M. De Vito

Insider trading has long been scrutinized in corporate law, finance, and business ethics, yet whether politicians trade on insider information—and if so, whether this breaches their fiduciary duty—remains unsettled. Drawing on the perspectives of social contract theory and virtue ethics, this study examines the ethical implications of U.S. senators exploiting nonpublic, bill-related information for personal gain. We analyze a comprehensive dataset of senators’ equity trades from 2014 to 2021, matched with legislative bill data classified using natural language processing to identify key legislative milestones: introduction, engrossment, enrollment, and enactment. Our findings reveal that trades executed just prior to critical legislative events yield significant abnormal returns. We also document patterns consistent with stealth trading, in which senators sequentially trade leading up to legislative decisions. Furthermore, senators with greater legislative influence realize higher abnormal returns, highlighting the financial benefits of privileged information. To address these ethical concerns, we propose a “contingent freedom” framework, restricting senators’ trading during critical legislative periods. This approach aims to balance ethical integrity and individual financial autonomy by mitigating conflicts of interest.

This article highlights two paradoxes, the first of which is due to the fact that exactly where the radical anti-humanistic approach of Protestantism flourished, the extraordinary blossoming of the human being arrived at the consecration of freedom as a principle of scientific research and civilized living. The second paradox by the manifestation of the Nazi ideology in those same places and less than a century ago. It is argued that the Protestant principle established in the European consciousness is not so much in the theological theory of justification (sola Gratia, sola Fide, sola Scriptura) as in the philosophical and political affirmation of free personal will, where the determining event was the statement by Luther at the Diet of Worms. But the very profound character of freedom and the destiny of infinite interpretation given to it by Luther are also at the origin of the uneasy consciousness and existence from which the malaise that led to the rise of totalitarianism.In support of the stated thesis, the article is structured according to four main lines: 1) Discussion on the fundamentally anti-humanist character of Protestantism; 2) discussion about the remarkable humanistic effects historically produced by the Protestant Reform; 3) discussion about the possible relationship between the ground prepared by the German society Reform and the rise of the national socialist ideology; 4) final considerations on the dialectic of human freedom.