1. Introduction

Over the last four decades, finance and capital markets have experienced tremendous progress in producing theoretical models and their applications in practice. At the beginning of this process, financial innovations served as very helpful tools for coping with risks and earning sound money. Lately, due to the banking and subprime crisis, doubts have arisen about the capability of finance and capital markets to serve as enablers for easing economic transactions in the real part of the economy, contributing to the welfare of societies, and, last but not least, to being legitimized as an integral part of a capitalistic system. Deep ethical concerns about the shortcomings and necessary improvements to financial systems and their participants have occupied not only regulators but also media, politicians, and stakeholders. What we are still missing is a broad reflection of ethics in finance and capital market theory. The following chapter introduces the structure of this book and the major topics that it tackles.