No abstract

Business ethics, as it is understood and practised generally, lacks a component of radicality. As part of the contemporary ‘return to ethics’ it displays an undesirable conservatism and blocks off possibilities for systemic alterity. I argue that a normal and ‘apologetic’ business ethics should therefore be supplemented with a radical or utopian business ethics. Put differently, business ethics should not only contribute to more responsible business practices, more morally sensitive business managers and more ethical organisational cultures, but should also facilitate social hope via hermeneutic strategies aimed at changing the way we think about ourselves, our economies and the roles and responsibilities of business as such.

This is a review of the book "Happiness around the world: the paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires," written by Carol Graham, and published in 2009 by Oxford University Press Inc., of New York, USA. This book's major aim is to address what makes people happy from an economic point of view. The aim of the book is twofold: first, to address the shortcomings of economic assumptions and research methodologies and second, to introduce the lessons learned from happiness surveys into policy. The book is recommended to a broader diverse audience, including social scientists and economists. The book could also be of assistance to research methodologies for economists at large.

One need not be a scholar or social scientist to recognise that "quality of life", even only if only taken as a concept, constitutes a philosophical minefield. Notions of "happiness" and "the good life", each term notoriously slippery and contentious, with histories reaching back as far as the works of Plato and Aristotle, necessarily come into play when quality of life is at issue. The meaning of these terms shifts as the varying ideological, metaphysical and anthropological assumptions shift, and therefore defies consensus. To add to these difficulties, David Benatar, philosopher at the University of Cape Town, has recently problematised research on quality of life by arguing that "coming into existence" always constitutes serious harm, but that the "harm of existence" has remained largely ignored due to people's systematic overestimation of their quality of life (2006).Despite these difficulties, the concept "quality of life" has been operationalised