Taking organs from dead people seems, prima facie, to raise fewer ethical complications than taking organs from other sources. There are, however, serious ethical problems in taking organs from the dead unless there is premortem evidence that this is what the deceased would have wanted, or at least, not have objected to. In this paper we will look at a “strong” opting out policy as proposed by John Harris. We will argue that people can be harmed after their death and (...) that the posthumous removal of organs against their expressed wishes is one form that such harm might take. We also argue that Harris’s claim that we show “equality of concern” between the donor and recipient requires too much. (shrink)

Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed (...) by Carbonell (2013) that in many real-world circumstances we have moral obligations to develop some skills rather than others. (shrink)

In this paper we explore what sacrifices you are morally required to make to save a child who is about to die in front of you. It has been argued that you would have very demanding duties to save such a child (or any adult who is in similar circumstance through no fault of their own, for that matter), and some examples have been presented to make this claim seem intuitively correct. Against this, we argue that you do not in (...) general have a moral requirement to bear more than moderate cost to save even a child who is just in front of you. Moreover, we explain why you have a much more demanding moral requirement in certain cases by appealing to the notions of undue risk and cost sharing. (shrink)

Chapter 1 of this book argued that moral philosophy should be based on seven principles of theory selection adapted from the sciences. Chapter 2 argued that these principles support basing normative moral philosophy on a particular problem of diachronic instrumental rationality: the ‘problem of possible future selves.’ Chapter 3 argued that a new moral principle, the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative, is the rational solution to this problem. Chapter 4 argued that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative has three equivalent formulations akin to but superior to (...) Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Chapter 5 argued that my principle’s three formulations make it rational to adopt a Moral Original Position to derive moral principles. The present chapter derives Four Principles of Fairness from the Moral Original Position--principles of coercion minimization, mutual assistance, fair negotiation, and virtue—and unifies them into a single principle of rightness: Rightness as Fairness. Finally, this chapter argues that Rightness as Fairness entails a novel approach to applied ethics called ‘principled fair negotiation’, illustrating how the theory provides a plausible new framework for addressing applied cases including lying, suicide, trolleys, torture, distribution of scarce resources, poverty, and the ethical treatment of animals. (shrink)

Price gouging occurs when, in the wake of an emergency, sellers of a certain necessary goods sharply raise their prices beyond the level needed to cover increased costs. Most people think that price gouging is immoral, and most states have laws rendering the practice a civil or criminal offense. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the philosophic issues surrounding price gouging, and to argue that the common moral condemnation of it is largely mistaken. I make this (...) argument in three steps, by rebutting three widely held beliefs about the ethics of price gouging: 1) that laws prohibiting price gouging are morally justified, 2) that price gouging is morally impermissible behavior, even if it ought not be illegal, and 3) that price gouging reflects poorly on the moral character of those who engage in it, even if the act itself is not morally impermissible. (shrink)

In this article I provide a conceptual analysis of an underexplored issue in the debate about effective altruism: its theory of effectiveness. First, I distinguish effectiveness from efficiency and claim that effective altruism understands effectiveness through the lens of efficiency. Then, I discuss the limitations of this approach in particular with respect to the charge that it is incapable of supporting structural change. Finally, I propose an expansion of the notion of effectiveness of effective altruism by referring to the debate (...) in political philosophy about realism and the practical challenge of normative theories. I argue that effective altruism, both as a social movement and as a conceptual paradigm, would benefit from clarifying its ideal, taking into account the role of institutions, and expanding its idea of feasibility. (shrink)

This article argues that whilst the idea of whistleblowing as a positive duty to do good or to prevent harm may be defendable, legislating that duty is not feasible. We develop our argument by identifying rights and duties involved in whistleblowing as two clusters: one of justice and one of benevolence. Legislative arguments have evolved to cover the justice issues and the tendency exists of extending rights and duties into the realm of benevolence. This article considers the problematic assumptions and (...) implications of whistleblowing as a positive duty, by examining the extent to which the Good Samaritan argument holds with regard to whistleblowing. We argue that three criteria necessary for whistleblowing as a legally enforceable positive duty are not met, namely that we need to be able to (1) specify who should know what, (2) minimize the risk to the whistleblower and (3) adequately deal with mistaken concerns being raised. (shrink)

