The production of ethical capital, and the capacity of firms and investors to leverage their speculations about which ethical claims will be the most profitable, and which ethical risks are most profitably minimised, depends on information from labour. This chapter reveals some of the ways in which labour, and specifically labour in its role as consumer, informs markets about ethical risks. Branding strategies are co-creative dialogic processes through which consumers and firms produce images, meanings and emotional responses. The acceleration of digital technology supports the expansion and intensification of these processes through which labour co-produces brands, including their ethical dimensions.

This chapter employs a critical reading of the Integrated Reporting framework and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards, methodology and guidance documents. The analysis explores how key concepts like materiality, value, capital, accountability and risk are deployed in these frameworks, to understand the function this form of reporting plays in the speculative moral economy. Guided by historical accounting research and recalling the propositions developed in chapters one and two of the book, this chapter develops an understanding of how ethics are rationalised and made ready for commodification.

This chapter explores the recent consolidation and concentration of the ESG information segment of the financial sector, and the emerging regulation of this sector in the context of political contest over defining the limits of ESG. As the economic significance of ESG investing grows, these debates become more intense and have led to new rules and proposals from securities regulators defining ESG and setting disclosure requirements. These regulatory processes, often positioned as a mechanism to standardise and clarify ESG practices, are exposing the limits of the responsible capital imaginary and creating new platforms to contest the accumulation of ethical capital.

This chapter uses value theory to understand how ethics are produced through contemporary responsible investment practices, and in particular, the integration of ESG issues into investment decisions. The chapter offers an interpretation of value theory that is specific to understanding how ethics are translated into financial decision-making frameworks. This theory is then applied to empirical evidence about ESG integration in practice, to develop the argument that ESG integration produces a derivative logic of ethics, which then has implications for the organisation of capital, labour and nature.

Drawing together the preceding arguments about the contemporary moral economy, the function of ethics as risk in the context of financialisation and the alienation of ethics from the human being, this chapter highlights the productive nature of ethical capital, but also the political potential it generates.

Locating the emergence of ethical capital as a capitalist realist response to overlapping social, ecological and political crises, this chapter sets out the theoretical frame and core concepts of the book. It explains what ethical capital means in the context of this book, why it has emerged alongside a responsible capital imaginary, and what the consequences of this may be.

Chapter one develops a selective survey of different moral economies throughout capitalism’s history, interwoven with a discussion of speculation and risk. This chapter establishes the materialist approach to ethics that the book adopts, anchoring a discussion of the moral economy in key moments of ethical and political struggles. From establishing the liberal philosophical foundations for capitalist accumulation, to the socialisation of capital via joint stock companies, to the monopolistic endeavours of the early twentieth century and the welfare state of the post-World War II era, this history focuses on the dynamic manifestations of moral economy and the politics of speculation, articulating the grounded and contested nature of ethics.

Chapter two, following on from the argument in the previous chapter which uses the moral economy concept as an analytical tool, argues that the contemporary period is characterised by a “speculative moral economy”. This moral economy has two key, contradictory features. First, it is underlaid by the responsible capital imaginary, insisting that it is possible to simultaneously “do well” (make profits) and “do good” (be ethical). Contemporary business ethics asserts that profit-making and social justice are not merely compatible but mutually beneficial. Second, this moral economy is operationalised through risk management, generating a derivative logic of ethics. Ethical questions are treated as risks and are managed, like other risks, through financial mechanisms. Ethics become capital, but at the same time, capital accumulation produces a particular market-compatible ethics.