concerns the relationship between trust and money in traders’ worlds.