The RRI Challenge

6Responsibilization in Tension with Market Regulation

6.1. Ethics in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms: innovation, responsibility and the perennial reinvention of capitalism

The 2008 crisis was a significant event in the sense that it made the normative vacuum that we already mentioned very palpable. It also directed the attention of the global public to the problem of morality, thus emphasizing the societal significance of economic activities and their ethical implications. It is not by chance that after the crash, some financial institutions even considered emphasizing the ethical aspects of the economist’s profession by adopting a banker’s oath¹. This is very telling for a general problem concerning contemporary market societies. Ethics seems to be fading away as a consideration, or it is just being instrumentalized in the context of innovation-driven capitalism. Furthermore, it seems rather difficult for the discipline of economics to uphold its own tradition of good old political economy in its never-ending conversation with moral philosophy. Ethics has been lost in the Bermuda Triangle of market mechanisms. In the context of hectic capital accumulation and capital realization that turn the wheels of incessant innovation cycles, responsibility is predominantly construed as commitment to the profit-generating mechanism. This also has its repercussions as to the attempts to responsibilize the knowledge-creation process and restore the status of ethics as inevitable ...