Authors:
- Provides an innovative perspective on business ethics education
- Shows the role of Adam Smith's moral sentiments in contemporary business ethics
- Provides a literary business case study exploring the tension between "doing well" and "doing good"
Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics (IBET, volume 49)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
About this book
According to Adam Smith, vanity is a vice that contains a promise: a vain person is much more likely than a person with low self-esteem to accomplish great things. Problematic as it may be from a moral perspective, vanity makes a person more likely to succeed in business, politics and other public pursuits. “The great secret of education,” Smith writes, “is to direct vanity to proper objects:” this peculiar vice can serve as a stepping-stone to virtue. How can this transformation be accomplished and what might go wrong along the way? What exactly is vanity and how does it factor into our personal and professional lives, for better and for worse?
Keywords
- business ethics education
- impartial spectator
- moral sentiments
- vanity and sympathy
- phenomenology of vanity
- prudence and humility
- empathy and remorse
- emotional contagion
- sympathy and selfishness
- commercial society
- theory of moral sentiments
- virtues of enlightenment
- the character of virtue
- Adam Smith's theories
- vanity fair
- literary diction
Authors and Affiliations
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Babson College, Wellesley, USA
Rosa Slegers
About the author
Rosa Slegers is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Babson College. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Fordham University, an MBA from Babson College, and an MA in Literary Theory from the University of Leuven, Belgium.
Slegers’ scholarship and teaching integrate philosophy, literature, and management thinking to pursue questions at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Her first book, Courageous Vulnerability (Brill, 2011), draws on the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson, and Gabriel Marcel to frame a cluster of moral and aesthetic attitudes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Her second book, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments in Vanity Fair (Springer, forthcoming), brings Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments into conversation with 19th Century English novels to explore the role of vanity in commercial society. Slegers’ current research focuses on the role of the emotions (in particular shame) in moral decision-making and the uncanny existential implications of technological developments.Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments in Vanity Fair
Book Subtitle: Lessons in Business Ethics from Becky Sharp
Authors: Rosa Slegers
Series Title: Issues in Business Ethics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98731-6
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-98730-9Published: 27 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07525-5Published: 20 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-98731-6Published: 17 September 2018
Series ISSN: 0925-6733
Series E-ISSN: 2215-1680
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 187
Topics: Ethics, Language and Literature, Business and Management, general