Scholars have compared Joseph Butler and Immanuel Kant’s moral theories, claiming that they both center on the concept of autonomy. In this thesis, I argue that, despite this superficial similarity, they disagree about the core commitments of their conceptions of autonomy. Butlerian autonomy relies on inferring from the normative authority of conscience to the descriptive that human nature is adapted to virtue, and from this descriptive claim about human nature to moral obligation. Kant rejects these inferences, and therefore rejects the (...) key components of Butlerian autonomy. Moreover, I argue that Kant’s rejection of Butler’s conception of human nature renders Butler’s stoic conception of virtue unavailable to Kant. (shrink)

Can compensation repair the moral harm of a previous wrongful act? On the one hand, some define the very function of compensation as one of restoring the moral balance. On the other hand, the dominant view on compensation is that it is insufficient to fully repair moral harm unless accompanied by an act of punishment or apology. In this paper, I seek to investigate the maximal potential of compensation. Central to my argument is a distinction between apologetic compensation and non-apologetic (...) compensation. Apologetic compensation, I argue, is an act that expresses regret and apology by means of some offer of money, goods, or services. Non-apologetic compensation is an act that seeks to restore loss or harm without expressing regret or apology. In the paper, I defend the view that acts of compensation can be apologetic and argue that such apologetic compensation is sufficient for moral repair. (shrink)

What is the function of morality? On this question, something approaching a consensus has recently emerged. Impressed by developments in evolutionary theory, many philosophers now tell us that the function of morality is to reduce social tensions, and to thereby enable a society to efficiently promote the well-being of its members. In this paper, I subject this consensus to rigorous scrutiny, arguing that the functional hypothesis in question is not well supported. In particular, I attack the supposed evidential relation between (...) an evolutionary genealogy of morals and the functional hypothesis itself. I show that there are a great many functionally relevant discontinuities between our own culture and the culture within which morality allegedly emerged, and I argue that this seriously weakens the inference from morality’s evolutionary history to its present-day function. (shrink)

There is a substantial class of collective decision problems whose successful solution requires interdependence among decision makers at the agenda-setting stage and independence at the stage of choice. We define this class of problems and describe and apply a search-and-decision mechanism theoretically modeled in the context of honeybees and identified in earlier empirical work in biology. The honeybees’ mechanism has useful implications for mechanism design in human institutions, including courts, legislatures, executive appointments, research and development in firms, and basic research (...) in the sciences. Our paper offers a fresh perspective on the idea of “biomimicry” in institutional design and raises the possibility of comparative institutional analysis across species. (shrink)

The thesis provides a philosophically grounded account of a socialist planned economy. While I do not primarily consider a positive case for socialism, I address two major objections to it and thus argue that the possibility of socialism as an alternative form of economic organisation has been dismissed too quickly. Furthermore, I provide an account of the precise form a socialist economy should take, outlining general principles of planning and distribution. Based on a welfarist interpretation of Marx, I show that (...) distribution of consumer goods should be facilitated by an equal distribution of tokens. These tokens can be redeemed for consumer products or substituted for additional leisure time. The rates at which tokens can be redeemed for consumer products should correspond to market clearing prices. Welfare-oriented socialism is also defended against a deontological objection to socialism by Robert Nozick, who claims that socialism leads to injustice because it violates private property rights. The thesis also considers Ludwig von Mises’s calculation argument against socialism, which claims that socialism leads to the abolition of economic rationality. I show how this objection can be overcome by using optimal planning techniques which are responsive to consumer demand as signalled by the market clearing rates of consumer products. The resulting model of socialism is tested using a computer simulation. The simulation also demonstrates that a novel system of valuation based on opportunity cost leads to a better adaptation of production in response to environmental constraints when compared to the labour values of classical political economy. (shrink)

Locating the history of male honour in the perspective of his philosophical anthropology, Mandeville is able to show that the rituals of modern honour are an exemplary expression of that spontaneous, artificial order stemming out of a natural disposition of human passions. For Mandeville, duelling provides decisive evidence that the desire for approval from others, even at the cost of one's life, is a dominant motive in man's behaviour. The aim of this paper is to review selected Scottish responses to (...) the questions raised by Mandeville's views on ‘Modern Honour’ and his provocative defense of duelling. (shrink)

