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  1. Justice Failure: Efficiency and Equality in Business Ethics.Abraham Singer - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 149 (1):97-115.
    This paper offers the concept of “justice failure,” as a counterpart to the familiar idea of market failure, in order to better understand managers’ ethical obligations. This paper takes the “market failures approach” to business ethics as its point of departure. The success of the MFA, I argue, lies in its close proximity with economic theory, particularly in the idea that, within a larger scheme of social cooperation, markets ought to pursue efficiency and leave the pursuit of equality to the (...)
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  • The Implicit Morality of the Market and Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics.Marc A. Cohen & Dean Peterson - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 159 (1):75-88.
    Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is (...)
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  • When will a Darwinian approach be useful for the study of society?Samuel Bagg - 2017 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (3):259-281.
    In recent years, some have claimed that a Darwinian perspective will revolutionize the study of human society and culture. This project is viewed with disdain and suspicion, on the other hand, by many practicing social scientists. This article seeks to clear the air in this heated debate by dissociating two claims that are too often assumed to be inseparable. The first is the ‘ontological’ claim that Darwinian principles apply, at some level of abstraction, to human society and culture. The second (...)
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  • Corporate Accountability. Not Moral Responsibility.David Rönnegard - 2024 - Journal of Human Values 30 (1):32-37.
    The aim of this article is to briefly spell out why corporate moral agency is a fallacy and to show how this conclusion should shift the field of business ethics more in the direction of political philosophy and the rule of law. An argument based on a false assumption can be valid, but it cannot be sound. If corporate moral agency is a fallacy, and thus also moral prescriptions for corporations, how do we salvage the field of business ethics? To (...)
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  • A Lie Is a Lie: The Ethics of Lying in Business Negotiations.Charles N. C. Sherwood - 2022 - Business Ethics Quarterly 32 (4):604-634.
    I argue that lying in business negotiations is pro tanto wrong and no less wrong than lying in other contexts. First, I assert that lying in general is pro tanto wrong. Then, I examine and refute five arguments to the effect that lying in a business context is less wrong than lying in other contexts. The common thought behind these arguments—based on consent, self-defence, the “greater good,” fiduciary duty, and practicality—is that the particular circumstances which are characteristic of business negotiations (...)
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  • What’s the Point of Efficiency? On Heath’s Market Failures Approach.Richard Endörfer & Louis Larue - 2024 - Business Ethics Quarterly 34 (1):35 - 59.
    This article reviews and criticizes Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Our criticism is organized into three sections. First, we argue that, even under the ideal assumptions of perfect competition, when markets generate Pareto-efficient distributions, Heath’s approach does not rule out significant harms. Second, we show that, under nonideal conditions, the MFA is either too demanding, if efficiency is to be attained, or not sufficiently demanding, if the goal of Pareto efficiency is abandoned. Finally, we argue that (...)
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  • Responsible Innovation in Business: A critical reflection on deliberative engagement as a central governance mechanism.T. Brand & Vincent Blok - 2019 - Journal of Responsible Innovation 1 (6):4-24.
    One of the main contentions of the framework for Responsible Innovation (RI) is that social and ethical aspects have to be addressed by deliberative engagement with stakeholders and the wider public throughout the innovation process. The aim of this article is to reflect on the question to what extent is deliberative engagement suitable for conducting RI in business. We discuss several tensions that arise when this framework is applied in the business context. Further, we analyse the place of deliberative engagement (...)
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  • Crisis Prices: The Ethics of Market Controls during a Global Pandemic.Kobi Finestone & Ewan Kingston - 2022 - Business Ethics Quarterly 32 (1):12-40.
    SARS-CoV-2 has unleashed an unprecedented global crisis that has caused the demand for essential goods, such as medical and sanitation products, to soar while simultaneously disrupting the very supply chains that allow individuals and institutions to obtain those essential goods. This has resulted in stark price increases and accusations of price gouging. We survey the existing philosophical literature that examines price gouging and identify the key arguments for regulators permitting such behavior and for regulators restricting such behavior. We demonstrate how (...)
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  • (1 other version)Food Vendor Beware! On Ordinary Morality and Unhealthy Marketing.Tjidde Tempels, Vincent Blok & Marcel Verweij - 2019 - Food Ethics 5 (1):1-21.