Failures are sometimes, but not always, causally relevant to events. For instance, the failure of the sprinkler was causally relevant to the house fire. However, the failure of the dam upstream to break (thus inundating the house with water) was not. Similarly, failures to prevent harms are sometimes, but not always, morally wrong. For instance, failing to save a nearby drowning child is morally wrong. Yet, you are also in some sense “allowing” someone on another continent to drown right now, (...) and this seems permissible. Here, I argue that these two issues are connected. Roughly, I argue that it is prima facie morally wrong to fail to prevent a particular harm if and only if one’s omission is causally relevant to that harm’s occurrence. The result is that, contrary to what Peter Singer claims, failing to donate to famine relief is not morally equivalent to failing to rescue a drowning child in a shallow pond. (shrink)

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer (...) my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false. (shrink)

Do we have stronger duties to assist in emergencies than in nonemergencies? According to Peter Singer and Peter Unger, we do not. Emergency situations, they suggest, merely serve to make more salient the very extensive duties to assist that we always have. This view, while theoretically simple, appears to imply that we must radically revise common-sense emergency norms. Resisting that implication, theorists like Frances Kamm, Jeremy Waldron, and Larry Temkin suggest that emergencies are indeed normatively exceptional. While their approach is (...) more in line with common-sense, however, it is theoretically less simple, and it is has proven difficult to justify the exception. In this paper we propose a model of emergencies that we call the Informal-Insurance Model, and explain how this can be used to combine theoretical simplicity with common-sense emergency norms. (shrink)

One objection that has been consistently raised for theorists who are committed to the idea that we have a positive duty to aid the global poor is the overdemandingness objection. This article is a critical discussion of this objection. First, the objection is laid out in some detail. A number of influential attempts to meet the overdemandingness objection are then discussed, and it is argued that they all fail in their intended purpose. The conclusion of the article is not that (...) the overdemandingness objection cannot be met. Rather, the conclusion is that the overdemandingness objection constitutes a serious challenge to anyone who accepts the objection and goes beyond the standard libertarian doctrine and commits herself to the existence of positive duties to aid the global poor. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge’s "World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan responsibilities and Reforms" is a seminal contribution to the debate on global justice. In this review paper, I undertake a kind of stock-taking exercise in which the main components of Pogge’s position on global justuce and world poverty are outlined. I then critically discuss some important criticisms of Pogge's position.

In 2004, Garrett Cullity made a significant contribution to the literature on what the world’s relatively affluent owe to the world’s relatively poor through the publishing of The Moral Demands of Affluence. In this discussion note, I draw attention to a logical problem in Cullity’s master argument in favor of the view that affluent individuals are justified in spending monetary resources on themselves at a level that lies well above what Peter Singer finds justified. The proposition I defend is that (...) the premises leading to Cullity’s conclusion about the moderate, and not extremely demanding, nature of his position are inconsistent. These premises license any conclusion, including the negation of the one preferred by Cullity. (shrink)

In the literature on global justice, there has been a lengthy debate about what the world’s rich owe to the world’s poor. Some have argued that rich individuals have positive duties of beneficence to help the poor, while others have argued that rich individuals only have negative duties not to harm them. A common objection to the former view is that once it is accepted that positive duties exist, fulfilling these duties will be overdemanding since rich individuals can almost always (...) help a little more. Some have tried to overcome this overdemandingness objection by setting cut-off points for how demanding morality is. In this article, we aim to show that it is problematic to be committed to the following propositions: (1) Positive duties to aid exist; (2) The overdemandingness objection is a serious challenge for anyone who accepts that positive duties to aid exist; and (3) Setting cut-off points for how demanding morality is constitutes a plausible way to overcome the overdemandingness objection. Showing that a commitment to (1), (2) and (3) is problematic is of interest given that several influential theorists are committed to this set of views. This set of views is simply a bad theoretical cocktail. (shrink)

Faced with endlessly repeated opportunities to save drowning children, most people think morality intuitively permits us to indulge in at least some goods that are not nearly as important as a child’s life. Some philosophers argue that this intuition gives us an important (though defeasible) reason to think we may sometimes permissibly refuse to save a life even when we can do so at insignificant cost. I argue that recent psychological experiments should make us wary of this claim.

