Making Market Behave Ethically
With the march of time, we have been witnessing an unprecedented rise in the volume of trade transactions in the world and markets are getting flooded with an ever increasing number of goods and services flown from all corners of the globe. But, side-by-side, there has also been a persistence of the worst forms of poverty in one segment of us. When we coolly reflect back this so-called progress of our times, somewhere in the heart of heart, it creates an itching sensation. Why is it so?
‘Creation’ is the pastime of God. He became many and staying in ‘one’, He wanted to experience that He was ‘the one as well as the integrated whole simultaneously’. Accordingly, He gave each one a distinct identity and at the same time made it to be insufficient by itself. However, this ‘insufficiency’ was not in an absolute sense. Along with the inadequacy to fulfil all its requirements by itself, it has also been endowed with the talent to produce something either more than what it requires for its sustenance or even which it doesn’t require at all. Such an arrangement warranted that every unit of life, for maintaining its identity, engages in give and take activities or exchange transactions with others. This would, in turn, help build relations among them and develop a feeling of oneness.
This being the higher principle of existence for every life in this creation, our moral sense dictates that an exchange transaction which mitigates mutual concerns of life and develops a feeling of oneness between the parties involved is good and welcome and any framework a civilisation chooses to systemise this when serves these ends in respect of each and every transaction, which its members engage into, is ethical. The corollary is that if by following certain production and exchange system one segment of its population has been consistently failing to mitigate the most primary and basic concerns of life with what they got in exchange of goods and...