Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new (...) standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus. (shrink)

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (...) (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era. (shrink)

This paper examines the work of Michael Novak, a prominent American philosopher and theologian with roots in Central Europe. The study focuses on Novak’s understanding of democratic capitalism and its role in promoting economic growth and human flourishing. Novak argues that when properly understood and practiced, capitalism can lead to a more just and prosperous society, as it is based on the human desire for freedom, creativity, and self-expression. However, he emphasizes that the success of capitalism depends on the presence (...) of moral and spiritual values, which he believes are necessary for it to function properly. This paper explores Novak’s arguments and evaluates them in the light of current knowledge. It also examines which values Novak deems important and why. The paper concludes that while Novak’s understanding of capitalism has some limitations, it offers valuable insights into the relationship between economics and morality. Novak’s framework provides a starting point for future discussions on how to ensure that capitalism operates ethically and promotes the common good. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

As a leading judge of seventeenth century Scotland, Viscount Stair (1619−1695) was a significant public figure in the immediate period before the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, he offers a vital but often overlooked insight into the intellectual life of Scotland during his lifetime. However, as Stair never published anything specifically on moral philosophy, this article asks if it is possible to reconstruct a moral theory on his behalf based on his printed legal and theological works. On the assumption that this is (...) feasible, this article examines how Stair’s moral theory relates to the Scottish variant of natural jurisprudence. In response to these questions, the analysis offered here argues that one can constructure answers to central questions of moral philosophy from Stair’s printed works, and further that it is possible to classify his moral theory as an early example of Scottish natural jurisprudence. Although there are acknowledged challenges in reconstructing his moral theory, it is suggested by the argument below that, to fully grasp the intellectual life of seventeenth century Scotland, we may need to engage more deeply with the theological works of seventeenth century Scots as well as adopt resourceful methods to build a picture of seventeenth century ideas relating to morality. (shrink)

Best known as a political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre is also a critic of the modern university. The paper examines the grounds of MacIntyre's criticism of modern universities; it offers an assessment of the philosophical debate occasioned by MacIntyre's writings on the topic; and it proposes a way of taking this debate forward. The debate is shown to be centred around three objections to MacIntyre's normative idea of the university: that it is overly intellectualist, parochial, and moralizing. The merits of these (...) objections are considered and a different interpretation of the normative core of MacIntyre's conception of the university is presented: realization and promotion of the common good. An analysis is offered of the kinds of common good universities may serve to realize, including practices internal to the institution, education of a public, and flourishing relationships in various social roles. The implications of this neo-Aristotelian analysis of the normative core of universities is also shown to be at odds with some of MacIntyre's explicitly stated views on the role of universities in forming an educated pubic and educating students for work. (shrink)

This paper argues that Quaker business ethics can be understood as a MacIntyrean tradition. To do so, it draws on three key MacIntyrean concepts: community, compartmentalisation, and the critique of management. The emphasis in Quaker business ethics on finding unity, as well as the emphasis that Quaker businesses have placed on serving their local areas, accords with MacIntyre’s claim that small-scale community is essential to human flourishing. The emphasis on integrity in Quaker business ethics means practitioners are well-placed to resist (...) the compartmentalising pressures of contemporary work. Quaker business ethics is also highly critical of the manipulative forms of management that MacIntyre regards as dominant. As such, Quaker business ethics provides evidence that more morally ameliorative forms of running business organisations is possible, even if they remain difficult to achieve. (shrink)

Storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and prolonged drought, as ever more regular features of life under deteriorating climate conditions, are unmistakably violent. Their effects on the lives of vulnerable human populations and ecosystems across the world are widely known to be devastating. Yet a legal order that denies the victims of such ecological persecution safe haven, no matter how great its use of force (e.g., detention, arrest, forced return) cannot, by definition, be violent. The power of law, used to protect states’ (...) rights to exclude from their jurisdictions growing numbers displaced involuntarily by global climate harms, in being a source of ‘legitimate right’, is never the same as violence. This article challenges the ongoing validity of this assumption. It points to some of the ways in which legal instruments are used today to deny those displaced by climatic conditions sufficient normative status to guarantee their safety. What is needed instead is a new critical normative understanding of the evolving relationship between climate change, violence, justice, and law, one that re-assesses the democratic justificatory grounds for the current positions of non-responsibility for the climate displaced whilst re-affirming such people’s legal and political status as equal co-members of the politically constituted international community of humanity. (shrink)

