Must Capitalism Be Moral?

The following is from Rushworth Kidder's recent Commentary in Ethics Newsline:

Have Americans, by separating these two books [by Adam Smith], also confused history with philosophy? Maybe, in our minds, we’ve merged the twin events of 1776, seeing The Wealth of Nations as synonymous with the American Revolutionary War. Maybe it was a misreading of that book that led us, at the end of the twentieth century, to launch a bizarre and tragic experiment: to see whether we could deliberately create a form of capitalism absent any moral content.

That experiment has run its course. We now know that it indeed can be done, but only at grave risk to the economy and to free enterprise itself. The real danger of the ethics recession is not the current economic collapse. It is that unless we restore the moral underpinnings of capitalism, the very freedom that makes capitalism possible may be swept away on waves of public moral outrage. Reinserting ethics into business, then, is no mere luxury. It’s essential to our survival as a wealth-creating nation. But then, Adam Smith could have told us that.

For the entire article: http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2009/05/04/must-capitalism-be-moral/