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Keywords

Greed, avarice, covetousness, pleonexia, Christianity, Aristotle

Abstract

There is a surprising lack of discussion on greed in business ethics. Whether in popular textbooks or in the literature, there is hardly any philosophical explication of greed. In this paper, I investigate the popular idea that greedy people desire more and more, the Christian idea of avarice as in the seven deadly sins, and Aristotle’s idea of pleonexia which has incorporated a condition of justice. These three different ideas are respectively psychological, metaphysical and socio-political. I propose the three of them should be integrated to give a concept of greed that is relevant and useful in the contemporary world in which business and capitalism are ubiquitous.

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