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The Legend of Excellent Businessman. A Neuroethical Perspective

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The Honorable Merchant – Between Modesty and Risk-Taking

Part of the book series: Ethical Economy ((SEEP,volume 56))

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Abstract

If the question about the causes of the crises has generated a good deal of literature in Spain, the key issue in recent times has been how to create that tangible and intangible wealth that only companies can give. One of the proposals that specialists agree upon is to revitalise the business entrepreneurial spirit, presenting the entrepreneurs’ way of life as an attractive option, due to the good they produce and the social recognition they enjoy. Accepting the suggestions of the so-called “narrative turn”, the article analyses the virtualities of business narratives in order to enhance the role of entrepreneurs. To this end, the article aims to cover three stages: (1) narratives are necessary because they are brain-based, (2) it is advisable to find out why entrepreneurs are not usually considered in Spain as the main characters of good narratives, (3) good narratives, the ones that convince, are the ones that have the capacity to show the meaning of the entrepreneurial activity and the truth of what we have been doing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This study is contained within the Scientific Research and Technological Development Project FFI2013-47136-C2-1-P, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and within the activities of the Group of Excellence for Research PROMETEO/2009/085 of the Generalitat Valenciana.

  2. 2.

    A good example of this are works such as those included in AAVV, Empresas éticas ante la crisis actual, ÉTNOR Foundation, Valencia, 2009; AAVV, Revitalizar las empresas para construir una buena sociedad, ÉTNOR Foundation, Valencia, 2011; RACMYP, Crisis económica y financiera: intervenciones en la RACMYP 2000–2010, (Spanish) Royal Academy of Moral Sciences and Politics, Madrid, 2010; Antón Costas (coord.), La crisis de 2008. De la economía a la política y más allá, Cajamar Foundation, 2010.

  3. 3.

    G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1955 (4. Auflage); Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1973, 2 Bd.; Jürgen Habermas, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1983; Adela Cortina, Ética mínima, Tecnos, Madrid, 1986; Jesús Conill, El crepúsculo de la metafísica, Anthropos, Barcelona, 1988; Domingo García-Marzá, Ética de la justicia, Tecnos, Madrid, 1992; Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1992; Paul Ricoeur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, Éditions Stock, 2004.

  4. 4.

    Christian Salomon, Storytelling. Bewitching the Modern Mind, Verso, London, 2017.

  5. 5.

    Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

  6. 6.

    Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Books, 2012, chap. 12.

  7. 7.

    Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a thousand faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1949.

  8. 8.

    George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004; The Political Mind, Penguin Books, 2009; Drew Westen, The Political Brain, Public Affairs, New York, 2007; Adela Cortina, Neuroética y neuropolítica, Tecnos, Madrid, 2011, Kap. 4.

  9. 9.

    Jesús Conill, Ética hermenéutica, Tecnos, Madrid, 2009.

  10. 10.

    Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Penguin Books, London, 1995, 9.

  11. 11.

    Aristotle, Ars Rhetorica, ed. W.D. Ross, Oxford University Press, 1959.

  12. 12.

    Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1985 (second corrected edition with Proscript), 27–31.

  13. 13.

    Luis Perdices also insists on “the abandonment of production activities, which derived from contempt for work, as living off the capital that is not the result of work was a thing of nobles”, La Economía Política de la Decadencia de Castilla en el siglo XVII, Síntesis, Barcelona, 1996, 42.

  14. 14.

    The translation into Spanish is by Josep Corell, Professor of Latin Philology of the University of Valencia.

  15. 15.

    Ramiro de Maeztu, El sentido reverencial del dinero, Editora Nacional, Madrid, 1957, p. 139.

  16. 16.

    Vivir para contarla, Mondadori, Barcelona, 2002, p. 7.

  17. 17.

    Adela Cortina, “Empresa y Derechos Humanos”, Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, Madrid, 2011.

  18. 18.

    Onora O’Neill “Agents of Justice”, en Thomas Pogge (comp.), Global Justice, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001.

  19. 19.

    Domingo García-Marzá, Ética empresarial, Trotta, Madrid, 2004.

  20. 20.

    Amartya Sen, “Does business ethics make economic sense?”, Business Ethics Quaterly, 3/1 (1993), 45–54; “Ética de la empresa y desarrollo económico”, en Adela Cortina (ed.), Construir confianza, Trotta, Madrid, 2003, 39–53; Jesús Conill, Horizontes de economía ética, Tecnos, Madrid, 2004.

  21. 21.

    R.E. Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, Pitman, Ballinger, Boston; José A. Moreno, “Responsabilidad social corporativa y competitividad: una visión desde la empresa”, en Revista Valenciana de Economía y Hacienda, n° 12, III (2004), 9–50.

  22. 22.

    M.E. Porter & M.R. Kramer, “Creating shared values”, Harvard Business Review, 89 (February), 62–77.

  23. 23.

    Jeffrey Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development, Columbia University Press, 2014.

  24. 24.

    Adela Cortina, Jesús Conill, Agustín Domingo, Domingo García Marzá, Ética de la empresa, Trotta, Madrid, 1994.

  25. 25.

    Homer, Iliad, Odyssey; Tom J. Peters und Robert H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence, Harper & Row, New York, 1982.

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Correspondence to Adela Cortina .

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Cortina, A. (2019). The Legend of Excellent Businessman. A Neuroethical Perspective. In: Lütge, C., Strosetzki, C. (eds) The Honorable Merchant – Between Modesty and Risk-Taking. Ethical Economy, vol 56. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04351-3_3

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