Scholars who favor shareholder primacy usually claim either that managers should not fulfill corporate duties of beneficence or that, if they are required to fulfill them, they do so by going against their obligations to shareholders. Distinguishing between structurally different types of duties of beneficence and recognizing the full force of the normative demands imposed on managers reveal that this view needs to be qualified. Although it is correct to think that managers, when acting on behalf of shareholders, are not (...) required to fulfill wide duties of charity, they are nevertheless required to fulfill a variety of narrow duties of beneficence. What is more, the obligation to fulfill these duties arises precisely because they are acting on behalf of shareholders. As such, this article 1) refines our understanding of the duties of corporate beneficence and 2) helps to identify which duties of beneficence are imposed on managers when they are acting on behalf of shareholders. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

One relatively straightforward way in which academics could have more impact on global poverty is by doing more to help people make wise decisions about issues relevant to such poverty. Academics could do this by conducting appropriate kinds of research on those issues and sharing what they have learned with the relevant decision makers in accessible ways. But aren’t academics already doing this? In the case of many of those issues, I think the appropriate answer would be that they could (...) do so much better. As an illustration, I examine the academic input into one decision about an issue concerning global poverty in some detail in this paper. I argue that that input has been seriously deficient, and suggest some ways in which it might be improved. Building on this discussion, I then formulate two questions that can be applied to any such decision, answers to which would indicate the quality of the input academics are currently providing. In cases where that input is deficient, and the decision in question an important one, I suggest that academics consider organising themselves in ways that will improve that input. I finish by briefly discussing how Academics Stand Against Poverty might help them do so. (shrink)

Peter Singer is well known to have argued for our responsibilities to address global poverty based on an analogy with saving a drowning child. Just as the passerby has a duty to save that child, we have a duty to save children ‘drowning’ in poverty. Since its publication, more four decades ago, there have been numerous attempts to grapple with the inescapable moral challenge posed by Singer’s analogy. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the Singerian challenge, through (...) offering a different explanation for why our intuitions about rescuing a threatened person in front of us are more demanding than our intuitions about rescuing those living under equally threatening conditions of poverty. We argue that understanding the underlying motive or mechanism by which people come to endorse intuitions about duties of assistance undermines our confidence in the validity and robustness of some of the highly demanding intuitions that Singer relies on. This, in turn, puts serious limitations on the normative and practical reach of Singer’s analogy. (shrink)

Global poverty is a huge problem in today's world. This survey article seeks to be a first guide to those who are interested in, but relatively unfamiliar with, the main issues, positions and arguments in the contemporary philosophical discussion of global poverty. The article attempts to give an overview of four distinct and influential normative positions on global poverty. Moreover, it seeks to clarify, and put into perspective, some of the key concepts and issues that take center stage in the (...) philosophical discussion of global poverty. The four positions to be discussed are labeled the Maximalist Position, the Minimalist Position, Intermediate Position I and Intermediate Position II. After an account of these four distinct positions, we turn, in the conclusion, to a discussion of what role empirical sciences such as economics and political science should play in normative considerations about global poverty. (shrink)

Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized—namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value. In this article, I critique the basic assumptions of (...) the rescue paradigm, reframe the ethical landscape in which rescue obligations are understood, and defend the necessity and value of a wider social and institutional view. Along the way, I move back and forth between ethical theory and a concrete case where the duty to rescue has been problematically applied: the purported duty to regularly return incidental findings and individual research results in genomic and genetic research. (shrink)

This article examines the relation between policies concerning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and philosophical moral theories. The objective is to determine which moral theories form the basis for CSR policies. Are they based on ethical egoism, libertarianism, utilitarianism or some kind of common-sense morality? In order to address this issue, I conducted an empirical investigation examining the relation between moral theories and CSR policies, in companies engaged in CSR. Based on the empirical data I collected, I start by suggesting some (...) normative arguments used by the respondents. Secondly, I suggest that these moral arguments implicitly rely on some specific moral principles, which I characterise. Thirdly, on the basis of these moral principles, I suggest the moral theories upon which the CSR policies are built. Previous empirical studies examining the relation between philosophical moral theories and the ethical content of business activities have mainly concentrated on the ethical decision-making of managers. Some of the most prominent investigations in that regard propose that managers mainly act in accordance with utilitarian moral theory (Fritzsche, D. J. and H. Becker: 1984 , Academy of Management Journal 27 (1), 166–175; Premeaux, S. and W. Mony: 1993 , Journal of Business Ethics 12 , 349–357; Premeaux, S.: 2004 , Journal of Business Ethics 52 , 269–278). I conclude that CSR policies are not based on utilitarian thinking, but instead, on some kind of common-sense morality. The ethical foundation of companies engaged in CSR, thus, does not mirror the ethical foundation of managers. (shrink)

