On April 5, Professor Stephen Hicks spoke at the annual conference of the Association for Private Enterprise Education on the topic “What Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship.” The conference was held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks and economics professor Robert von der Ohe will co-teach a new course this fall 2008 semester at Rockford College: Entrepreneurship and Ethics. The purpose of this course is to integrate entrepreneurship, business history, and business ethics. It will consist of case studies of major entrepreneurs in modern history, e.g., Commodore Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Insull, John Johnson, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, and others. Part of each case study involves learning the entrepreneur’s business practices and how he or she achieved business success. What traits and practices did they have: intelligence, risk-tolerance, leadership, ambition, ruthlessness? And part of each case study will involve learning about the ethical controversies their activities generated: Were they “predatory competitors,” “monopolists,” “robber barons”—or were they extraordinarily productive individuals who benefited both themselves and their customers? Students read and analyze business histories and biographies by both proponents and detractors. See the Entrepreneurship and Ethics course flyer.
Rockford College philosophy professor Stephen Hicks’s essay entitled “Ethics and Economics” was published in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David Henderson, Ph.D. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is the second edition of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, which was published to acclaim in 1993, and includes essays by “Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and George Stigler, former presidential economic advisors, financial columnists, and economists such as Armen Alchian, Don Boudreaux, Deepak Lal, Anna Schwartz, Lawrence Summers, and Murray Rothbard.”
Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks gave two invited talks this month. On November 13th, he spoke at the University of Texas, Austin, on the impact of Galileo Galilei and John Locke; the title of his talk was “Philosophy and the Early Modern Revolution in Religion.” On November 15th, he spoke at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia on the topic of the fiftieth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel, Atlas Shrugged; the theme of the conference was “The Continuing Relevance of Atlas Shrugged.”