Hutcheson fonde sa théorie morale sur un « sens moral ». Ce sens nous permet de faire des distinctions morales. Cette théorie donnera lieu à un débat sur la réalité des valeurs morales. Selon certains commentateurs, nos distinctions morales portent sur des faits moraux réels que l’on peut connaître empiriquement grâce à notre sens moral. Inversement, certains soutiendront que le sens moral ne produit pas de connaissance morale. Les jugements moraux issus de ce sens sont des réponses émotionnelles plus ou (...) moins fiables que l’on ressent face à des motivations qui nous semblent être vertueuses. Nous montrerons que, selon Hutcheson, nos jugements moraux sont bien des réponses émotionnelles, mais qu’ils ont néanmoins un critère d’objectivité. Notre sens moral, grâce à la Providence divine, a pour fonction de préserver le bien-être de l’humanité. Cette fonction du sens moral sert de critère pour évaluer le bon fonctionnement de ce sens moral. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others’ knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Second—and more relevant to the term “injustice”—we can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with describing the (...) wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we “can, and should, aim for in practice”. But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable disposition—that is, any such virtue—as the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could.. (shrink)

Altruism is a deep and complex phenomenon that is analysed by scholars of various disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, biology, evolutionary anthropology and experimental economics. Much confusion arises in current literature because the term altruism covers variable concepts and processes across disciplines. Here we investigate the sense given to altruism when used in different fields and argumentative contexts. We argue that four distinct but related concepts need to be distinguished: (a) psychological altruism , the genuine motivation to improve others’ interests and (...) welfare; (b) reproductive altruism , which involves increasing others’ chances of survival and reproduction at the actor’s expense; (c) behavioural altruism , which involves bearing some cost in the interest of others; and (d) preference altruism , which is a preference for others’ interests. We show how this conceptual clarification permits the identification of overstated claims that stem from an imprecise use of terminology. Distinguishing these four types of altruism will help to solve rhetorical conflicts that currently undermine the interdisciplinary debate about human altruism. (shrink)

Altruism is a malleable notion that is understood differently in various disciplines. The common denominator of most definitions of altruism is the idea of unidirectional helping behaviour. However, a closer examination reveals that the term altruism sometimes refers to the outcomes of a helping behaviour for the agent and its neighbours – i.e. reproductive altruism – and sometimes to what motivates the agent to help others – i.e. psychological altruism. Since these perspectives on altruism are crucially different, it is important (...) to use a clear terminology to avoid confusion. In particular, we show that the notion of altruism used by biologists profoundly differs from the ones used by philosophers, psychologists and economists in cross-disciplinary debates about human altruism. (shrink)

This article explores the possible convergence between the capabilities approach and utilitarianism to specify CSR. It defends the idea that this key issue is related to the anthropological perspective that underpins both theories and demonstrates that a relational conception of individual freedoms and rights present in both traditions gives adequate criteria for CSR toward the company's stakeholders. I therefore defend "relational capability" as a means of providing a common paradigm, a shared vision of a core component of human development. This (...) could further lead to a set of indicators aimed at assessing corporate social performance as the maximization of the relational capability of people impacted by the activities of companies. In particular, I suggest a way of evaluating the contribution of extractive companies to the communities close to their industrial sites in extremely poor areas, not from the viewpoint of material resources and growth, but from the viewpoint of the quality of the social environment and empowerment. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to accentuate those features that distinguish Levinasian ethics from the egoism that prevails in management thought. It focuses on differences in the constitution of the subject, how Levinas seeks an ethics that goes beyond the subjective point of view that structures the self as being self-present, self-interested, free and systematic and relates to others through this perspective. Levinas's concepts are critically discussed by reading these alongside Jacques Lacan and Adam Smith, which enable observations (...) to be made about Levinas's concept of the Same and about the difference he effects between human and the nonhuman. It is concluded that it can be easy to misread Levinas in key respects in ways that may act to assimilate his thought to egoism. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Mandeville's primary purpose in The Fable of the Bees was to historicize the concept of self?love (amour?propre) articulated by seventeenth?century French Jansenists and moralistes; that in doing so Mandeville constructed a theory designed to explain the inter?subjective constraints and forces of social discipline which characterize commercial societies; and that a full understanding of Mandeville's achievement depends upon an appreciation of the way in which pride in his theory becomes socialized into hypocrisy at a (...) decisive moment in the civilizing process, a moment after which, Mandeville argues, cultural institutions themselves can contain that unfettered self?interest which his contemporaries fearfully associated with the triumph of commerce. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the context and significance of the first instalment of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature , Books One and Two, on the understanding and on the passions, published in 1739 without Book Three. I argue that Books One and Two taken together should be read as addressing the question of the relation between reason and passion, and place Hume's discussion in the context of a large early modern philosophical literature on the topic. Hume's goal is (...) to show that the passions do not require government by reason, and to illustrate various ways in which the passions of social beings regulate themselves. The underlying theme of the first Treatise is thus a new theory of sociability: sympathetic sociability. (shrink)