The practical failure to understand in conflicts, where participants routinely challenge each other’s attribution of meaning, undermines the key assumption of the Weberian interpretive project: that the subject acts meaningfully. This article revisits Weber’s concept of meaning as an object of understanding for a social scientist. Ascertaining the empirical fact of subjective attribution, as Weber advised, may not be sufficient when it comes to understanding action whose meaning is disputed. The article uses the example of E.P. Thompson’s interpretation of eighteenth-century (...) English food riots to show that the disputed empirical meaning is a product of rational understanding, which Weber would classify as dogmatic meaning. The social scientist fails to understand what the critic claims to: a failure to act meaningfully in cultural terms. Furthermore, because the subject acts meaningfully without fail, we close off the option of explaining conflict as a rational disagreement. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized the existence of myriad widespread deep disagreements on values, justice, morality, and ethics. In order to come to terms with such deep disagreements, resistant to rational solution, this article asserts the need for developing an ethics of disagreement. The reality that theoretical disagreements often turn into practical conflicts is a major justification for why such an ethics is necessary. This paper outlines an ethics of deep disagreement that is primarily conceived of as a form of virtue (...) ethics. Such an ethics asks opposing parties in moral and intellectual conflicts to acknowledge that (a) deep disagreements exist, (b) opposing positions should be recognized as worthy of respect, and that (c) one should seek dialogue and mutual understanding. This ethical approach conceives of toleration as a moral and political virtue and presents an argument for toleration based on deep disagreements. (shrink)

This paper draws a distinction between ‘right MacIntyreans’ who are relatively optimistic that MacIntyre’s vision of ethics can be realised in capitalist society, and ‘left MacIntyreans’ who are sceptical about this possibility, and aims to show that the ‘left MacIntyrean’ position is a promising perspective available to business ethicists. It does so by arguing for a distinction between ‘community-focused’ practices and ‘excellence-focused’ practices. The latter concept fulfils the promise of practices to provide us with an understanding of the best work (...) for humankind and highlights the affinities between MacIntyre’s concept of a practice and Marx’s conception of good work as free, creative activity. The paper concludes with a suggestion that we reflect on the best forms of work so that we can strive to ensure the very best activities, those most consonant with our flourishing, one day become available to all. (shrink)

This issue of Christian Bioethics explores foundational debates regarding the orientation and application of Christian bioethics. Should Christian bioethics be approached as essentially a human activity, grounded in scholarly study of theological arguments and religious virtues, oriented toward practical social ends, or should Christian bioethics be recognized as the result of properly oriented prayer, fasting, and asceticism leading to an encounter with God? The gulf between these two general perspectives—the creation of immanent human goods versus submission to a fully transcendent (...) God—is significant and, as ongoing debate in Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality over the past nearly three decades has made clear, the implications are both intellectually engaging and spiritually profound. (shrink)

It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at (...) the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter covers contemporary work on disagreement, detailing both the conceptual and normative issues in play in the debates in mainstream analytic epistemology, and how these relate to religious diversity and disagreement. §1 examines several sorts of disagreement, and considers several epistemological issues: in particular, what range of attitudes a body of evidence can support, how to understand higher-order evidence, and who counts as an epistemic “peer”. §2 considers how these questions surface when considering disagreements over religion, including debates over (...) the nature of evidence and truth in religion, epistemic humility, concerns about irrelevant influences and about divine hiddenness, and arguments over exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Finally, §3 summarizes the contributors’ essays in this volume. (shrink)

Many neo-Aristotelians argue that practical identities are normative, that is, they provide us with reasons for action and create binding obligations. Kantian constructivists agree with this insight but argue that contemporary Aristotelians fail to fully justify it. Practical identities are normative, Kantian constructivists contend, but their normativity necessarily derives from the normativity of humanity. In this paper, I shed light on this underexplored similarity between neo-Aristotelian and Kantian constructivist accounts of the normativity of practical identities, and argue that both ultimately (...) fail. I end by suggesting an alternative justification of the claim that practical identities are normative. (shrink)

Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to (...) best determine how to weigh moral trade-offs. However, the VSD framework also concedes the universalism of moral values, particularly the values of freedom, autonomy, equality trust and privacy justice. This paper argues that the VSD methodology, particularly applied to nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies, has an insufficient grounding for the determination of moral values. As such, an exploration of the value-investigations of VSD are deconstructed to illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses. This paper also provides possible modalities for the strengthening of the VSD methodology, particularly through the application of moral imagination and how moral imagination exceed the boundaries of moral intuitions in the development of novel technologies. (shrink)

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post-religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos. (shrink)

In a recent issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, several scholars wrote on the topic of ethics expertise in clinical ethics consultation. The articles in this issue exemplified what we consider to be two troubling trends in the quest to articulate a unique expertise for clinical ethicists. The first trend, exemplified in the work of Lisa Rasmussen, is an attempt to define a role for clinical ethicists that denies they have ethics expertise. Rasmussen cites the dependence of ethical (...) expertise on irresolvable meta-ethical debates as the reason for this move. We argue against this deflationary strategy because it ends up smuggling in meta-ethical assumptions it claims to avoid. Specifically, we critique Rasmussen’s distinction between the ethical and normative features of clinical ethics cases. The second trend, exemplified in the work of Dien Ho, also attempts to avoid meta-ethics. However, unlike Rasmussen, Ho tries to articulate a notion of ethics expertise that does not rely upon meta-ethics. Specifically, we critique Ho’s attempts to explain how clinical ethicists can resolve moral disputes using what he calls the “Default Principle” and “arguments by parity.” We show that these strategies do not work unless those with the moral disagreement already share certain meta-ethical assumptions. Ultimately, we argue that the two trends of attempting to avoid meta-ethics by denying that clinical ethicists have ethics expertise, and attempting to articulate how ethics expertise can be used to resolve disputes without meta-ethics both fail because they do not, in fact, avoid doing meta-ethics. We conclude that these trends detract from what clinical ethics consultation was founded to do and ought to still be doing—provide moral guidance, which requires ethics expertise, and engagement with meta-ethics. To speak of ethicists without ethics expertise leaves their role in the clinic dangerously unclear and unjustified. (shrink)

Call a belief ”non-negotiable’ if one cannot abandon the belief without the abandonment of one’s religious perspective. Although non-negotiable beliefs can logically exclude other perspectives, a non-reductive approach to religious pluralism can help to create a space within which the non- negotiable beliefs of others that contradict one’s own non-negotiable beliefs can be appreciated and understood as playing a justificatory role for the other. The appreciation of these beliefs through cognitive resonance plays a crucial role to enable the understanding of (...) those who hold other perspectives. epistemological and spiritual consequences of this claim are explored. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine Hume’s secular re-definition and re-evaluation of the traditional Christian understanding of pride and humility as part of his project to establish a fully secular account of ethics and to undermine what he thought to be the harmful aspects of religious morality. Christians traditionally have seen humility, understood as receptivity to God, to be crucial for individual and social flourishing, and pride as the root of individual and social disorder. By contrast, Hume, who conceives of pride (...) and humility immanently in terms of our self-appraisals, sees pride as a key virtue that serves as the ultimate source of moral motivation and deems humility a ‘monkish virtue’ (i.e., a vice). Hume, moreover, sees religious appeals to a transcendent moral source to be a threat to individual flourishing in that they encourage the formation of what he calls ‘artificial lives’ (of which the monkish virtues are an expression) as well as a threat to social concord, insofar as they foster unnecessary religious factions, intolerance, and theologically sanctioned violence. In part to combat this, Hume promotes a wholly secular ethic rooted in common life. I uncover the real points of agreement and disagreement that underlie Hume and traditional Christian conceptions of pride and humility in order to articulate what is essentially at issue between these contrasting perspectives and, ultimately, to identify some of what is gained or lost in Hume’s secularization of ethics. I, thus, explore the reasons that Hume rejects Christian morality and seeks to replace it with a secular one. I then assess whether Hume’s secular perspective has sufficient resources for addressing the biased judgments and rivalries that can arise precisely because of what Hume sees as our natural desire for the ‘passion of pride’ (i.e., for a positive sense of ourselves before others). I conclude both that Hume identifies genuine dangers in attempting to go beyond the human and also that there are genuine dangers in Hume’s attempt to close the window to a transcendent moral source. I, therefore, contend that any adequate view of human flourishing must take account of both these dangers. (shrink)