    Food and beverage firms are frequently criticised for their impact on the spread of non-communicable diseases like obesity and diabetes type 2. In this article we explore under what conditions the sales and marketing of unhealthy food and beverage products is irresponsible. Starting from the notion of ordinary morality we argue that firms have a duty to respect people’s autonomy and adhere to the principle of non-maleficence in both market and non-market environments. We show how these considerations are relevant when (...)
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  • Recovering the Logic of Double Effect for Business: Intentions, Proportionality, and Impermissible Harms.Rosemarie Monge & Nien-hê Hsieh - 2020 - Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (3):361-387.
    ABSTRACTBusiness actors often act in ways that may harm other parties. While the law aims to restrict harmful behavior and to provide remedies, legal systems do not anticipate all contingencies and legal regulations are not always well-enforced. This article argues that the logic of double effect, which has been developed and deployed in other areas of practical ethics, can be useful in helping business actors decide whether or not to pursue potentially harmful activities in commonplace business activity. The article illustrates (...)
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  • Big Data and Personalized Pricing.Etye Steinberg - 2019 - Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (1):97-117.
    ABSTRACT:Technological advances introduce the possibility that, in the future, firms will be able to use big-data analysis to discover and offer consumers their individual reservation price. This can generate some interesting benefits, such as a better state of affairs in terms of equality of both welfare and resources, as well as increased social welfare. However, these benefits are countered by considerations of relational equality. This article takes up the market-failures approach as its basis to demonstrate what is wrong with using (...)
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  • Stakeholder Dialogue as Agonistic Deliberation: Exploring the Role of Conflict and Self-Interest in Business-NGO Interaction.Teunis Brand, Vincent Blok & Marcel Verweij - 2020 - Business Ethics Quarterly 30 (1):3-30.
    ABSTRACT:Many companies engage in dialogue with nongovernmental organizations about societal issues. The question is what a regulative ideal for such dialogues should be. In the literature on corporate social responsibility, the Habermasian notion of communicative action is often presented as a regulative ideal for stakeholder dialogue, implying that actors should aim at consensus and set strategic considerations aside. In this article, we argue that in many cases, communicative action is not a suitable regulative ideal for dialogue between companies and NGOs. (...)
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  • Weeding Out Flawed Versions of Shareholder Primacy: A Reflection on the Moral Obligations That Carry Over from Principals to Agents.Santiago Mejia - 2019 - Business Ethics Quarterly 29 (4):519-544.
    ABSTRACT:The distinction between what I call nonelective obligations and discretionary obligations, a distinction that focuses on one particular thread of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, helps us to identify the obligations that carry over from principals to agents. Clarity on this issue is necessary to identify the moral obligations within “shareholder primacy”, which conceives of managers as agents of shareholders. My main claim is that the principal-agent relation requires agents to fulfill nonelective obligations, but it does not always (...)
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  • Beyond market, firm, and state: Mapping the ethics of global value chains.Abraham A. Singer & Hamish van der Ven - 2019 - Business and Society Review 124 (3):325-343.
    The growth of global value chains (GVCs) and the emergence of novel forms of value chain governance pose two questions for normative business ethics. First, how should we conceptualize the relationships between members of a GVC? Second, what ethical implications follow from these relationships, both with respect to interactions between GVC members and with respect to achieving broader transnational governance goals? We address these questions by examining the emergence of transnational eco-labeling as an increasingly prominent form of GVC governance that (...)
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  • On the Origin, Content, and Relevance of the Market Failures Approach.Jeffrey Moriarty - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 165 (1):113-124.
    The view of business ethics that Christopher McMahon calls the “implicit morality of the market” and Joseph Heath calls the “market failures approach” has received a significant amount of recent attention. The idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the “point” of market activity, and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized. While this view has been much-discussed, it is still not well-understood. (...)
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  • State Power: Rethinking the Role of the State in Political Corporate Social Responsibility.Judith Schrempf-Stirling - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 150 (1):1-14.
    Key accomplishments of political corporate social responsibility scholarship have been the identification of global governance gaps and a proposal how to tackle them. Political CSR scholarship assumes that the traditional roles of state and business have eroded, with states losing power and business gaining power in a globalized world. Consequently, the future of CSR lies in political CSR with new global governance forms which are organized by mainly non-state actors. The objective of the paper is to deepen our understanding of (...)
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  • The Inapplicability of the Market-Failures Approach in a Non-Ideal World.Etye Steinberg - 2017 - Business Ethics Journal Review 5 (5):28-34.
