The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that _prima facie_ look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses of the (...) phenomenon overlook a non-obvious category of hearers whom the speakers of bald-faced lies intend to deceive. Those hearers are institutions represented by the people involved, such as courts or secret police. We also criticize two recent rival accounts (Jessica Keiser’s and Daniel Harris’s) that attempt to save the traditional conception by saying that some bald-faced lies are not assertions, because they are conventional—rather than illocutionary—speech acts. (shrink)

In the debate on epistemic injustice, it is generally assumed that testimonial injustice as one form of epistemic injustice cannot be committed (fully) deliberately or intentionally because it involves unconscious identity prejudices. Drawing on the case of sexual violence against refugees in European refugee camps, this paper argues that there is a form of testimonial injustice—willful testimonial injustice—that is deliberate. To do so, the paper argues (a) that the hearer intentionally utilizes negative identity prejudices for a particular purpose and (b) (...) that the hearer is aware of the fact that the intentionally used prejudices are in fact prejudices. Furthermore, the paper shows how testimonial injustice relates to recognition failures both in terms of a causal as well as a constitutive claim. In fact, introducing willful testimonial injustice can support the constitutive claim of such a relation that has so far received little attention. Besides arguing for a novel form of testimonial injustice and contributing to the recent debate on the relation between epistemic injustice and recognition failures, this paper is also motivated by the attempt to draw attention to the inhumane conditions for refugees at the border of Europe as well as elsewhere. (shrink)

Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And, (...) where it is discussed, the view is that corporations are less prone to weakness. Here, I argue that proponents of corporate responsibility should say that corporations can and often do instantiate weakness of the will, and that this is important to recognize. Weakness of the will requires certain capacities that these proponents typically take corporations to have. And once this is appreciated, we can assess how corporate weakness might proceed differently than how it does for individuals. We can also begin a conversation about how best to meet the distinctive challenges for recognizing and correcting corporate weakness, using a number of resources from management scholarship. (shrink)