This paper introduces ‘Virtue and Virtuousness: When will the twain ever meet?’ a special edition of Business Ethics: A European Review. The Call for Papers invited contributions that could inform the relationship between organisational virtuousness, as conceptualised by positive organisation studies, and the classical conception of virtues pertaining to individual women and men. While the resources of particular virtue traditions – Aristotelian, Catholic, Confucian, and the like – could inform their own debates as to whether virtue extends beyond individuals, the (...) debate between virtue traditions and positive organisation studies has a different dimension. The question is whether the claims of positive social sciences as such are compatible with those of any virtue tradition. We argue that positive social science and virtue traditions are indeed rivals such that adherence to the claims of the one precludes adherence to the other. Resolution to such conflicts requires that one tradition is able to resolve questions that exhaust the resources of the other. This paper suggests that at least one area of incoherence in the findings of positive social sciences can be resolved by virtue traditions, and introduces the remaining papers in the special edition. (shrink)

This paper is both a response to the four reviewers in a special symposium on my book Adam Smith’s Pluralism and a substantive discussion of philosophy of education. In it, I introduce what I call “the educative critique,” a mode of analysis similar to Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial critiques, but focusing on the educative role of a text. I argue that choosing education as a theme is itself a solution to interpretive difficulties, not an add-on that only concerns pedagogues and (...) policy-makers. (shrink)

The paper argues that dreams consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of (...) dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams. (shrink)

This paper argues that the positive allocative decisions paradigmatically carried out by the application of legal rules are a necessary condition for arguments about particular justice (i.e., distributive and commutative justice) to make sense. If one shifts the focus from the distinction between distributive and commutative justice to what the two aspects of particular justice are for, namely, providing criteria to judge the allocation of goods, it becomes clear that the distinction is conceptually unstable. The paper argues that stabilizing the (...) distinction is worthwhile and that this can only be accomplished by the introduction of positive allocation schemes. (shrink)

During the last forty years, the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas, of the British Commonwealth, and of other countries colonized by Europeans over the last five hundred years have demanded that their forms of property and government be recognized in international law and in the constitutional law of their countries. This broad movement of 250 million Aboriginal people has involved court cases, parliamentary politics, constitutional amendments, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the development of an international law of (...) Aboriginal peoples, and countless nonviolent and violent actions in defense of Aboriginal systems of property and cultures. The Aboriginal peoples of New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have been at the forefront of the movement, and it is in these countries that the greatest legal recognition has been achieved. (shrink)

The values of nursing arise from a concern with human flourishing. If the desire to become a nurse is a reflection of an aspiration to care for others in need then we should anticipate that those who choose to nurse have a tendency towards the values we would normally associate with a caring profession (care, compassion, perhaps altruism, and so on). However, these values require a secure base if they are not to succumb to the corrupting pressures of the increasingly (...) instrumental nature of the values of the institutions in which healthcare in general and nursing in particular takes place. One way of securing a base for withstanding the corrupting influences of the institution is to understand nursing as a practice in the sense in which Alasdair MacIntyre uses that term. In this brief paper I will outline ways in which the managerial imperative of meeting targets is both distorting practice and undermining nursing’s values. I conclude that understanding nursing as a MacIntyrean practice provides a refuge from what might otherwise be overwhelming pressures for nurses to adopt instrumental values to the detriment of professional caring values. (shrink)

This article explores the values that should be promoted in civic education for democracy and also how the promotion of values can be non-coercive. It will be argued that civic education should promote the values of reasonableness, mutual respect and fairness, but also that only public, political reasons count in attempting to justify the content of civic education. It will also be argued that the content of civic education may legitimately be broader than this, including but not restricted to the (...) values of autonomy, integrity, magnanimity, truthfulness and generosity. At the same time, if civic education is seen merely as a means to shape and form future citizens, then the promotion of values in civic education will be a coercive imposition on children and young people. If the promotion of values instead is to be non-coercive it must be defended with reasons that children and young people should be able to accept. (shrink)