The last few years have seen the emergence of a more political, ‘post-Derridean’ generation, critical of the impotent messianism of the politics of deconstruction. As Žižek would have it: ‘Derrida's notion of ‘deconstruction as ethics’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the spectre of ‘infinite justice’, forever postponed, always to come’ (Žižek 2008: 225). The promise of redemption, it follows, would reside in an insubstantial promissory value, in the writing of irredeemable cheques that, if cashed in, could (...) only ever lead to default. With its ethos of play and over-investment in an empty promise, deconstruction starts to look symptomatic of the now-bankrupt age of excess. Does the current financial crisis not entail a crisis of Derrida? This reading contrives to elide what is genuinely political in Derrida, and thereby fails to recognise the deconstruction of economic theodicy implicit in his work. Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the concept of sacrifice is irreducibly linked to the short-circuiting of the political. We see in Derrida, however, that sacrifice is at the heart of politics, a response to undecidability that is precisely opposed to the fantasy of economics without sacrifice. Furthermore, sacrificial politics is the condition of possibility of the promise, which is constructed and contingent, rather than a priori. If there is a problem with this, it is that Derrida does not sufficiently entertain the prospect of the promise becoming so distant as to be effectively meaningless. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, this article argues for an expansion of Derrida's account, to show not only that politics is sacrifice, but moreover that the promise of redemption cannot live on in the absence of sacrifice. (shrink)

In including a well-regulated pride among the virtues that are both useful and agreeable to oneself, Hume challenges not only theological, but also secular accounts that view pride as a vice. I examine Hume's evolving views on pride in relation to the secular view that regards pride as vicious. I suggest Hume's account of pride in his later moral philosophy has a new emphasis on dignity, and reflects a distinctively modern outlook on the role of humanity in evaluating virtue and (...) vice. (shrink)

In view of the scope and scale of the latest scandals, e.g. Enron's maximum breaking bankruptcy, the re-discovery of ethics in business has received an impressive boost. By now even car salesmen have written ethics, a Code of Conduct, e.g. in the USA or Poland. But there is no clear aim of the role ethics obtains in organizational settings as we may show in some small cases of practical approaches to deal with ethics in organizations. We discuss how ethics is (...) the prerequisite to conduct any business and what advantages may be realized if a clear set of ethics is followed. We will discuss three practical examples. In cases of ethics-based values-added management of Siemens (Germany), Boeing (U.S.) and SAP (Germany) we explain the mechanisms of ethics in management to strengthen organizational success. We emphasize the importance of clear ethics-related communication processes in organizations. We explain the use of communication theories inside organizational processes to clarify communication about such an abstract topic as ethics. Finally, we point out how a management of ethical ideas and cultural values should be designed in business enterprises. (shrink)

Adam Smith is usually thought to argue that the result of everyone pursuing their own interests will be the maximization of the interests of society. The invisible hand of the free market will transform the individual''s pursuit of gain into the general utility of society. This is the invisible hand argument.Many people, although Smith did not, draw a moral corollary from this argument, and use it to defend the moral acceptability of pursuing one''s own self-interest.

