Narrow Results

The sharing economy may be an opportunity to respond to real societal needs through the mutualization of resources and to encourage new communities through the democratization of power. Mutualization and democratization do not guarantee the ethical nature of this movement. Our research question is under what conditions the sharing economy can present the ethical dimensions highlighted by sharing-related literature. To answer that question, we explore the theoretical and empirical context of crowdfunding (CF) and focus on the comparative analysis of five reward- and equity-based CF platforms. This study emphasizes the conditions needed for ethical CF and, more generally, for an ethical sharing economy: the possibility to give gratuitously; the pursuit of a societal purpose; cooperation within and between groups of actors; long-term stability of spaces and times dedicated to cooperation; virtual and possibly physical arenas of cooperation; and people dedicated to cooperation.

This article sketches an ethics of (financial) speculation in futures markets. (1) It identifies an intentionalistic fallacy prevalent in moral criticisms of speculation in general and of financial speculation in particular. (2) It scrutinizes the degree to which the recent debate on financial speculation with agricultural commodities follows the general pattern of moral criticism and its intentionalistic fallacy. (3) It then provides a theoretical and empirical in-depth analysis of long-only index funds' engagement in futures markets and concludes that moral criticisms which put them in the pillory as “hungermakers” are unjust(ified). This proves that ethics, understood as a theory of morality, can criticize moral criticisms of financial speculation on moral grounds. (4) Finally, this article discusses the option of interdisciplinary cooperation between ethics and economics.