9:30 - 11:30 Keynote session Friday Morning. AUC common room.
9:30 Welcome back and opening remarks.
9:35 Keynote 1:
From ‘homo economicus’ to ‘homo cooperans’ – exploring new paradigms for understanding economics and business”
Prof. Govert Buijs, head of ‘Philosophy, Culture, Politics and Organisation’ at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. F.J.D. Goldschmeding Chair ‘Economics in relation to Civil Society’ and special chair ‘Political philosophy and and weltanschauung’ for the Dr. Abraham Kuyperfonds.
10:45 Keynote 2:
The appropriate moral psychology of the socially responsible person
Germán Scalzo. Professor of Business Ethics at the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) and a member of the Mexican National Research Institute.
9:35 Keynote 1:
From ‘homo economicus’ to ‘homo cooperans’ – exploring new paradigms for understanding economics and business”
Prof. Govert Buijs, head of ‘Philosophy, Culture, Politics and Organisation’ at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. F.J.D. Goldschmeding Chair ‘Economics in relation to Civil Society’ and special chair ‘Political philosophy and and weltanschauung’ for the Dr. Abraham Kuyperfonds.
10:45 Keynote 2:
The appropriate moral psychology of the socially responsible person
Germán Scalzo. Professor of Business Ethics at the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) and a member of the Mexican National Research Institute.
Abstracts
From ‘homo economicus’ to ‘homo cooperans’ – exploring new paradigms for understanding economics and business”
Prof. Govert Buijs, head of ‘Philosophy, Culture, Politics and Organisation’ at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. F.J.D. Goldschmeding Chair ‘Economics in relation to Civil Society’ and special chair ‘Political philosophy and and weltanschauung’ for the Dr. Abraham Kuyperfonds.
In the course of the 19th century in the science of economics the idea of ‘homo economicus’ became more and more center stage: humans as individual rational calculators of interexchangeable preferences. It turned out to be a wonderful basis for an increasing mathematization of economics. It only had two problems: (a) its great distance to the truth, to how humans really are and (b) its character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By virtue of (b) the idea of the home economicus almost became true in certain circumstances. However, a richer anthropology did assert itself at critical junctures: humans as moral beings, as beings who look for meaning, as beings who have emotions and as social beings. Theoretically however, the search for a more or less coherent, anthropologically richer paradigm is still in its infancy, at least within economics.
In this lecture, an attempt will be made to fill in this gap.
The appropriate moral psychology of the socially responsible person
Germán Scalzo. Professor of Business Ethics at the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) and a member of the Mexican National Research Institute.
It is broadly assumed that modern economics, built on the Smithian notion of self-interest, rests on an extremely reductionist notion of what it means to be human. Recently, practical wisdom or phronesis— an invaluable and timeless cornerstone of a virtuous character— has made a remarkable resurgence in the business literature intersecting virtue ethics and business management. Although the conceptual density of this concept has filled Western philosophical literature since Aristotle’s introduction of it into classical virtue ethics and its continuing evolution throughout the history of normative thought, the Aristotelian notion of phronesis still requires a moral psychology to integrate the person as a unity. To fill this gap, and based on what Polo identifies as the roots of being human (the so-called ‘three radicals’), my co-authors and I offer two broad conceptual categories to help categorize existing theories according to the assumptions they make about the self, human agency and action more broadly. They are the so-called “Autonomous Self,” or AS and the “Interprocessual Self,” or IPS (Akrivou & Orón, 2016; Akrivou, Orón & Scalzo, 2018); each refers to how people “see” (understand) and live out their own integrity, their relationships to others (human persons and communities), as well as their relationship to others’ needs and perspectives. It also includes an understanding of the respective professional role demands that they assume, offering an overall comparison of their cognitive and affective assumptions regarding human action. Here, I will show that— in opposition to modernist reductionist anthropologies— IPS’s corresponding philosophy of economics profoundly alters how business and management ought to be understood and practiced.
Prof. Govert Buijs, head of ‘Philosophy, Culture, Politics and Organisation’ at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. F.J.D. Goldschmeding Chair ‘Economics in relation to Civil Society’ and special chair ‘Political philosophy and and weltanschauung’ for the Dr. Abraham Kuyperfonds.
In the course of the 19th century in the science of economics the idea of ‘homo economicus’ became more and more center stage: humans as individual rational calculators of interexchangeable preferences. It turned out to be a wonderful basis for an increasing mathematization of economics. It only had two problems: (a) its great distance to the truth, to how humans really are and (b) its character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By virtue of (b) the idea of the home economicus almost became true in certain circumstances. However, a richer anthropology did assert itself at critical junctures: humans as moral beings, as beings who look for meaning, as beings who have emotions and as social beings. Theoretically however, the search for a more or less coherent, anthropologically richer paradigm is still in its infancy, at least within economics.
In this lecture, an attempt will be made to fill in this gap.
The appropriate moral psychology of the socially responsible person
Germán Scalzo. Professor of Business Ethics at the Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) and a member of the Mexican National Research Institute.
It is broadly assumed that modern economics, built on the Smithian notion of self-interest, rests on an extremely reductionist notion of what it means to be human. Recently, practical wisdom or phronesis— an invaluable and timeless cornerstone of a virtuous character— has made a remarkable resurgence in the business literature intersecting virtue ethics and business management. Although the conceptual density of this concept has filled Western philosophical literature since Aristotle’s introduction of it into classical virtue ethics and its continuing evolution throughout the history of normative thought, the Aristotelian notion of phronesis still requires a moral psychology to integrate the person as a unity. To fill this gap, and based on what Polo identifies as the roots of being human (the so-called ‘three radicals’), my co-authors and I offer two broad conceptual categories to help categorize existing theories according to the assumptions they make about the self, human agency and action more broadly. They are the so-called “Autonomous Self,” or AS and the “Interprocessual Self,” or IPS (Akrivou & Orón, 2016; Akrivou, Orón & Scalzo, 2018); each refers to how people “see” (understand) and live out their own integrity, their relationships to others (human persons and communities), as well as their relationship to others’ needs and perspectives. It also includes an understanding of the respective professional role demands that they assume, offering an overall comparison of their cognitive and affective assumptions regarding human action. Here, I will show that— in opposition to modernist reductionist anthropologies— IPS’s corresponding philosophy of economics profoundly alters how business and management ought to be understood and practiced.