This article examines the relation between policies concerning Corporate Social Responsibility and philosophical moral theories. The objective is to determine which moral theories form the basis for CSR policies. Are they based on ethical egoism, libertarianism, utilitarianism or some kind of common-sense morality? In order to address this issue, I conducted an empirical investigation examining the relation between moral theories and CSR policies, in companies engaged in CSR. Based on the empirical data I collected, I start by suggesting some normative (...) arguments used by the respondents. Secondly, I suggest that these moral arguments implicitly rely on some specific moral principles, which I characterise. Thirdly, on the basis of these moral principles, I suggest the moral theories upon which the CSR policies are built. Previous empirical studies examining the relation between philosophical moral theories and the ethical content of business activities have mainly concentrated on the ethical decision-making of managers. Some of the most prominent investigations in that regard propose that managers mainly act in accordance with utilitarian moral theory, 166–175; Premeaux, S. and W. Mony: 1993, Journal of Business Ethics12, 349–357; Premeaux, S.: 2004, Journal of Business Ethics52, 269–278). I conclude that CSR policies are not based on utilitarian thinking, but instead, on some kind of common-sense morality. The ethical foundation of companies engaged in CSR, thus, does not mirror the ethical foundation of managers. (shrink)

Liberalist thinking argues that moral agents have a right to pursue an ordinary life. It also insists that moral agent can be bystanders. A bystander is involved with morally bad states of affairs in the sense that they are bound by moral duty, but for a non-blameworthy reason. A common view on the morality of commercial life argues that commercial agents cannot and ought not to assume the status of bystander, when confronted with child labor, pollution, or other overwhelmingly big (...) morally bad states of affairs. According to the common view, the agent will get overdemanded. In this paper, the overdemandingness charge is interpreted as a criticism of the liberalist position. According to this charge, bystander status must be given up in the market because otherwise the right to pursue a personal life is crushed. In this paper, we demonstrate that the overdemandingness charge fails. It does not make sense if bystander status is grounded in the duty of beneficence. It would make sense if the status were grounded in the duty of rescue but that duty does not apply in relation to oMBS. The condition of ‘subjective urgency’ is not fulfilled. Hence, liberalist thinking can withstand the charge of overdemandingness and commercial agents cannot assume a right never to acknowledge bystander status. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The purpose of this paper is to formulate and defend a set of moral principles applicable to management. Our motivation is twofold: 1) to increase the coherence and utility of Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT); and 2) to initiate an alternative stream of business ethics research. To those ends, we specify what counts as adequate guidance in navigating the ethical terrain of business. In doing so, a key element of ISCT, Substantive Hypernorms, is found to be flawed beyond repair. So (...) we propose and defend a remedy:prima faciemoral principles. After delineating the appropriate criteria and format for such principles, we formulate, explain, and defend five of them. We conclude with a brief comment on future research possibilities. (shrink)

Fiona Woollard presents an original defence of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, according to which doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. She argues that the Doctrine is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition, and offers a moderate account of our obligations to offer aid to others.

In this paper I argue that Liam Murphy’s collective consequentialism—emphasizing fairness instead of maximization of value—is not an adequate response to the demandingness objections levied at consequentialism. Especially since Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” many have objected that consequentialism is far too demanding, particularly concerning our obligations of assistance to those in extreme poverty. Murphy thinks that the problem is not that consequentialism is necessarily too demanding; it is that, in our nonideal world of partial compliance, consequentialism is too (...) demanding on those who comply with its dictates. I hope to show that Murphy’s theory is unsatisfying. I will not defend any particular version of consequentialism over alternative consequentialist theories, nor will I defend consequentialism over alternative non-consequentialist moral theories. My aim is far narrower: To show that those who accept a broadly consequentialist account of morality have little reason to accept Murphy’s collective consequentialism. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the usage of Albert Hirschman’s categories of market behaviour as of exit and voice in debates about workplace democracy by taking seriously his critique of the neoclassical analysis of competition. Pro-market liberals are generally hostile to the idea of workplace democracy and tend to favour top-down hierarchies as a way of organising labour. This hostility is generally inspired by the neoclassical analysis of exploitation and efficiency, which leads them to defend distributions achieved through exit-based competitive equilibria. Following (...) Hirschman, I propose to consider a hypothetical alternative: a democratic equilibrium, reached through the use of voice. I show that it would present the same appealing characteristics than its competitive counterpart while also accounting for the non-ideal conditions in which markets operate. Support for free markets should entail support for workplace democracy minimally understood as a strengthening of voice. (shrink)