The Normative Ideal of the "Honorable Merchant" and Modern Corporate Responsibility

The project takes an institutional ethics perspective and develops the argument that the normative ideal of the "honorable merchant" can be reconstructed as a semantic superstructure specifically tailored to a particular institutional arrangement in history. More precisely, this perspective emphasizes that medieval merchant guilds organized an institutional solution for the problem that specific investments and forward transactions can be easily exploited by local rulers and local merchant partners in the (early) medieval context of legal uncertainty. Yet to be compatible with modern concepts of corporate social responsibilty, the normative ideal of the honorable merchant needs to be differentiated and updated to reflect the global institutional challenges of the modern firm.