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Margin Call is a film depicting the high-tension 32 hours of an investment bank that discovers that its financial holdings are essentially worthless because it has become highly overexposed in the risky trading of mortgage-backed securities and the entire market is set to implode, triggering what the bank leaders know will be a global financial crisis. In a ten-minute overnight meeting, the CEO, John Tuld, must make a difficult choice for the firm and for himself. This paper aims at analyzing Tuld’s behavior in the light of the virtue of prudence as described by Thomas Aquinas, and reflects on how the problem might have been handled differently if John Tuld had been guided by Christian moral teachings. It also examines whether Christian ethics, with its ancient heritage, has sufficient specificity and transformative capacity to serve as a guide in contemporary financial decision-making.

Spanish Abstract: Este articulo aborda las implicaciones de la responsabilidad limitada de las empresas en la doctrina de Milton Friedman acerca de la responsabilidad social corporativa y la obligacion fiduciaria de los directivos con los shareholders.Desde que la responsabilidad limitada permite a las empresas privatizar sus beneficios mientras socializa sus perdidas, atribuye ilegitimamente a los ejecutivos la capacidad de imponer impuestos. Esta atribucion amenaza la propiedad privada y el intercambio voluntario, supuestos en los que Friedman basa su sistema. Por tanto, Friedman rechaza la responsabilidad limitada o reconsidera estos supuestos, aceptando sus consecuencias. Basandonos en sus ideas libertarias, y despues de revisar toda la obra de Friedman asi como la literatura relevante, se explica como la responsabilidad limitada modificaria el concepto de propiedad, obligando al directivo a incorporar el interes de todos los stakeholders en la direccion de la empresa, presentando el modelo stakeholder como la respuesta coherente y etica a la presencia de la responsabilidad limitada en las economias modernas.English Abstract: This article deals with the implications of limited responsibility in businesses according to Milton Friedman’s doctrine about corporative social responsibility and the fiduciary obligation of the directors to the shareholders. Since limited responsibility allows businesses to privatize their benefits while they socialize their losses, it attributes the capacity to impose taxes illegitimately to the executives. This attribution threatens private property and voluntary interchange, suppositions on which Friedman bases his system. Therefore, either Friedman rejects limited responsibility or reconsiders these suppositions, accepting their consequences. Based on his libertarian ideas and after reviewing all of Friedman’s works as relevant literature, this study explains how limited responsibility would modify the concept of property, obliging the directors to incorporate the interest of all the stakeholders in managing the business, presenting the stakeholder model as the coherent and ethical response to the presence of limited responsibility in modern economies.

Spanish Abstract: Friedman ha sido tradicionalmente considerado como el exponente de la teoria de los shareholders. De acuerdo a este modelo los accionistas tienen prioridad sobre el resto de los agente implicados en la empresa, y por tanto los ejecutivos no tienen otra responsabilidad que maximizar el beneficio de los accionistas, si bien dentro de unos limites. En este articulo ofrecemos una interpretacion distinta al enmarcar sus ideas en su filosofia libertaria. La nueva perspectiva que adquieren las clausulas que limitan la actuacion de los directivos, junto con recientes tendencias en los conceptos de beneficio, propiedad, asi como en el papel de la cultura corporativa en la empresa, legitiman la incorporacion de la responsabilidad social en las agendas de los directivos, incluso en el restrictivo modelo shareholder. English Abstract: Friedman has been traditionally interpreted as the exponent of the shareholder theory. According to this theory, among the various actors associated with a business, shareholders have unrivaled primacy, and hence, corporations should be managed so as to maximize their value alone, within certain limits. However, by framing these ideas in his libertarian philosophy, we present a more accurate interpretation, especially of the clauses limiting the managers’ actions. This interpretation, together with the developments in the concepts of profit, property, and the role playing by the corporate culture, legitimates the inclusion of social responsibility into the managers’ agenda, even in the shareholder model.

The publication of Michael Porter and Mark Kramer’s Creating Shared Value (Harvard Business Review, 2011) challenges both the academic literature on corporate social responsibility as well as business practice. Porter and Kramer argue that there is a better way of integrating social goals within business practice, without distracting a firm from its primary purpose of achieving profit. This paper aims to expand Porter and Kramer’s approach and to apply the shared value model to the financial sector, through analyzing the ways of systematic shared value creation in finance. We begin with an examination of Porter and Kramer’s concept. Next, we evaluate the impact of shared value creation on academic literature. We distinguish between four groups of works related to shared value: Porter’s work, Porter’s co-authors, supporters (divided into followers and innovators), and critics. After implementing these steps, we address the two-fold purpose of this paper: 1. To examine Porter and Kramer’s process-centered theory and 2. To investigate the financial application of a revised concept of shared value. In particular, we will explore the role of virtues as a missing pillar in Porter and Kramer’s original theory. Integrating the shared value approach with virtues leads us from their process-centered approach to the person-centered approach that we call Systematic Shared Value. We believe that finance professionals can apply this new paradigm, formulating new ways of shared value creation. We conclude the article by presenting a preliminary systematic approach to shared value creation in finance.

The ethical dimension of industrial production has been largely neglected by theorists of production. This article identifies three important features of the production process, i.e. utility, compartmentalization, and independent external end-point; brought about by industrialization in the development of the production of goods. We claim that a mechanistic understanding of these features gets in the way of an ethical approach to the topic. We analyze attempts to overcome such an understanding by appeal to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. This article concludes that this strategy is insufficient and that a comprehensive ethics of production only comes into view if we incorporate transitive motivation into the analysis.

Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one of the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. Focusing on publications in the Thomson-Reuters Journal of Citation Report between 1980 and 2011, we use EBSCO and ABI databases to look for articles containing the keywords 'virtue ethics', 'virtue theory' or 'virtuousness' in the abstract together with 'business' or 'management' in the text. We refined our search to draw lists of the most prolific authors, the most cited authors, the most cited articles and the journals with the most virtue ethics publications. This information allows us to chart how virtue ethics articles have evolved through the decades and establish clusters of authors as well as clusters of themes. These findings also provide a foundation for future study of the meanings of virtue ethics and the achievement and potential of different persuasions within virtue ethics research. We believe this will make a significant contribution to business ethics scholarship and management education by supplying both with a solid philosophical and anthropological mooring.