Values in financial regulation: a philosophical perspective on a regulatory regime

Climate change has taken center stage in recent years as posing societal challenges to which the financial sector is called to respond. Arms production and trade, refugees fleeing poverty, hunger, prosecution and other indignities are other examples of tragedies that raise moral questions and ethical challenges, including what a value-based regulation of the financial institutions implicated in them could and should entail. Regulatory theory and practice are also challenged to broaden the focus beyond the bounds of the law: from the implementation of policies to a reflection on the values that are being expressed or pursued.

Especially now that a societal discourse on values increasingly directly appeals to financial regulation for action, whether shrouded in public law or private law means, it can be called remarkable that reflections on the place of financial regulation “as regulation” in a broader value discourse are not often found. The transformations in the financial regulatory regime of basic, foundational concepts such as autonomy, care and trust are neither often discussed.

In this thesis Jan Broekhuizen offers such reflections and traces the contours of regulated forms of care in the financial regulatory regime, problematizes its recasting of trust and discusses the moralism implicit in its idea that autonomy can be regulated. The idea underlying this thesis is that this is important and needed, in order to both better understand an evolving regulatory discourse that uses such concepts and to show the problematic nature of a discourse that would use them without critique.