    Joseph Heath (2014) argues that the contribution of competitive markets to Pareto-efficiency generates moral constraints that apply to business managers. Heath argues that ethical behavior on the part of management consists in avoiding profit-seeking strategies which, under conditions of perfect competition, would decrease Pareto-efficiency. I argue that because (1) such conditions do not obtain; and (2) the most efficient result – under imperfect conditions – is not achieved by satisfying the largest possible set of the remaining conditions; it is (3) (...)
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  • Professionalism, Agency, and Market Failures.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2016 - Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (4):445-464.
    According to the Market Failures Approach to business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have a professional duty not to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, namely the competitive market. This answer (...)
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  • Capitalism, Corporations and the Social Contract: A Critique of Stakeholder Theory, by Samuel Mansell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 198 pp. ISBN: 9781107015524. [REVIEW]Pierre-Yves Néron - 2015 - Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (3):393-396.
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  • Order Ethics: Bridging the Gap Between Contractarianism and Business Ethics.Christoph Luetge, Thomas Armbrüster & Julian Müller - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 136 (4):687-697.
    Contract-based approaches have been a focus of attention in business ethics. As one of the grand traditions in political philosophy, contractarianism is founded on the notion that we will never resolve deep moral disagreement. Classical philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, or recent ones like Rawls and Gaus, seek to solve ethical conflicts on the level of social rules and procedures. Recent authors in business ethics have sought to utilize contract-based approaches for their field and to apply it to concrete business (...)
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  • The Contained-Rivalry Requirement and a 'Triple Feature' Program for Business Ethics.Dominic Martin - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 115 (1):167-182.
    This paper proposes a description of the moral obligations of economic agents. It will show that a threefold division should be adopted to distinguish moral obligations applying to their interactions in the market, obligations applying to their interactions inside business firms and obligations applying to their interactions with agents outside the market. Competition might be permissible in the first case since markets are special patterns of social interactions (called adversarial schemes). They produce their benefits when agents try to satisfy exclusive (...)
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  • Artificial intelligence ethics has a black box problem.Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, Erica Monteferrante, Marie-Christine Roy & Vincent Couture - 2023 - AI and Society 38 (4):1507-1522.
    It has become a truism that the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary and must help guide technological developments. Numerous ethical guidelines have emerged from academia, industry, government and civil society in recent years. While they provide a basis for discussion on appropriate regulation of AI, it is not always clear how these ethical guidelines were developed, and by whom. Using content analysis, we surveyed a sample of the major documents (_n_ = 47) and analyzed the accessible information regarding (...)
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  • Rawlsian Institutionalism and Business Ethics: Does It Matter Whether Corporations Are Part of the Basic Structure of Society?Brian Berkey - 2021 - Business Ethics Quarterly 31 (2):179-209.
    In this article, I aim to clarify some key issues in the ongoing debate about the relationship between Rawlsian political philosophy and business ethics. First, I discuss precisely what we ought to be asking when we consider whether corporations are part of the “basic structure of society.” I suggest that the relevant questions have been mischaracterized in much of the existing debate, and that some key distinctions have been overlooked. I then argue that although Rawlsian theory’s potential implications for business (...)
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  • (1 other version)Correction to: Food Vendor Beware! On Ordinary Morality and Unhealthy Marketing.Marcel Verweij, Vincent Blok & Tjidde Tempels - 2019 - Food Ethics 5 (1-2):1-21.
    The title of the article in the initial online publication was mixed up with copy editing information. The original article has been corrected.
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  • The Responsibilities and Role of Business in Relation to Society: Back to Basics?Nien-hê Hsieh - 2017 - Business Ethics Quarterly 27 (2):293-314.
    ABSTRACT:In this address, I outline a “back to basics” approach to specifying the responsibilities and role of business in relation to society. Three “basics” comprise the approach. The first is arguing that basic principles of ordinary morality, such as a duty not to harm, provide an adequate basis for specifying the responsibilities of business managers. The second is framing the role of business in society by looking to the values realized by the basic building blocks of contemporary economic activity, i.e., (...)
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  • An Absurd Tax on our Fellow Citizens: The Ethics of Rent Seeking in the Market Failures (or Self-Regulation) Approach.Peter Martin Jaworski - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 121 (3):1-10.
