Does the institution of the market, based on competition and the search for profit, necessarily promote greed, selfishness and opportunism? This is the question that the John Templeton Foundation put, in the aftermath of the crisis, to philosophers from different cultural traditions. Philosophie Magazine attended the debates.

“Obviously! " Michael Walzer. Professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, specialist in ethics and international relations, American, he is the author of Maximum moral, minimal moral (Bayard). Competition at work in the market encourages actors to break moral rules and produce good reasons for doing so.It is these rationalizations - deceiving oneself to cross the red line without scruple - that corrupt the moral sense. We can make an analogy with the democratic political system. The competition for power prompts candidates to lie in public meetings, to make untenable promises, to accept dirty money, etc. Free and free market elections teach us not only to take risks, to trade and to deliberate collectively, but also to watch and beware of each other, betray our friends, etc. The astonishing thing is that we do not treat the dangers inherent in the market and those related to politics in the same way. Where democracies have succeeded, through constitutions, to free itself from the whims of tyrants and the arrogance of aristocrats and to put an end to the worst forms of political corruption, the economic domain has been left to itself. Today the worst form of corruption does not come from the political field, despite its imperfections, but from the economic field, characterized by a deregulated market where behavior is not regulated and where responsibility is almost zero.