Market economy, understood as the institutionalized form of complex economic activity based on the division of labour and competition, is always more than just the market mechanism. There is no such thing as the market economy, as a market order can by no means be specified in terms of market coordination alone. The justification of a certain order of the market economy consists in embedding the market in an overall conception, taking into account both the market and the non-market elements of well-coordinated socio-economic interactions in a society. The determination of such a conception, and in particular of the precise role which can be ascribed to the market as a partial coordination mechanism within it, is the task of institutional politics. The problem is obviously of a normative kind: as with every legitimate form of politics, regulatory politics must be oriented on justified normative principles. The clarification of the corresponding orientational problems is the task of regulatory ethics. This provides the critical-normative reflection on foundations in regard to the ethical-rational justification of institutional politics. Institutional ethics would be pointless or at least hopeless, if the modern economy had the character of a totally autonomous, self-directed system emancipated from all control in the real lifeworld. No direct empirical statement is involved here; what is constitutive of the regulatory-ethical questions at issue is rather the following twofold premise: