Is trading moral and ethical?
EVERY-DAY ETHICS ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN THE PAGE LECTURE SERIES, 1909, BEFORE THE SENIOR CLASS OF THE SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL, YALE UNIVERSITY SPECULATION A CHAPTER on the ethics of speculation will prob- ably seem to many people to take inevitably the form of the famous chapter on Snakes in Ireland, viz., that there are no ethics in speculation. And I fear that a lecturer on this subject who takes a different view will be thought to be in the position of a classmate of mine, who, on going into an ex- amination in ethics, remarked that he ” didn’t know an ethic when he saw one.” Nevertheless I feel convinced that one of the chief obstacles to the achievement of a higher moral tone in business is the indiscriminate denunciation of certain business practices, without any careful preliminary analysis of their real nature. When popular writers are con- stantly pouring out invective against things which practical men know to be necessary, there is grave danger that these same practical
