Thielemann, U.: On Exchange and Deception. How the Logic of Exchange Excludes Deception and Fraud, and How We Thereby are Mistaken about its True Ethical Properties, in: Gerschlager, C. (Hrsg.), Expanding the Economic Concept of Exchange. Deception, Self-Deception and Illusions, Boston 2001, S. 67–81. 

This rather old groundwork text on exchange, which I offer here in draft form, is actually quite important for the advancement of an ethically reflected economics which I advocate. I just (October 2012) re-read it. It is about the rejection of pure (market) exchange, or of instrumental reason on both sides of an interaction, thus of the legitimacy of strategic rationality (Jürgen Habermas) as the embodiment of practical reason, and thus of homo oeconomicus, without concomitantly rejecting (market) exchange generally, which would be ethically absurd. The key feature for this is the «gradation» of the general exchange matrix, known as the so called «prisoner’s dilemma» in game theory and in transcendental (radical) economics.

«Only this gradation», I argue, «offers the possibility to reject the notion of a metaphysical coincidence of self-interest and ethics» [or of the «business case» for ethics], without rejecting market interaction at all. So, the text gives a philosophical foundation for the «embedding» of «market-alien» or outer-market values [marktfremde Gesichtspunkte] into market interrelationships. Also, and included in this, is the concept of fairness of market interrelationships as opposed to the limited alternative of an ethics of pure solidarity on the one hand (whose ethical bindingness is quite weak), and an purely negative, and cruel, ethics of just physical non-interference on the other.