Some years ago, 1985, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a paper onThe Idea of an Educated Public in which he argued that the only route open for educators for the future, in order to emerge out of the current moral ‘crisis’ created by the ‘emotivist’ modernist culture is to bring back the idea of an ‘educated public’ from the Scottish Enlightenment and to regard education as education into such a public. The notion of an ‘educated public’, in effect, reappears also in all (...) his later books on moral philosophy, particular his latest,Three Rival Theories of Moral Enquiry, where he takes up his original proposal that educated publics should grow around universities and canvasses the new idea that under contemporary conditions what we may need is not one universal university but three kinds contextualized within the three rival kinds of cultural and moral programmes he identifies, and, correspondingly, three kinds of educated public. This paper tries to trace the evolution of MacIntyre's idea of an educated public throughout his work, arguing that there is one particular perspective on the idea which he strangely omits, that represented by Dewey/Habermas, and critiquing his final solution on the basis of its possibility and political desirability. (shrink)

This paper aims to persuade its reader that libertarianism, at least in several of its varieties, is a species of the genus Michael Oakeshott referred to as ‘rationalism in politics’. I hope to demonstrate, employing the work of Oakeshott, as well as Aristotle and Onora O’Neill, how many libertarian theorists, who generally have a sincere and admirable commitment to personal liberty, have been led astray by the rationalist promise that we might be able to approach deductive certainty concerning the 'correctness' (...) of some political programme. Of course libertarians, in common with the adherents of almost any other political ‘stance’, are not a monolithic body, but exhibit a variety of more or less rationalist arguments for their views. For example, a thinker like Hayek, who is often placed in the libertarian camp, came to adopt much of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in his later work. And, of course, Oakeshott himself expressed an affinity for libertarian ideas in his essay, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ (1991 [1962]). But a general predilection to enhance individual freedom as far as is deemed practicable is quite a different matter from taking a stance in which liberty, and liberty conceived in a rather narrow fashion, is the only value deemed admissible into ‘reasonable’ political discourse. (We will see in a subsequent section that Oakeshott recognized this urge to sanctify one value above all others as a logical requirement of striving for deductive political truths.) I believe that a critique of such libertarian rationalism is particularly relevant given the present situation in the United States vis-à-vis civil rights and the ongoing ‘war on terror’, in that many non- libertarian supporters of peace and strong civil rights find themselves allied with libertarians on these issues—if libertarians have gotten these issues ‘correct’, then how might they have gone wrong elsewhere? Furthermore, the critique may aid libertarians themselves, because, if the title of this paper is accurate, such a single-minded exaltation of one value above all others is an enemy of true liberty, so that libertarians might want to rethink adopting such a position. As Philip Pettit demonstrates (1997), freedom as non-domination is more robust and inclusive of all that we value about freedom than is the libertarian concept of freedom as non-interference; by allowing, say, immense economic power to be concentrated in a single corporation, as intervention to break the company up would violate the principle of non-interference, libertarian ideas may greatly diminish the liberty of the people subject to that corporate power. (shrink)

Abstract:This article elaborates a normative Stakeholder Management Theory (SHMT) from a critical theory perspective. The paper argues that the normative theory elaborated by critical theorists such as Habermas exhibits important advantages over its rivals and that these advantages provide the basis for a theoretically more adequate version of SHMT. In the first section of the paper an account is given of normative theory from a critical theory perspective and its advantages over rival traditions. A key characteristic of the critical theory (...) approach is expressed as a distinction between three different normative realms, viz., legitimacy, morality, and ethics. In the second section, the outlines of a theory of stakeholder management are provided. First, three basic tasks of a theoretically adequate treatment of the normative analysis of stakeholder management are identified. This is followed by a discussion of how a critical theory approach to SHMT is able to fulfill these three tasks. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is a further development of two previous pieces of work (Moore 2002, 2005) in which modern virtue ethics, and in particular MacIntyre’s (1985) related notions of “practice” and “institution,” have been explored in the context of business. It first introduces and defines the concept of corporate character and seeks to establish why it is important. It then reviews MacIntyre’s virtues-practice-institution schema and the implications of this at the level of the institution in question—the corporation—and argues that the concept (...) of corporate character follows from, but is a novel development of, MacIntyre’s schema. The paper contrasts corporate character and virtues with the more familiar concepts of corporate culture and values. The constitutive and substantive elements of corporate character, including the essential corporate virtues, are then drawn out and illustrated with reference to the cases explored in Koehn (1998). Finally, the paper acknowledges and counters a specific criticism of this approach. (shrink)

