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Immanuel Kant Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers: On July 9th, participants from 28 countries joined Opalesque's "Kant & Capital" webinar - not for a lecture, but for a workshop. The premise: after sixty years of labels - SRI, triple bottom line, ESG, impact - each of which fell short of its promise, it may be time to stop refining frameworks and start asking a more fundamental question about principles. The panel brought together three perspectives spanning the capital chain: Gert Dijkstra, former Chief Strategy Officer and Board Member of APG Asset Management, one of the world's largest pension investors; Kate Hofman, founder of GrowUp Farms, Europe's largest indoor salad producer, and now CEO of food-tech company Pesto; and George Darrah of Systemiq Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing where technology meets the physical economy.
But the panelists were only part of the story. In the spirit of the webinar's theme - Kant's injunction to dare to think for ourselves - the audience was asked to reason out loud throughout the session. Wealth managers, finance ethics academics, family office principals, impact investors and entrepreneurs contributed in real time, and their voices are woven through this article. What follows is not a transcript but a distillation: seven theses that emerged from the discussion, including the closing exchanges. A replay of the webinar is available here.
Prologue: When AI builders reached for Kant
The timing was almost uncanny. As we prepared this webinar, The Economist published an article asking why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers. It reported that the constitution governing Anthropic's Claude AI models incorporates material from Immanuel Kant - deontological rules prohibiting "lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end" - and that these rules hold even when a greater good might excuse breaking them.
Read that again: when the leading minds in AI needed a foundation robust enough to govern the most powerful technology of our time, they didn't reach for ESG scores or stakeholder matrices. They reached for ideas written in 1785.
The Enlightened Capital initiative began ten months earlier, in September 2025, when I met Gert Dijkstra at a financial conference in Lausanne, where he was leading a roundtable on "enlightened entrepreneurs and their enlightened investors." I was initially skeptical of the word "enlightened" - it carries a religious connotation, an elusive state one aspires to. But Gert insisted the reference was to the Age of Enlightenment: the thinkers of that era, he argued, had already solved on a fundamental level problems we are still battling in capital markets. The more I examined that claim, the more I had to agree. The result became the Manifesto now published at enlightenedcapital.org - and this webinar was its first public stress test.
Thesis 1: ESG did not fail from bad intentions - it was hollowed out
We opened by asking the audience directly: in one word or sentence, why has ESG failed? The answers came fast, and they clustered with remarkable consistency.
"Normative basis lacking," wrote a professor of finance ethics - a diagnosis several others immediately seconded. "Short-termism," offered another participant. One investor was blunter still: ESG "was a marketing trick to increase AUM through less sophisticated retail distribution that was not tied to mission." A wealth advisor pointed to structural incoherence: rank companies by their ESG rating from one data provider, then from another, and the rank correlation is around 0.3 - meaning ESG does not mean the same thing to the organizations scoring it. Unlike calculating a rate of return, where everyone gets the same answer, ESG never had a shared definition. Another participant put it in systems terms: ESG metrics are too linear, while the problems they try to address are multi-dimensional - "a great effort, but ultimately the wrong tool for the job." Others cited a too-narrow definition of fiduciary duty, and organized resistance from actors with opposing interests.
Kate Hofman's answer from the panel was perhaps the most disarming: ESG failed "because there has been more money to be made without principles."
Notably, a minority pushed back on the premise itself. "Has it failed?" asked one participant, arguing that much is going on quietly that no longer makes headlines. Another agreed these frameworks remain "important building blocks for a fairer, more inclusive and sustainable economy." A third said ESG failed only "in the sense that it's still not enough" - worldwide awareness has been raised, and real action taken.
Gert Dijkstra reconciled the two camps: whether or not ESG "failed" depends on what you measure. It raised awareness of climate, biodiversity and governance issues that are now permanently on the institutional agenda. But it was also met with enormous counter-lobbying money, and its breadth made it vulnerable. ESG was not defeated in argument - it was adopted, marketed, diluted, and pushed back. Hollowed out from the inside.
Thesis 2: Constraints only bind when anchored in uncompromising principles
This is where Kant enters. Gert introduced the categorical imperative as, in essence, a fundamental moral business compass: act only according to rules you would want to become universal law. Applied to business and investment decisions, it forces simple but demanding questions: Is it fair? Is it true? Is it beneficial for all involved?
Gert anchored this in the concept of stewardship - taking responsibility for the long term, for the planet and for generations to come - built on five elements: trustworthiness, accountability, diligence, humility and intentionality. And he was careful to note the idea is not new. Ian Bradley's "Enlightened Entrepreneurs" (2007) chronicles the Victorian industrialists - Cadbury, Rowntree, Colman, Boots - who built businesses on exactly these foundations, some of which still exist today. James O'Toole's "The Enlightened Capitalists" (2019) traced the same lineage through ethical leadership, and Harvard Business School's Ranjay Gulati made the contemporary case in "Deep Purpose" (2022).