    Joseph Heath lumps in quotas and protectionist measures with cartelization, taking advantage of information asymmetries, seeking a monopoly position, and so on, as all instances of behavior that can lead to market failures in his market failures approach to business ethics. The problem is that this kind of rent and rent seeking, when they fail to deliver desirable outcomes, are better described as government failure. I suggest that this means we will have to expand Heath’s framework to a market and (...)
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  • AI, Radical Ignorance, and the Institutional Approach to Consent.Etye Steinberg - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (3):1-26.
    More and more, we face AI-based products and services. Using these services often requires our explicit consent, e.g., by agreeing to the services’ Terms and Conditions clause. Current advances introduce the ability of AI to evolve and change its own modus operandi over time in such a way that we cannot know, at the moment of consent, what it is in the future to which we are now agreeing. Therefore, informed consent is impossible regarding certain kinds of AI. Call this (...)
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  • Exploring the role of self-awareness, self-integrity, self-regulation, and ethics education in the student’s ethics compliance: evidence from Indonesia.Blasius Erik Sibarani - forthcoming - International Journal of Ethics Education:1-23.
    This study aims to investigate the influence of self-awareness on students’ ethical compliance, examine the impact of self-integrity on students’ ethical compliance, explore the effect of self-regulation on students’ ethical compliance, and analyze the influence of ethics education on students’ ethical compliance. Additionally, the research investigates whether ethics education taught in schools or universities has a greater impact compared to an individual’s personality on students’ ethical compliance. The population in this study comprises students in Indonesia. Data collection involves distributing questionnaires (...)
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  • Are Business Ethics Effective? A Market Failures Approach to Impact Investing.Rodney Schmidt - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 184 (2):505-524.
    We evaluate the effectiveness of impact investing from the perspective of the market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Under the MFA, businesses are ethically obligated to contribute to market efficiency by mitigating market failures. The MFA ethics literature emphasizes a negative externality interpretation of market failures, with ethical practice as self-regulation. We argue that the MFA also obligates businesses, and investors, to produce positive externalities, a form of private provision of public goods. We develop a graphical MFA ethical framework (...)
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  • Pay Secrecy, Discrimination, and Autonomy.Matthew Caulfield - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 171 (2):399-420.
    A question facing nearly all private firms is whether they may keep employee pay secret. Many think it is obvious that firms are obligated to disclose a good deal of pay information once we properly appreciate the severity of pay discrimination in our economy and the autonomy-related interests that would be served by pay disclosure. This article puts forth a dissenting voice against the vast majority of recent commentary. It exploits a fissure between reasons we have to support certain coercive (...)
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  • Rawls on Markets and Corporate Governance.Wayne Norman - 2015 - Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (1):29-64.
    ABSTRACT:Like most egalitarian political philosophers, John Rawls believes that a just society will rely on markets and business firms for much of its economic activity—despite acknowledging that market systems will tend to create very unequal distributions of goods, opportunities, power, and status. Rawls himself remains one of the few contemporary political philosophers to explore at any length the way an egalitarian theory of justice might deal with fundamental options in political economy. This article examines his arguments and conclusions on these (...)
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  • Beyond market, firm, and state: Mapping the ethics of global value chains.Abraham A. Singer & Hamish Ven - 2019 - Business and Society Review 124 (3):325-343.
    The growth of global value chains (GVCs) and the emergence of novel forms of value chain governance pose two questions for normative business ethics. First, how should we conceptualize the relationships between members of a GVC? Second, what ethical implications follow from these relationships, both with respect to interactions between GVC members and with respect to achieving broader transnational governance goals? We address these questions by examining the emergence of transnational eco‐labeling as an increasingly prominent form of GVC governance that (...)
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  • Moving Beyond Market Failure: When the Failure is Government’s.Peter Jaworski - 2013 - Business Ethics Journal Review:1-6.
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  • Deliberative Democracy and Corporate Constitutionalism: Considering Corporate Constitutional Courts.Sandrine Blanc - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 188 (1):1-15.
    Committees multiply in firms, whether stakeholder boards or committees, multi-stakeholder initiatives, ethics committees, or oversight boards. These arrangements aim to organise and legitimise the social and political activities of corporations. This article raises the question of the appropriate form of such governance structures. The examples above illustrate three possible ways of legitimising corporate quasi-public social and political activities: deliberation within the company, deliberation outside, and an approach we label _corporate constitutionalism_. While the first two models have been tested in practice (...)
