Clemson University, in South Carolina, is establishing a
study center devoted to finding the moral roots of commerce.
Welcome Clemson and the new Institute leader, C. Bradley Thompson, to an important debate of our
time. I have argued for a decade that
commerce is nonmoral and that nonmorality is commerce’s greatest value.
However, I point out that commerce, because it has a cross-cultural empirical base, does promote some vales that might appear to be moral: meritocracy, honesty, diversity and openness. Problem is, no moral system in the previous three millennia of human activity has produced these values in this combination with such pervasive importance.