Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? valuably clarifies the issues involved in granting religion-specific accommodations to laws and policies of general application. His arguments are careful, rigorous, and fair, and in rejecting the deontological arguments for religion-specific accommodations he seems to me largely correct. But when he turns to arguing against the utilitarian case for such accommodations, he employs a seemingly non-standard sense of utilitarianism in which demands of principled consistency constrain what would otherwise be utilitarian welfare-maximization. A more traditional and (...) stronger version of utilitarianism, however, has room for seemingly unprincipled or even irrational distinctions as long as employing those distinctions is utility- or welfare-maximizing. And thus although Leiter’s arguments against the deontological justifications for religion-specific accommodations are largely successful, his arguments against utilitarian justifications, by relying more heavily on the notion of “principle” than a utilitarian should accept, are open to challenge. (shrink)

Robert Solomon has presented a version of business ethics in terms of virtues theory. It is a good thing that business ethics should be understood in terms of virtues theory, but the account that Solomon gives is seriously misleading in important respects. "A virtue is a pervasive trait of character that allows one to 'fit into' a particular society and to excel in it," he says. This is something that we might query: what a society will recognize as a virtue (...) might well be what fits that formula, but sometimes we shall want to recognize as a virtue what enabled somebody to stand out against his or her society and change it, and shall want to say that those traits that enable somebody to fit happily into (say) a slave society are vices rather than virtues. That is to say, a society's recognition of virtues, its application of virtues theory in picking out various character traits as valuable, will depend on other judgments common in that society, and we might well differ from that society in those judgments. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of legal ethics should be oriented around the generative problem , which asks two fundamental questions. First, how does the lawyer's role generate reasons? Second, what kinds of reasons can this role generate? Every extant theory of legal ethics is based on a solution to the generative problem. On the generative method , theories of legal ethics are evaluated based on the plausibility of these solutions. I apply this method to three prominent theories of legal ethics, finding that (...) none is based on a fully satisfactory solution to the generative problem. This method has important implication for the study of legal ethics. Philosophically, it moves theoretical debates about legal ethics closer to other debates about the sources of normativity, like those concerning promises. Further, this method identifies a realworld dimension to these theoretical debates. Focusing on the generative problem allows for the empirical verification of hypotheses about legal ethics that have, to date, largely been conjectured. (shrink)

Role morality can be defined as “claim(ing) a moral permission to harm others in ways that, if not for the role, would be wrong” (A. Applbaum: 1999, Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) p. 3). Adversarial situations resulting in role morality occur most frequently in the fields of law, business, and government. Within the realm of accounting, professional obligations may place the accountant in a situation where he/she is susceptible (...) to the pressures of role morality. If the accountant engages in acts consistent with role morality, significant harm to others may result. The current study represents an initial investigation into role morality in accounting and includes survey data from three samples of professionals: accountants, physicians, and attorneys. Results suggest that accountants generally do not agree that role morality is acceptable. Additionally, when compared to the groups of physicians and attorneys, physicians agree the least with role morality, while attorneys agree the most. Implications for practicing accountants and suggestions for future research into the theory of role morality are offered. (shrink)

Willful blindness is not an appropriate substitute for knowledge in crimes that require a mens rea of knowledge because an actor who contrives his own ignorance is only sometimes as culpable as a knowing actor. This paper begins with the assumption that the classic willfully blind actor—the drug courier—is culpable. If so, any plausible account of willful blindness must provide criteria that find this actor culpable. This paper then offers two limiting cases: a criminal defense lawyer defending a client he (...) suspects of perjury and a pain doctor who suspects his patient may be lying about her pain. The paper argues that each of these actors is justified in cultivating ignorance about his client’s or patient’s truthfulness. If this is right, then a good theory of willful blindness must distinguish these cases. The article argues that neither Husak & Callender’s motivation-based account of willful blindness nor the recklessness account is able to do so. The paper proposes the following alternative: contrived ignorance constitutes culpable blindness when the decision to remain blind or to cultivate blindness is not itself justified. This Justification approach meshes with our intuitions about willfully blind drug couriers as well as willfully blind lawyers and doctors. (shrink)

In contemporary society, as in classical Greece, we need citizens that deliberate well both for themselves and for society overall. Different competitors contend about the right principles in the theory of education. This paper holds that ‘character education’, descending from the ancient ethics of virtues, still represents the best option available for people who want to deliberate well for the common good. A special place in deliberation is taken by legal reasoning because the law is central in the distribution of (...) goods in our society. Rather than focusing only on rules and principles I follow the EV approach and focus on the qualities of the good decision-maker, the reasonable judge. The intellectual virtues of phronesis and techné combine those personal and professional qualities that we want at work in any judge. But it is the exercise of the civic art of rhetoric that expresses at best the public dimension of the reasonable judge. (shrink)

Elsewhere I have defended utilitarianism as a philosophy peculiarly well suited to the conduct of public affairs, on grounds of the peculiar tasks and instruments confronting public officials. Here I add another plank to that defence of ‘utilitarianism as a public philosophy’, focusing on the peculiar role responsibilities of people serving in public capacities. Such ‘public service utilitarianism’ is incumbent not only upon public officials but also upon individuals in their capacities as citizens and voters. I close with reflections on (...) how best to evoke appreciation of these utilitarian role responsibilities from officials and electors alike. (shrink)

Disloyalty is always a vice, but loyalty is not always a virtue, so ethical management should not seek simply whatever loyalty it can get. Loyalty can make it possible for us to trust each other, and, when it takes appropriate objects and does not take extreme or improper forms, it can lie at the heart of much of what makes life worthwhile. Hence, it is understandable that corporations and management seek loyalty despite the fact that it can so easily go (...) wrong. This paper deals with the issues of the grounds and objects of the employee loyalty that it is appropriate for management to seek. (shrink)

Public relations helps an organisation and its publics adapt mutually to each other. However, this does not mean that the profession is value neutral or anything goes. There will be cases where professionals have to make discretionary ethical decisions and negotiate their roles and responsibilities, especially when faced with novel or difficult issues. In this conceptual paper, we describe how the notion of professional role morality not only shapes the individual struggles that practitioners endure but also highlights the organisational structures (...) that foster or shun ethics in the decision-making process. Thus we provide a means of assessing professional action that balances the urge to become a hired gun who simply abdicates personal responsibility and completely adopts the employer’s moral viewpoint on the one hand, and moral torpedoes who rely exclusively on their personal views without any concern for wider implications on the other. Investigating role morality as played out in public relations is important because it may explain why practitioners often find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here we present five fictionalised narratives to illustrate the conceptual issues and highlight the most significant moral distinctions that have practical consequences for both the theory and practice of public relations. (shrink)