The difference between these principles and the frameworks of the last sixty years is categorical, not gradual. Reporting requirements can be gamed; scores can be arbitraged; feel-good frameworks bend under commercial pressure. A principle that admits no exceptions - not even for a "greater good" - cannot be hollowed out, because there is nothing to dilute. That, presumably, is why the AI builders from Anthropic chose it. Perhaps capital markets should ask why they haven't.
Thesis 3: The Muskonomy is not an edge case - it is becoming a template
Mid-session, I posed a riddle: One man holds the titles of CEO, CTO and Chairman - while running four other companies. He controls 80% of voting rights with 40% of equity. The board consists of personal allies. Mandatory arbitration eliminates class-action lawsuits. The company deliberately registered under Texas law to restrict shareholder litigation. Who is that?
The chat lit up instantly, and unanimously. Everyone knew.
Set aside the question of value creation - that verdict belongs to the future. Look purely at governance: no separation of powers, no independent oversight, no meaningful recourse for minority investors. Now apply Kant's test: could this governance structure, if every company adopted it, sustain a functioning economy? The answer is obviously no. And yet this is where the most valuable private company in the world has arrived. The concentration of unchecked authority, the erosion of shareholder rights, the deliberate choice of legal jurisdictions to avoid oversight - these are not edge cases. They are becoming templates. Gert noted that this recent very large IPO that was, in his view, questionable from both a financial-ratios and a governance perspective - gaming the system, as I would put it.
To the audience's credit, the counterarguments came immediately - this was a workshop, after all. One participant argued the man in question "also created more value than other governance structures." Another mounted a genuinely Kantian defense: the governance structure is voluntary - nobody is forced to invest - and voluntarism plays a large part in Kant's thinking as a good in itself. A third participant cut through with the sharpest question of the session: "Value and costs for whom?"
That exchange, in miniature, is the debate capital markets need to have - and are not having.
Thesis 4: Misaligned capital ends badly for both sides
Kate Hofman brought the entrepreneur's view, drawn from 13 years of raising capital for two businesses. She founded GrowUp Farms in 2012 - the first serious vertical farming venture in the UK, "about five years too early" - driven by the mission of decoupling agriculture's environmental impact from feeding people healthy food. Being early meant building with very little backing. Then the venture capital boom arrived in her sector, "not necessarily to long-term good effect": capital that was not aligned with the realities of the food industry poured in, and neither the returns nor the lofty goals materialized.
Her key observation: things may actually have gotten worse. Venture capital increasingly defines success as one thing only - hitting a very steep growth rate. Kate kept returning to the Kantian test: "Is exponential growth, as fast as you can get it, the right thing for every business, for every employee, every industry? I'm not sure it is." She described watching bricks-and-mortar manufacturing companies contort their business models to look like software companies because that is what they thought capital wanted - manipulating businesses set out to solve one problem in one way into a standard software growth model they could never sustain.
And here is the crucial point: misalignment ends badly for both sides. The entrepreneur doesn't get to build the business aligned with their vision - and the investor is less likely to get a solid return, because the entrepreneur can't deliver what they are best at doing. Kate has walked away from investment on these grounds, and holding that line, she noted, gets harder the stronger the herd runs in one direction.
The audience validated this from the capital side. When I asked who had ever walked away from a deal, an investment or a client on principle, the answers were striking. A wealth manager who ran a private bank in Hong Kong described turning away potential clients who could not satisfactorily explain the source of their wealth - "our onboarding rules stopped those clients at the door." A foundation investor described walking away from a large partnership because the counterparty wanted to pursue financial return first with philanthropic capital, rather than impact first. The finance ethics professor reported having done so three times. Principles, it turns out, are not theoretical for this community - they are practiced, and they have a price that people are visibly willing to pay.
Thesis 5: The invisible hand has left the building
Two data points framed the next test. Nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on a Trump crypto coin, according to the New York Times. And the US SEC was created in the 1930s - roughly a century ago - to combat rampant market manipulation that had destroyed public confidence. Apply the categorical imperative once more: can a system where political leaders launch speculative tokens sustain itself if everyone did it? And the historical question underneath: are we back where we were a hundred years ago?
So I asked the audience the honest question: as economic participants, should we just sit back and trust the invisible hand of the market to sort this out over time?
Not one participant said yes. "No, we shouldn't let the market fix it," wrote one - "the market is hugely important, but as Kant suggests, instinctively that's not enough." Another made the institutional point: the invisible hand only works alongside a robust anti-monopoly and trust-busting function - "we may not have that currently." A third argued the invisible hand no longer functions in an over-financialized economy, citing the economist Mariana Mazzucato. A fourth widened the aperture entirely: "We need all stakeholders - asset owners, governments, NGOs, entrepreneurs, consumers."
