The goal of this paper is to offer some remarks about how teachers, especially teachers of moral theories and arguments, should respond to insulting messages about disability that may be expressed in their courses. While there is a strong prima facie presumption for instructors to convey the truth as they see it, this is not an absolute requirement when the views they teach have a tendency to be insulting. I investigate some circumstances in which a moral view embeds and expresses (...) an insulting message about disability and I argue that affording due respect to their students requires ethics instructors to be alert to disparaging messages about disability and to send counter-messages when the views they teach give such messages. (shrink)

The question of the basis of human equality has recently gained increasing attention. However, much of the literature has focused on whether persons—understood as fully competent adults—have equal moral status, while relatively less attention has been devoted to the analysis of what grounds the equal moral status of those human beings who are not fully competent adults. This paper contributes to this debate by addressing the question of the equality of moral status between adults and children. Specifically, this paper has (...) three aims. First, it provides a conceptual map of this complex issue. Second, it argues that the challenges that have been raised against standard accounts of persons’ equal moral status are even more forceful when applied to the question of adults and children’s moral equality. Finally, it examines what a commitment to adults and children’s moral _inequality_ entails and what it does not, thereby showing that the justificatory role of the principle of moral equality is not as far-reaching as commonly assumed. (shrink)

This conceptual paper revisits the concept of equality as a base of distributive justice and contends that it is underspecified, both theoretically and in terms of its ethical and pragmatic application to human resource management (HRM) within organizations. Prior organizational literature focuses primarily upon distributive equality of remunerative outcomes within small groups and implicitly employs an equity-based conception of inputs to define equality. In contrast, through exposition of the philosophical roots of equality principles, we reconceptualize inputs as de facto equal (...) and consider the systemic application of distributive equality in the form of status leveling practices. Ethical ramifications of distributive equality so viewed are explored. We conclude by arguing that, to implicitly insert a stronger ethics focus into the study and practice of HRM, perhaps there should be "equality theory" competing with equity theory for recognition in managerial and scholarly discourse. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s work, identifying what it calls the ‘process-frame’ in her criticism of imperialism, economy, and the biologization of politics. It discusses an interpretation in which ‘natality’ presents a completely alternative mode of temporality, a resistance to the process-frame. This interpretation, it is argued, needs to be specified by taking into account that political (...) action both interrupts and starts processes of its own. To confine and overcome the negative effects of process-framing, it is important to emphasize action as a world-building activity – something capable of establishing a relatively stable area of the common world by initiating processes of its own. Second, it is also important to cultivate ways of thinking and perceiving particular acts as meaningfully independent of all-embracing processes. (shrink)

The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act and its subsequent backlash serve as a case-study to raise ethical concerns both about the characterization of contemporary western liberal democracy as a political theory and a prevailing religious extremism acting as a legislative power within governments; Developing and reflecting on these issues this study will attempt to show a need to evaluate the moral principles attributed to modern political systems and the governmental delineation of power over individuals within a society. Applying Rawlsian concepts, (...) this study will show that laws such as the RFRA are representative of weak and superficial democracies that in most cases are actually centres of power, funded by corporations and organisations in direct conflict with liberal principles. (shrink)