This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however unevenly--prosperous (...) communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

Several stages can be identified in Darwin's effort to formulate natural selection. The first stage corresponded, roughly speaking, to the period up to 1844. It was characterized by Darwin's attempt to base his model of geographic speciation on an individualistic dynamics, with species understood as reproductively isolated populations. Toward the end of this period, Darwin's ignorance of the laws of variations and heredity led him to adopt varieties and species as the units of variations. This had the extremely important effect (...) of stimulating him to consider the process of speciation as involving populations. At the end of this period, Darwin also began to regard adaptation as being exclusively toward places in the economy of nature. Thus he faced the problem of integrating the process of natural selection with the process of speciation. Individual variants were the units that fueled the first process, whereas varieties produced new speices. There was no link between adaptation and speciation, except whatever could be supplied by a quasi-historical, developmental idea of optimizing the amount of life.In the second stage, I contend, Darwin's reading of Milne-Edwards crystallized his previous insights into a coherent whole. Milne-Edwards' comments on the advantage of functional specialization could readily be understood in terms of the advantage accruing to the individual, relative to other members of its species, from occupying a different niche. Milne-Edwards' discussion of the division of labor suggested that organisms which moved into unoccupied niches would enjoy reduced competition, and hence a differential advantage in survival and reproduction; thus they would induce the species to do likewise. Rather than base his explanation on an analogy with the artificial economy, Darwin chose the principle of the optimalization of the amount of life per unit area as the overall explanatory principle. The difficulties connected with integrating different levels of description were therefore circumvented, insofar as the problem of diversity and speciation was concerned. Although natural selection considered individuals as the units of selection, and the units of variations were varieties and species, the dynamics of the process understood in terms of natural selection, competition, division of labor and niches could give a plausible account of how individual advantage could be transferred to the species, and how diversity resulted from this mechanism. The problem of the different levels of descriptions was confined to how the properties of variations in individuals (in particular, the frequency of variations and their transmission) were responsible for the assumed variability characteristic of varieties and species. This problem Darwin never solved.A third stage occurred in 1858 with the amalgamation of the tree-of-life vizualization of the process of speciation. Speciation, geographic distribution, and systematics were all then embedded in a conceptual matrix with vast explanatory powers. (shrink)

Moral luck – which seems to appear when circumstances beyond a person’s control influence our moral attributions of praise and blame – is troubling in that modern moral theory has supposed morality to be immune to luck. In business, moral luck commonly influences our moral judgments, many of which have economic consequences that cannot be reversed. The possibility that the chance intervention of luck could influence the way in which we assign moral accountability in business ethics is unsettling. This paper (...) argues that if we cannot explain moral luck away, we should give consideration to moral risk in our moral judgments and the associated assignment of economic rewards regarding episodes in which moral luck plays a role. (shrink)

Required reading at more than 100 colleges and universities throughout North America.

This book is vintage North."--Barry Weingast, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University "In this book Douglass North once again opens new frontiers in economic research.

This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty's previously unpublished essay "The ...

Brings together traditional philosophy and modern sociobiology to examine evolutionary biology and its relation to the evolution of knowledge and ethics.

In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense (...) of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike. (shrink)

This book provides essential reading for anyone with an academic or professional interest in business ethics today.

Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them.