Synopsis of lecture:

"Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic phenomenon. It has, however, received less attention as a moral phenomenon. In this talk, Professor Hicks articulates a conception of entrepreneurial ethics and argue that the virtues of entrepreneurship should be fundamental and foundational to business ethics.
Much contemporary business ethics assumes its core purposes to be (1) to stop predatory business practices and (2) to encourage philanthropy and charity by business. Certainly predation is immoral and charity has a place in ethics. Yet neither preventing predation nor promoting charity should be the first concerns of ethics. Instead, business ethics can learn from the values and virtues of entrepreneurs—i.e., those self-responsible and productive individuals who create value and trade with others to win-win advantage."

Stephen Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, a liberal arts college in Illinois. He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York.

He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004; Expanded Edition, 2011), Nietzsche and the Nazis (Ockham’s Razor, 2010) and co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998; third edition forthcoming 2012). His writings have been translated into Portuguese, Spanish, German, Korean, Persian, and Serbo-Croatian. He has published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics, as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun.

In 2010, he won his college’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington. Most of his graduate work was in logic and philosophy of science.

More information about Dr. Hicks’s courses, publications, and blog can be found at his website: www.StephenHicks.org.