Recent trends in Cognitive Ethics have emphasized the conceptual debts with the development of the Science of Human Nature in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The paper deals mainly with two major theoretical approaches in the cognitive revolution, that is possible to offer an explanation of the cognitive mechanisms involved in moral decision processes in terms of abstract principles allegedly embedded in human nature; and that there might be substantive reasons to assume a moral faculty to account for the (...) capacity to issue a potential infinite number of considered moral judgments. (shrink)

This article analyses how Rousseau's First Discourse and the questions it posed about human progress and the reform of society were debated in the institutional context of the Berlin Academy by Formey and Herder. Despite some important disagreements, Formey and Herder fundamentally shared Rousseau's assumption that erudition could be detrimental both to society and to the individual. In order to limit the socially corrosive effects of the arts and the sciences, and in an attempt to realize their full beneficent potential, (...) they called for their reform through institutional regulation and management by a meritocracy of scholarly experts. Drawing on Hume, Herder in particular developed a positive role for the modern state as an active agent of enlightenment, provided it not only promoted the arts and sciences but also guaranteed freedom and the rule of law to ensure their flourishing. (shrink)

Starting from MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, we investigate several codes of conduct of banks to identify the type of virtues that are needed to realize their mission. Based on this analysis, we define three core virtues: honesty, due care, and accuracy. We compare and contrast these codes of conduct with the actual behavior of banks that led to the credit crisis and find that in some cases banks did not behave according to the moral standards they set themselves. However, although banks (...) and the professionals working in them can be blamed for what they did, one should also acknowledge that the institutional context of the free market economy in which they operated made it difficult to live up to the core values lying at the basis of the codes of conduct. Given the neo-liberal free market system, innovative and risky strategies to enhance profits are considered desirable for the sake of shareholder’s interests. A return to the core virtues in the financial sector will therefore only succeed if a renewed sense of responsibility in the sector is supported by institutional changes that allow banks to put their mission into practice. (shrink)

Due to several recent scandals, Business Ethics is now firmly embraced. Whereas in the 1980s and early 1990s there were serious doubts expressed about combining ethics and business, the link now seems to have become self-evident. Fundamental questions about the tensions between business and ethics however continue to receive little attention. In this paper, based upon a debate concerning the Fair Trade company, the strains between business and ethics are analyzed. The article shows how several great thinkers have already considered (...) this tension. Three ways to conceptualize the tension between business and ethics have been distinguished, and these are outlined in the paper. In one approach, ethical entrepreneurship, value tensions are perceived as a source for entrepreneurship. However, this approach presupposes pluralistic ethics. Thinking only in terms of black and white is seen as blocking the ability to adequately handle the tension between business and ethics. Opting for ‘‘ethical entrepreneurship’’, as by Fair Trade, has fundamental and important consequences for the company’s communication policy. (shrink)

Adam Smith's lectures present a bleak theory of history in which the innate human results in the perpetuation of increasingly repressive slave societies. This theory challenges common conceptions about the philosophical and historical foundations of Smith's thought, and accounting for it requires moving beyond traditional dichotomies between an sphere grounded on asocial wants and a sphere grounded on sociability. For Smith, under the influence of earlier thinkers like La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, and Rousseau, all human behavior is rooted in our esteem-seeking (...) social nature, and the dominant form of esteem-seeking is a one based on external superiority. Understanding these foundations explains why Smith views both European commercial society and its central motive of economic self-interest as historically contingent, the product of a long series of unintended historical consequences. (shrink)

This essay traces the interlinked origins of two concepts found in Charles Darwin's writings: "unconscious selection," and sexual selection as applied to humanity's anatomical race distinctions. Unconscious selection constituted a significant elaboration of Darwin's artificial selection analogy. As originally conceived in his theoretical notebooks, that analogy had focused exclusively on what Darwin later would call "methodical selection," the calculated production of desired changes in domestic breeds. By contrast, unconscious selection produced its results unintentionally and at a much slower pace. Inspiration (...) for this concept likely came from Darwin's early reading of works on both animal breeding and physical ethnology. Texts in these fields described the slow and unplanned divergence of anatomical types, whether animal or human, under the guidance of contrasting ideals of physical perfection. These readings, it is argued, also led Darwin to his theory of sexual selection as applied to race, a theme he discussed mainly in his book The Descent of Man. There Darwin described how the racial version of sexual selection operated on the same principle as unconscious selection. He thereby effectively reunited these kindred concepts. (shrink)

