*Die Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt.
The relationship between Ethics and Economic Development has undergone a great deal of change during the last two hundred years since the dominance of the economic scene by the principles of a private enterprise economic system. Initially, it was unacceptable to interfere with the functioning of privately managed economic systems.
Not too long after the publication of his book „The Wealth of Nations,“ there was the French Revolution that erupted in Europe as the consequence of the wide economic division among different classes of the French society, where the wealthy, who benefited from the rising economics of the day, had forgotten the poor and the destitute. It was the sucking of blood of the working class by the entrepreneurs of the time that resulted in a series of revolutions starting in 1796 and lasted until 1848 that took to task the wisdom of the unchecked private enterprise system. This prompted the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and a series of other documents by him and his bosom collaborator Fredrick Engles who invited the working classes of Europe to redress the wrongs of the past and reassign their „surplus values“ to themselves that were usurped by the capitalists. This was the era of class struggle between the two classes of entrepreneurs and working classes that finally ended in the rise of communism as a state of political economy to safeguard the interests of all participants in a „classless society.“
The socialistic model of economic development did not work either since it resulted in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Communist Party over all aspects of human life in its heydays. Nevertheless, this development gave rise to a countervailing power in order to neutralize certain excesses of the colonial power of the West. In the wake of this development, the two blocks of power then armed themselves to the hilt in order to safeguard the economic and political interests of their own hegemony. Then, the task of economic development and expansion of welfare for the people of the two blocks of power turned into an arms race that was unprecedented. Of course, at one time, they collaborated to defeat their common enemy, the German expansionist movement that questioned the legitimacy of both the West and the Communist Russia. Thus, the movement of all these blocks of power was for the allocation of all material and natural resources of the world to themselves. It is as though wars and conflicts, in general, are the signs of desperation for the allocation of human and natural resources of the world to themselves with an insatiable appetite for the bounties of the world, or to prevent the other side from doing the same to their country.
