The deliberately provocative title of this chapter is not meant to suggest that business is somehow a superior form of activity relative to other occupations. The value of any pursuit, as should be clear by now, is a function of individuals and their various talents and circumstances. Rather, our point will be that although we have been operating at a theoretical plane throughout this work, moral theory is meant, finally, to issue in action—and, therefore, that some of the essential features of market entrepreneurship are also essential components of ethical conduct as we have been advancing it here. So, the question now becomes: What general models of action are best suited to the type of moral theory we are advocating? We noted in the last chapter that Darwall claims that modern ethical theory and practice is essentially juridical. This claim is no doubt accurate; but it does not follow that it represents the only, or even the best, way to understand morality. We have tried to offer in the preceding chapters an alternative perspective—one that might be called an “evaluational” approach to moral action, in opposition to the “juridical.” The contrast between the evaluational and the juridical forms may generally map onto our two basic paradigms of an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of respect, with the juridical being more likely to be found in the latter and the evaluational in the former.

In general, the juridical form seeks to render ethical prescriptions in terms of universal claims or rules grounded in a theory of value that is at least partially agent-independent, if not directly agent-neutral. The object of moral action, then, is to find the rule or norm that covers the kind of case at issue and to direct one's conduct according to that rule or norm.