Gert closed the loop with Adam Smith himself. When Smith described the invisible hand, the context was free markets. Look at the economic blocs around the globe today - tariffs, blockades, industrial policy - and free markets are hard to find. "There is not an invisible hand. There is a very visible hand." And since governments, in his conviction, are not likely to deliver the solutions either, the burden falls somewhere specific: on enlightened entrepreneurs who combine profit and purpose, and on the enlightened investors who back them. That, he said, is the core of his story.
Thesis 6: Enlightened capital already exists - what it lacks is a focal point
Lest this all sound like abstraction, the panel and audience assembled considerable evidence that enlightened capital is already at work.
George Darrah described Systemiq Capital's model: early-stage venture investing where technology transforms the physical economy - food, chemicals, materials, energy, computation. "We're not philanthropists. We're not concessional capital. We are looking for financial returns." The distinction is that impact is intrinsic to the product, not appended to it. He had joined us directly from a board meeting with a portfolio company whose AI and computer vision system, mounted on crop sprayers, cuts herbicide application by 90% while increasing yields - a company that makes money by reducing herbicide costs, with every positive externality bundled into the sale. "These founders have nowhere to go if they decide they're not interested in impact - they don't have a product, because the product itself is intrinsically impactful."
(In an almost too-perfect illustration of the stakes, George joined us from his car during the UK's latest extreme heat wave, his phone overheating repeatedly - "a very live interaction," as he put it, with too much carbon in the atmosphere.)
Gert added the institutional evidence: large European pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments have persisted with the policies they formulated a decade and a half ago, through the backlash. He recounted how he convinced an institutional investment committee to allocate to early-stage ventures with three arguments: long-term returns from taking many early bets; executing the investor's own sustainability policy by backing the technologies that will solve climate and biodiversity problems; and organizational learning - portfolio managers must understand the technologies and companies that will define the next decade. He pointed to Temasek's early conviction in vertical farming, to US endowments allocating high percentages to venture, and - increasingly - to family offices.
The audience filled in the picture further. One participant, who is building an impact multi-family office, described a growing cohort of younger exited entrepreneurs, wealth owners and inheritors for whom ROI is no longer the primary reason to deploy capital - who actively seek blended structures of return and philanthropy, and who until now "had no focused place to go," because mainstream family offices treat impact as an add-on. Another pointed to the innovative-finance world beyond ESG equity products - principled investing in bond, debt and credit structures emerging from the social impact investing community. A third observed that the gap Gert described between capital and enlightened entrepreneurs "is massive" - and Kate agreed it is hard to see how it gets bridged. Which is precisely the point: the supply and the demand both exist. What is missing is the connective tissue.
Thesis 7: To be dilution-proof, Enlightened Capital needs a normative core - and a movement
The final question of the session confronted the initiative with its own mortality: We have had sixty years of labels, and each fell short. ESG was hollowed out - adopted, marketed, diluted, pushed back. What would make Enlightened Capital dilution-proof, and what must it refuse to become?
Two audience answers stood out, and together they form something like a strategy.
The first, from the finance ethics professor, addressed the foundation: "What is needed is a compelling normative basis that we all can agree to - the rest (legal and accounting reform etc.) will flow from there." This is exactly the lesson of the ESG post-mortem in Thesis 1: frameworks without a normative core get arbitraged. Kant's categorical imperative is a candidate for that core precisely because it is not negotiable, not scoreable, and not gameable. You cannot get a 0.3 rank correlation on a principle.
The second, from a European institutional investor, addressed the realpolitik: "I'm afraid there will always be countervailing powers that will dilute enlightened capitalism. We should stand firm and spread the word. Develop and amplify a well-considered narrative that appeals to a lot of people, to create bottom-up support." No illusions about resistance - ESG's fate proved the counter-lobby is real and well-funded - but also no fatalism. Dilution is fought with clarity of principle on one side and breadth of movement on the other.
And what must Enlightened Capital refuse to become? The discussion suggests the answer: a label. A score. A compliance product. A marketing wrapper for asset gathering. The moment it becomes a checkbox, it has already lost.
Epilogue: "IN"
We closed the webinar by testing whether this should become a movement - asking participants who would like to help build it, actively or in a leadership capacity, to post "IN" in the chat. The INs came from the panel and the audience alike, including from the institutional investor who had just warned about countervailing powers. Standing firm and spreading the word, it seems, starts immediately.
That invitation extends to every reader of this article. If you would like to help build Enlightened Capital - actively or in a leadership capacity - email me at knab@opalesque.com with one line on how you'd like to contribute. Read and forward the Manifesto at enlightenedcapital.org, and share the webinar replay here.
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