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  • The corporation's governmental provenance and its significance.Abraham A. Singer - 2019 - Economics and Philosophy 35 (2):283-306.
    :Corporations cannot exist, scholars rightly note, without being constituted by government. However, many take a further step, claiming that corporations are normatively distinct from other market actors because of this governmental provenance. They are mistaken. Like corporations, markets and contracts also require government for their creation. Governmental provenance does not distinguish corporations normatively because our coercive social institutions are pro tanto justified in re-arranging both corporate and non-corporate market activities on behalf of social and political values. The corporation is distinct (...)
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  • Rethinking the Ethics of Corporate Political Activities in a Post-Citizens United Era: Political Equality, Corporate Citizenship, and Market Failures.Pierre-Yves Néron - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 136 (4):715-728.
    The aim of this paper is to provide some insights for a normative theory of corporate political activities. Such a theory aims to provide theoretical tools to investigate the legitimacy of corporate political involvement and allows us to determine which political activities and relations with government regulators are appropriate or inappropriate, permissible or impermissible, obligatory or forbidden for corporations. After having explored what I call the “normative presumption of legitimacy” of CPAs, this paper identifies three different plausible strategies to criticize (...)
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  • Role of collective and personal virtues in corporate citizenship and business success: a mixed method approach.Jayalakshmy Ramachandran, Geetha Subramaniam, Angelina Seow Voon Yee & Vanitha Ponnusamy - 2022 - Asian Journal of Business Ethics 11 (1):55-83.
    Organisational leaders mismanaging business affairs are guided by performance pressures and/or greed while pressurising employees to follow. Unethical activities have led to stakeholder losses, with no accountability by individuals perpetuating the fraud. Corporate governance frameworks and subsequent reforms have been used merely as tick box measures, proving them inefficient in numerous corporate collapses. This study intends to explore and analyse the roles of personal and collective virtues in corporate citizenship. Developing from the virtues theory and using a mixed method of (...)
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  • Dispute Resolution as an Ethical Phantasm.Bart Jansen - 2021 - Philosophy of Management 20 (3):293-306.
    Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is a collective noun for all kinds of alternative methods to formal dispute resolution. Business ethics attempts to theorize the different forms of normative coordination of corporate acts that remain within the lifeworld and outside the formal sphere of the legal system. In this context, business ethics could offer a positive approach to ADR, as ADR would be an effective, practical form of casuistry ethics. In this manner, concrete conflicts of interest and disagreements between economic actors (...)
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  • A Janus-faced food industry? : ethical reflections on corporate responsibility for health.Tjidde Tempels - 2019 - Dissertation, Wageningen University and Research
    Food-related non-communicable diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are key threats to public health. Yet, the responsibility for food-related health harms is contested. While traditionally viewed as mainly an individual responsibility or a governmental responsibility, fingers are nowadays also pointed at the food and beverage industry, as many firms are producing and marketing unhealthy products that contribute to the rise of obesity and other food-related NCDs. Yet, does the behaviour of the industry and the impact its (...)
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  • Corporate responsibility and the plurality of market aims.Jeffery Smith - 2019 - Business and Society Review 124 (2):183-199.
    A number of recent authors, most notably Joseph Heath, have persausively defended a market‐centered account of corporate responsibility that grounds standards of business conduct upon the normative presuppositions of the market. They have us focus on two important items: first, the value of welfare, or Pareto efficient outcomes, which underwrites the legitimacy of market arrangements; and second, the behavioral requirements needed to assure that corporations conduct business in a manner consistent with this value. This article critically examines the aspirations of (...)
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  • Market Failures and Moral Failures: A Dilemma.Olof Leffler - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (2):153-171.
    I present a dilemma for the market failures approach to business ethics. On an orthodox interpretation, it takes moral requirements for businesses to require them not to profit from market failures to approximate Pareto efficiency. On a moralized interpretation, it also incorporates other considerations. However, the orthodox approach is extensionally inadequate, for it is legitimate to profit from many of the allegedly ruled-out market failures. The moralized approach does better but fails to be sufficiently comprehensive. First, it has not been (...)
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  • Against Paretianism: A Wealth Creation Approach to Business Ethics.Carson Young - 2022 - Business Ethics Quarterly 32 (3):475-501.
    How should we distinguish between ethical and unethical ways of pursuing profit in a market? The market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics purports to provide an answer to this question. I argue that it fails to do so. The source of this failure is the MFA’s reliance on Pareto efficiency as a core ethical principle. Many ethically “preferred” tactics for seeking profit cannot be justified by appeal to Pareto efficiency. One important reason for this is that Pareto efficiency, as (...)
