The Honorable Merchant and the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

The Honorable Merchant as an ideal of business ethics has a long-standing tradition. However, this ideal focusses a lot on the individual person and less on situational conditions, constraints and incentives under which people act. The Order Ethics approach helps conceptualize and justify why business ethics for the globalized market economy might shift this focus and put situational conditions on top of the agenda. This holds within companies as well: Instead of insisting on the ideal of the honorable merchant, companies should change structural incentives and conditions, by way of mechanisms such as Corporate Social Responsibility and others.