The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics

21/07/2026

Andrei Rogobete comments on a sweeping and erudite critique of modern technological society, challenging in its breadth and perhaps unduly negative in its assessment of the impact of technology.

Andrei Rogobete reviews Robert Skidelsky's The Machine Age, an ambitious history of technology's impact on work and society, from steam power to modern AI.

29/05/2026

UK tax levels are at the highest level since immediately after the Second World War, but as Dan Neidle wrote yesterday "the UK tax system is not really a designed object. It is a very long-running game of Jenga, where each generation of politician carefully adds new taxes and new tweaks to the top of the pile, and rarely does anyone dare to touch the horrors lurking lower down."

The UK is ranked 32nd out of 38 OECD members for tax competitiveness and the poor use of efficient taxes like VAT (where exceptions abound) and an almost uniquely poorly-designed property tax system mean that revenue comes from taxes that cause more economic damage than necessary.

Last week we gathered people from policy, business, and public life in Westminster to think about the UK's fiscal situation and the relationship between taxation and enterprise — from the structural inefficiencies of the current system, to the political economy of reform, to the real decisions entrepreneurs are already making in response to changing tax policy.

We'll be holding further events in the autumn so do sign up at the link in the comments. Read the full write-up below.

How the UK raises its tax revenue matters as much as how much it raises. CEME gathered people from policy, business, and public life in Westminster to examine the relationship between taxation and enterprise.

18/05/2026

'Business Ethics for Better Behavior' by Jason Brennan, John Hasnas, William English and Peter Jaworski represents a significant departure from conventional business ethics writing. Rather than reducing ethics to corporate social responsibility or philosophical abstraction, the authors draw on moral psychology, cognitive science, and institutional analysis to explain why well-intentioned people routinely make moral errors—and how organisations can be structured to reduce that risk.

A new CEME review by Billy Christmas recommends the book both as a rigorous teaching resource and as a practical manual for anyone who wants to operate with integrity in commercial life. For those building or managing organisations, this is an unusually honest reckoning with the structural and psychological conditions that produce ethical failure.

A CEME review of Business Ethics for Better Behavior by Brennan, Hasnas, English and Jaworski, a moral psychology-grounded approach to ethics in business.

30/03/2026

Amid endless AI predictions and prognostications, is there enough genuine insight? Naoise Grenham makes the case that Encountering Artificial Intelligence — born from three years of Vatican-backed theological dialogue — delivers where much commentary falls short: cohesive anthropology and coherent ethics. He highlights its defence of irreplaceable human relationality against the growing appeal of "risk-free" AI companionship.

Naoise Grenham comments on the first of a Vatican-led, three-volume series of theological investigations into AI, which is heavily influenced by the late Pope Francis’s theology of encounter.

27/03/2026

The Price of Our Values stresses the need for ‘value pluralism’: for economics to acknowledge the shortcomings of some of its default analytic positions and make greater room for moral concerns, as well as the need for moral thinking to allow greater space for economic considerations.

'The Price of Our Values' calls for 'value pluralism': economics must engage with moral concerns, and moral thinking must reckon with economic costs.

26/03/2026

Public discourse routinely describes AI systems as entities that 'think', 'understand', or 'decide'. Andrei Rogobete argues that this anthropomorphisation is not just imprecise but actively harmful. It leads users to overestimate what AI can do, shifts accountability away from the humans who design and deploy these systems, and fosters misplaced emotional trust — with particular risks for children. Drawing on John Searle's distinction between syntax and semantics, Rogobete maintains that linguistic fluency in a machine is not evidence of comprehension. He then offers a Christian perspective: human beings are uniquely created for loving, transformative relationships with God and one another — a capacity no computational system can share. Responsible adoption of AI, he concludes, requires honest language about what these tools are and are not.

Anthropomorphising AI is rhetorically seductive but intellectually unsound.

25/03/2026

Philip Booth assesses an argument for a limited state and dispersed, competing forms of governance based not simply on a concern for increased freedom, but the ability to flourish.

24/03/2026

London's great aristocratic estates used leasehold development and private law to perform planning functions long before the rise of public town planning.

Kroencke examines how London's great aristocratic estates used leasehold development and private law to perform planning functions long before the rise of public town planning.

23/03/2026

Modern life is increasingly governed by a single source of authority — the centralised state — while the self-governing institutions that once ordered much of civic, professional, and economic life have steadily lost their independence.

David Thunder's The Polycentric Republic argues for a different model: a system of dispersed, overlapping governance in which enterprise associations and local civil bodies hold real authority, with power flowing upwards rather than downwards.

In this review, Philip Booth welcomes Thunder's contribution while probing its relationship to classical liberal arguments for a limited state. He notes that Thunder's justification rests not on maximising individual freedom but on creating the conditions for human flourishing and the practice of the virtues — an approach that should be of particular interest to Christians engaged with questions of political order.

Philip Booth assesses an argument for a limited state and dispersed, competing forms of governance based not simply on a concern for increased freedom, but the ability to flourish.

19/03/2026

As a volume that explores the history of economic thought 'The Invention of Infinite Growth' is strong, but Andrew Packman suggests that it adds little to debates over how to approach the tension between growth and the need to conserve the natural world.

Andrew Packman reviews The Invention of Infinite Growth — strong on economic history, but adding little to debates on growth and the natural world.