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  • Are Rawlsian Considerations of Corporate Governance Illiberal? A Reply to Singer.Sandrine Blanc - 2016 - Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (3):407-421.
    ABSTRACT:Singer has recently argued that questions related to corporate governance are beyond the reach of Rawls’s political conception of justice. This is because justice applies to the basic structure of society, understood as society’s legally coercive structures, and because corporate governance cannot be considered part of this structure in political liberalism. This commentary challenges the second part of the argument. First, it suggests that the criterion used to exclude corporate governance from the basic structure—whether employees can exit economic organizations—is not (...)
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  • Code Red for Humanity: The Role of Business Ethics as We Transgress Planetary Thresholds.Heidi Rapp Nilsen - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 189 (1):1-7.
    The urgency of the ecological crisis, described as a ‘code red for humanity’, is also a call to the business ethics community to work even harder for a safe space for humanity. This commentary suggests two specific domains of engagement, with the aim of having more impact in mitigating the ecological crisis: (1) the empirical fact of non-negotiable biophysical thresholds to convey the status and severity of the crisis, and (2) the need for strong laws and regulations—and compliance with these—to (...)
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  • Democratic Governance and the Ethics of Market Compliance.David Silver - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 173 (3):525-537.
    The “question of reasonable compliance” concerns how business firms should comply with morally reasonable laws that have been democratically enacted. This article argues that, out of respect for the governing authority of democratic citizens, firms should comply with the law in accordance with legislators’ normative expectations of compliance. It defends this view against arguments from the legal, economic and business ethics literatures that focus on the contentious nature of democracy and the competitive nature of the market. In response this article (...)
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  • The Dawn of the AI Robots: Towards a New Framework of AI Robot Accountability.Zsófia Tóth, Robert Caruana, Thorsten Gruber & Claudia Loebbecke - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 178 (4):895-916.
    Business, management, and business ethics literature pay little attention to the topic of AI robots. The broad spectrum of potential ethical issues pertains to using driverless cars, AI robots in care homes, and in the military, such as Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. However, there is a scarcity of in-depth theoretical, methodological, or empirical studies that address these ethical issues, for instance, the impact of morality and where accountability resides in AI robots’ use. To address this dearth, this study offers a (...)
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  • Can Welfare Economics Justify Corporate Philanthropy? Proposing the Philanthropy Multiplier as a Metric for Evaluating Corporate Philanthropic Expenditures.William English - 2024 - Business Ethics Quarterly 34 (3):440-470.
    Much business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature suggests, implicitly or explicitly, that firms ought to engage in activities that can be characterized as philanthropy, namely, expending resources beyond what is required by law and market norms to promote others’ welfare at the expense of firm profits. However, this literature has struggled to provide a normative framework for evaluating corporate philanthropy, although scholars have noted that such expenditures can potentially remedy market failures and provide public goods more efficiently. I articulate (...)
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  • Navigating Our Way Between Market and State.Jeffery Smith - 2019 - Business Ethics Quarterly 29 (1):127-141.
    ABSTRACT:In this address I argue that different perspectives on the normative foundations of corporate responsibility reflect underlying disagreements about the ideal arrangement of tasks between market and state. I initially recommend that scholars look back to the “division of moral labor” inspired by John Rawls’ seminal work on distributive justice in order to rethink why, and to what extent, corporations take on responsibilities normally within the purview of government. I then examine how this notion is related to recent theoretical work (...)
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  • Is There ‘a Point’ to Markets? A Response to Martin.Wayne Norman - 2014 - Business Ethics Journal Review:22-28.
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  • Rank Has Its Privileges: Explaining Why Laboratory Safety Is a Persistent Challenge.Gokce Basbug, Ayn Cavicchi & Susan S. Silbey - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 184 (3):571-587.
    Environmental, health, and safety management systems have become common in research settings to improve laboratory safety through systematic observation and self-regulation. However, there is scant empirical evidence assessing whether these surveillance and inspection systems meet their intended objectives. Using data from safety inspections in research laboratories at a large university, we investigate whether conducting inspections, and recording and reporting findings back to the formally responsible actors (i.e., principal investigator scientists) lead to the improvement of regulatory compliance. Our analyses identify a (...)
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