Starting from MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, we investigate several codes of conduct of banks to identify the type of virtues that are needed to realize their mission. Based on this analysis, we define three core virtues: honesty, due care, and accuracy. We compare and contrast these codes of conduct with the actual behavior of banks that led to the credit crisis and find that in some cases banks did not behave according to the moral standards they set themselves. However, although banks (...) and the professionals working in them can be blamed for what they did, one should also acknowledge that the institutional context of the free market economy in which they operated made it difficult to live up to the core values lying at the basis of the codes of conduct. Given the neo-liberal free market system, innovative and risky strategies to enhance profits are considered desirable for the sake of shareholder’s interests. A return to the core virtues in the financial sector will therefore only succeed if a renewed sense of responsibility in the sector is supported by institutional changes that allow banks to put their mission into practice. (shrink)

This paper discusses Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) conception of governability. It grounds his key distinction between a submissive and a governable subject in terms of his alternative account of human sociability to demonstrate the nature and structure of relationships that are necessary for upholding stable and flourishing societies. Using Sir William Temple as an interlocutor (1628–1699), it also explores the role played by the cultivation of reverence to authority in Mandeville's analysis of governability.

Next SectionBiodefence, broadly understood as efforts to prevent or mitigate the damage of a bioterrorist attack, raises a number of ethical issues, from the allocation of scarce biomedical research and public health funds, to the use of coercion in quarantine and other containment measures in the event of an outbreak. In response to the US bioterrorist attacks following September 11, significant US policy decisions were made to spur scientific enquiry in the name of biodefence. These decisions led to a number (...) of critical institutional changes within the US federal government agencies governing scientific research. Subsequent science policy discussions have focused largely on ‘the dual use problem’: how to preserve the openness of scientific research while preventing research undertaken for the prevention or mitigation of biological threats from third parties. We join others in shifting the ethical debate over biodefence away from a simple framing of the problem as one of dual use, by demonstrating how a dual use framing distorts the debate about bioterrorism and truncates discussion of the moral issues. We offer an alternative framing rooted in social epistemology and institutional design theory, arguing that the ethical and policy debates regarding ‘dual use’ biomedical research ought to be reframed as a larger optimisation problem across a plurality of values including, among others: (1) the production of scientific knowledge; (2) the protection of human and animal subjects; (3) the promotion and protection of public health (national and global); (4) freedom of scientific enquiry; and (5) the constraint of government power. (shrink)

In this article we discuss whether it pays to invest ethically. Our aim is to examine corporate social responsibility from philosophical, moral and practical points of views. We focus on two main issues related to ethical investments. Firstly we discuss the moral dilemma of how capitalism has changed its shape in today's world and from 'blaming the business' there is a general attempt to use the markets to promote ethics values and corporate social responsibility. Secondly, we analyze the growth of (...) ethical investment funds in the UK today, and their performance, and highlight some of the institutional investors involved in the management of ethical funds. We discuss whether ethical investments really succeed in reducing the conflict between profit-making and social responsibility as they promise or whether they use commercial rhetoric and market mechanism to merely sell us our own perceived values back. We conclude that the paper has a key contribution in setting the scene for future research in an area that is evolving and of fundamental importance to companies, investors and various stakeholder groups. (shrink)

A horseshoe is regarded as a lucky, perhaps even romantic, symbol of our industrial heritage. Why is it, then, that much of English literature, from Mandeville's ‘Grumbling Hive’ on, portrays business in a murky light? The paper begins with an analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that it is the institutionalisation and legitimisation of avarice and its consequential effects that gives rise to such a portrayal. A horseshoe has also been used as a convenient means of conceptualising an answer to (...) the questions this conclusion raises: ‘Who should control the corporation and for what ends?’ (Mintzberg 1985) and discussing recent developments in corporate social responsibility. Drawing on research evidence the paper demonstrates how corporations are simultaneously under pressure from society and responding to its concerns. The paper concludes that these current developments can at best ameliorate the situation, and that what is necessary is to rediscover the notion of corporate virtue, instead of putting virtue at the service of vice. (shrink)

Tocqueville’s incomplete, conflicted reflections on whether honor and war have been safely consigned to the past should alert us to the psychological, not merely sociological, difficulty of adjusting to modernity. His thoughts about memory suggest that one form of adjustment is the attempt to re‐enchant the world. Among such attempts are both the European ideologies that have spread to the Middle East—nationalism, communism, and fascism—and religious fundamentalism. The latter, in particular, responds not only to the loss of premodern enchantment, but (...) to the complexity that makes the modern world so chaotically contingent and changeable—deepening the allure of simple precepts, imposed from above, experienced directly, and adhered to inflexibly. (shrink)