According to Marin Cureau de La Chambre—steering a middleway between the Aristotelian and the Cartesian conception of the soul—everything that lives cognizes and everything that cognizes is alive. Cureau sticks with the general tripart distinction of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul. Each part of the soul has its own cognition. Cognition is the way in which living beings regulate bodily equilibirum and environmental navigation. This regulative activity is gouverned by acquired or by innate images. Natural cognition (or instinct) is cognition (...) by innate images only. Cureau develops a highly originel theory of natural (or 'specialized') instinct. His theory attempts to explain five features of instinct (innateness, specialization, species-specifitiy, coerciveness, teleological nature). According to my interpretation, Cureau proposes a species of what is called a 'teleosemantic theory' of innate cognition. (shrink)

Jacob Viner introduced the term ‘sub-rational’ to characterize the faculties – human instinct, sentiment and intuition – that fall between animal instinct and full-blown reason. The Scots considered sympathy both an affective and a physiological link between mind and body, and by natural history, they traced the most foundational societal institutions – language and law, money and property – to a sub-rational origin. Their ‘social evolutionism’ anticipated Darwin's ‘dangerous idea’ that humans differ from the lower animals only in degree, not (...) in kind. Darwin had the ability to ‘trade places in the imagination’, as Adam Smith would say, with plants and animals, and ‘think’ as they do. The trend today is to ‘positivize,’ ‘behaviorize’ and otherwise reduce the sub-rational to the purely biological. My suggestion is that we trade places in the imagination with the Scottish moral scientists and Darwin, and try thinking as they did. (shrink)

Recent theories on cognitive science have stressed the significance of moral intuition as a counter to and complementary part of moral reasoning in decision making. Thus, the aim of this paper is to create an integrated framework that can account for both intuitive and reflective cognitive processes, in order to explore the antecedents of ethical decision making. To do that, we build on Scholasticism, an important medieval school of thought from which descends the main pillars of the modern Catholic social (...) doctrine. Particularly, the focus will be on the scholastic concept of synderesis, which is an innate human faculty that constantly inclines decision makers toward universal moral principles. Managerial implications are discussed, stressing how a rediscovery of decision makers’ intuitive moral judgments could be relevant in the reflective thinking practice of managers’ ethical reasoning, thus saving them from rational insensitivity to ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Contrary to the view that Francis Hutcheson attempted to expound, defend, and further develop the philosophical system described in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, some contemporaries of Hutcheson considered Hutcheson's differences from Shaftesbury to be at least as profound as the similarities. The clearest descriptions of those differences can be found in William Leechman's preface to Hutcheson's 1755 System of Moral Philosophy, and more elaborately in a review of Hutcheson's System, probably by Hugh Blair, published in the 1755 Edinburgh Review. Examining Shaftesbury's and (...) Hutcheson's moral philosophies in light of these two descriptions reveals that Shaftesbury's defense of virtue as natural to human beings, while a plausible response to Locke, clearly did not escape Hutcheson's censure of Epicurean egoism. (shrink)

Today’s globalized economy cannot be governed by legal strictures alone. A combination of self-interest and regulation is not enough to avoid the recurrence of its systemic crises. We also need virtues and a sense of corporate responsibility in order to assure the sustained success of the global economy. Yet whose virtues shall prevail in a pluralistic world? The moral theory of Thomas Aquinas meets the present need for a business ethics that transcends the legal realm by linking the ideas of (...) justice and virtue in an ingenious way. While allowing for, and incorporating, the specificities of region and religion, industry and culture, Thomas’s virtue theory coordinates private and public activities through a set of context-invariant, justice-oriented norms with conceptual appeal to contemporary questions of global business ethics.In our article, we first sketch how Aquinas’s theory can be also of relevance to a non-confessional audience through its appeal to the ‘natural light of reason.’ Then we explain how his theory of ‘natural law’ aligns his ideas of virtue and justice. From this vantage point, we address the tension between cultural diversity and moral uniformity in the economic sphere in general and in today’s globalized business world in particular. Throughout the article, we aim to show that by interpreting the virtue-dimension of business in light of the idea of social justice, Aquinas’s conception of virtuous business conduct gains inter-personal and inter-cultural validity that establishes social justice as the global virtue of business. (shrink)

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology provoked a great controversy, for in that work Wilson claimed that ethics was rooted in human biology. On the first page of the book, he asserted that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved via natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural environment. In 1998, the publication of Wilson's Consilience renewed the (...) controversy, as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments.Footnotes* I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation for a research grant that supported the writing of this essay. (shrink)