The reconstructive theory of the procedural legitimacy of modern law developed on the basis of the theory of discourse ethics has limited itself solely to the deontological, moral‐normative aspects of the validity claims of legal norms and judgments. However, teleological and axiological aspects are also intertwined with legal validity claims and with the procedures in which legal norms and judgments are produced. The discursive‐procedural concept of legitimacy seems to require as its support, instead of the theory of discourse ethics, a (...) general theory of practical discourses or, more generally, of rational collective will‐formation. (shrink)

Central to argumentation theory is a concern with normativity. Argumentation theorists are concerned, among other things, with explaining why some arguments are good (or at least better than others) in the sense that a given argument provides reasons for embracing its conclusion which are such that a fair- minded appraisal of the argument yields the judgment that the conclusion ought to be accepted -- is worthy of acceptance -- by all who so appraise it.

Critics point to four issues as presenting barriers to the use of virtue in the context of business. They focus on the relationship between management and practice, the potential for virtuous behaviour in a competitive environment, the ability to develop a reflexive critique of management that can be acted on, and the differentiation between work and wider social roles and people's propensity to take responsibility for them. In this paper we propose a solution to criticisms levelled at the use of (...) virtue within Business Ethics. We examine the critiques of management in the context of Virtue Ethics and the application of these to business. In arguing for a role for business in being virtuous and promoting virtue we accept that the concept of management that is based on the type of liberalism founded on personal preference and benefit is deeply problematic and that management that is driven solely by profit is not compatible with the development of practice based virtue. However, we argue that to exclude those activities in which management is involved as a result would be wrong and dangerous. Instead we see the great advantage of a Virtue Ethic is that it conjures up an alternative vision to the dominant practice, and such an alternative vision is urgently needed in business today. (shrink)

Both in the Netherlands and in Britain, practices of ‘life story work’ have emerged in nursing for persons with intellectual disabilities. The narrative approach to care and support may at the same time be considered as an attempt to compensate for the ‘disabled authorship’ of many persons with intellectual disabilities and as a sign of controversy with standard practices of diagnosis and treatment that tend to neglect the personal identities of both clients and care givers, their particular historical and relational (...) contexts and their spiritual needs. This paper argues that narrative ethics not only offers an appropriate moral framework for practices of life story work, but that these practices are a narrative ethics in action. Starting with an account of the concept of ‘life story work’ as it has been introduced in nursing practices in the field of intellectual disability, the paper explains its relationship with key characteristics of narrative ethics. The teleological dimension in narrative ethics and in practices of life story work sparks off a dialectic process of understanding of the client and self‐understanding of the care giver. It also invites a respect for life in its openness toward the future and presupposes an openness toward other possible versions of the life narrative. The phenomenological and hermeneutic‐interpretative methodologies in narrative ethics aim at a ‘sudden moment of intimacy’ in relationships of nurses and clients. The ‘epiphany’ of this essential moment of recognition, insight and engagement cannot, however, be brought about by methodology. (shrink)

Communitarians reject the impartial and universal viewpoint of liberal morality in favor of the "situated" viewpoint of the agent's community, and elevate political community into the moral community. I show that the preeminence of political community in communitarian morality is incompatible with concern for people's lives in the partial communities of family, friends, or others. Ironically, it is also incompatible with the communitarian thesis about the situated nature of moral agency. Political community is preeminent in communitarianism because of its unargued-for (...) assumption that a good society is a morally unified society. I further argue that the ability to take the impartial standpoint is essential to the ability to make particular commitments that have an intrinsic human importance. (shrink)

We argue that the declining female enrollment in graduate business schools is a manifestation of gender bias in business education. The extant conceptual foundation of business education is one which views business activity in terms of a game with fixed and wholly material objectives. This concept betrays an underlying value system that reflects a male orientation. Business education is not merely amoral, therefore, but is gender biased. We suggest that business educators adopt a broadened behavioral rubric. Virtue-ethics theory provides such (...) a rubric. (shrink)

