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August 09, 2006

Ethics Gone Wild

Paul Kedrosky takes a look at Girls Gone Wild.  Or rather, the actions of the entrepreneur behind it, and raises the question -- is there such a thing as entrepreneurship morality?

I tried to comment, but got an error, so posting it here (consider this a disclaimer for not writing more on what could be a very big subject).

Does business have a morality? No, but it has ethics.  Although you can get lost in definitions.

Social entrepreneurship is class of business with a fairly well defined set of ethics. It is also a investment thesis (pornotube.com is an ethical thesis to the contrary).

Enterpreneurship is like many professions without institutional barriers to entry (e.g. PR, and yes, Venture Capital, increasingly in the hedge fund age) -- ethics will be defined in industry groups, in some cases to gain advantage.  In most cases, explicit normative development only happens when egregious errors impact the community.  Then they act out of profit motive and perhaps before regulation is called for.

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