Modern professional behavior all too often fails to meet high standards of moral conduct. An important reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is the expansive self interest of the individual professional. The individual''s natural desire for his/her own success and pleasure goes unchecked by internal moral constraints. In this essay, I investigate this phenomenon using the psychoanalytic concepts of the ego ideal and superego. These concepts are used to explore the internal psychological dynamics that contribute to moral decision-making. The (...) contrasts between self interest and concern for others, selfishness and moral values, and moral conscience and social conformity are examined in Tolstoy''s study of the modern professional in The Death of Ivan Ilych. By reviewing Freud''s work on the moral conscience, particularly its complex inner structure and liabilities to dysfunction, and applying it to Tolstoy''s penetrating portrayal of Ivan Ilych''s personal and professional life, an understanding of the inner (emotional) foundation of moral character, its dependence on the past through the links between generations, and the need to integrate idealism with moral values is generated. Examples from Enron Corporation will be used throughout the paper to relate the analysis and discussion to contemporary business ethics problems. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to investigate what enables human flourishing from a Thomistic perspective by considering Aquinas’ natural inclinations. I will argue that human beings flourish in different ways, depending on their practices. However, not every practice contributes to human flourishing, but only those that are consistent with human nature, which agents grasp through their natural inclinations. To support this argument, I will critically analyze MacIntyre’s account, referring mainly to his latest work (2016). MacIntyre has the merit of (...) highlighting the role of practices in human flourishing by considering the narrative dimension in the agents’ lives, but he fails to recognize the properly metaphysical framework of human nature, that would be provided by the proper consideration of natural inclinations. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline a new method for evaluating the human impact of machine-learning applications. In partnership with Underwriters Laboratories Inc., we have developed a framework to evaluate the impacts of a particular use of machine learning that is based on the goals and values of the domain in which that application is deployed. By examining the use of artificial intelligence in particular domains, such as journalism, criminal justice, or law, we can develop more nuanced and practically relevant understandings (...) of key ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence. By decoupling the extraction of the facts of the matter from the evaluation of the impact of the resulting systems, we create a framework for the process of assessing impact that has two distinctly different phases. (shrink)

Scott Woodcock has levied a number of objections against Aristotelian naturalism which claims that ethical norms are grounded by reason and biology. His most recent “membership objection” is a synthesis of earlier objections and consists in a trilemma. If Aristotelian naturalists answer the first horn of the trilemma by stipulating that determinations of species-membership are grounded non-empirically, and the second horn of the trilemma by stipulating rationality is species-specific, then they are confronted by a moral outsider—someone who claims that they (...) have non-empirically determined their species membership and are thus guided by different norms of rationality than the rest of us. This permits the moral outsider to act heinously without moral sanction from Aristotelian naturalism. Critics have neglected Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism. And he has faced moral-outsider-type counterexamples before. I develop a new response to counterexamples MacIntyre’s account has faced and argue that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian naturalism is able to answer Woodcock’s membership objection. I do this by developing an empirical taxonomy-based approach that enables us to justify the moral outsider’s responsibilities while preserving the best of Aristotelian naturalism. (shrink)

Throughout the last decades, state and civil society actors in Germany have undertaken a number of initiatives in order to enter into a structured conversation with Muslim communities, and to find spokespersons who serve as partners for political authorities. This process has commonly been analysed in terms of its empowering effects for Muslims via the emerging ‘institutionalisation’ of Islam. The modes and techniques of power at stake in this process have yet often been undermined. Through the lens of Foucault's concept (...) of governmentality, the starting point of my article is one particular dialogue forum, initiated by the German state in 2006 – the ‘Deutsche Islam Konferenz’ (DIK) – whose primary goal is to institutionalise and regulate the communication between Muslims and state actors and thereby to regulate the conduct of Muslims. Focusing mainly on the way in which gender and Islam have been coupled and played out in this initiative, I argue that the DIK is less a dialogical encounter than a tool of a broader civilising liberal project. Through the inquiry into the modes of power operating in this state led dialogue initiative the article shows that while aiming to secure Muslim's ‘integration’ into German society and to liberate Muslim women from restrictive gender norms, the DIK operates as an enactment of a particular notion of freedom with normative and normalising implications. (shrink)

Ethical naturalists such as Philippa Foot, John McDowell or Sabina Lovibond have critically distinguished their version of naturalism from the version ascribed to David Hume. This article defends H...