Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...) of the ‘right to rear’) argues that there are several more moderate views of parental obligation which might also be thought to ground parental obligation. We first show that an obligation to breastfeed might result not from a general obligation to maximally benefit one’s child, but from what we call ‘choice-specific’ obligations to maximise benefit within particular activities. We then develop this idea through two views of parental obligation—the Dual Interest view, and the Best Custodian view—to ground an obligation to exclusively breastfeed on demand, before showing how both these more moderate views fail. Finally, we argue that not only is there no general obligation to breastfeed children, but that it is often morally right not to do so. Since much advice from health institutions on this issue implies that exclusive breastfeeding on demand is the best option for all families, our argument drives the feeding debate forward by showing that this advice often misrepresents parents’ moral obligations in potentially harmful ways. (shrink)

Edwin Arthur Burtt , who spent the majority of his professional life at Cornell University, is most widely known as the philosopher and author of the works entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science and The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha . These titles reflect the breadth of his philosophical interests, ranging from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of religion. These were recurrent themes in his voluminous publications appearing from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. ;Thus (...) far, no attempt has been made to examine Burtt's life's thought as a whole. This may be due to his eclecticism and penchant for incorporating ideas into Western philosophy from such diverse sources as psychoanalytic theory and Eastern philosophy and religion. Moreover, he was a philosophic activist. He sought to address the serious problems of the twentieth century, in particular the experience of the two World Wars and the threat of annihilation posed by the development of nuclear weapons. Scholars have therefore tended to refer to his works as isolated entities. His influence has been strongest at each end of the spectrum of his philosophic interests, and he is either treated as a philosopher of science or a philosopher of religion. ;This thesis aims to remedy this situation by treating Burtt's work as a whole. Throughout his seventy year philosophic odyssey there is a connecting thread, namely, his determination to develop a post-empiricist metaphysics which would receive its political expression in a world community. In his view, modern science had displaced humanity from its central place and moral significance in the ancient and medieval universe. ;For Burtt science and empiricism can only ever provide partial truth and only speak of partial realities. It was from this starting point that Burtt, after several detours, arrived at his theory of expanding awareness--his most original contribution to philosophy and the cornerstone of his mature thought. The practice of this theory, he believed, would lead to a philosophic regeneration which, in turn, would give rise to a post-scientific, or post-empiricist, metaphysics which could restore humanity to an experience of "at-home-ness" in the universe. He also believed this restoration could help resolve the critical problems facing humanity in the late twentieth century and in the future. (shrink)

The market failures approach to business ethics has recently garnered substantial critical attention (see, e.g., Cohen and Peterson 2019; Moriarty 2020; Steinberg 2017; Hsieh 2017; von Kriegstein 2016; Smith 2018; Endorfer and Larue 2022; Singer 2018). Though precursors of this view can be found in the literature (e.g., McMahon 1981; Friedman 1970), it was Joseph Heath (2004, 2006, 2014, 2023) who developed the approach and gave it its name. The market failures approach (henceforth: MFA) is concerned with the ethical (...) obligations of managers of firms (Heath 2014, 69). Roughly, it holds that managers ought not to conduct their businesses in a way that exploits market failures. “Market failure” is a technical term, meaning any failure of the conditions of the first fundamental welfare theorem, sometimes called the “Pareto conditions” (see Arrow 1951). The theorem states that if the Pareto conditions hold, then the market equilibrium will use society’s scarce resources efficiently, meaning that no one could be made better-off without making anyone else worse off. Efficiency, according to Heath (2014, chapter 7), is the implicit morality of the market. We coordinate much of our shared activity using markets, Heath claims, because of their ability to produce efficient results. Markets are good forms of social organization, according to Heath, because they are the best way to promote our values given empirical facts about the frailties of human psychology and the informational constraints that we face. As such, managers ought not compromise the very conditions that justify a market economy by profiting from breakdowns in the market’s efficiency. Managers are permitted to maximize profits, so long as they do not violate the market’s norm of efficiency in so doing. This is because the fundamental justification for the profit motive is that it is necessary for the operation of the price system which is essential to the efficiency properties of markets. In this paper, I will argue that the MFA is more general than even Heath himself claims. The MFA describes the professional obligations of managers, but the view I develop, the generalized market failures approach, describes the obligations of all market participants. Since efficiency is the implicit morality of the market, it binds not just managers, but all market participants, including consumers, investors and workers. Market participants are permitted to maximize the benefit they gain from market interactions, as long as they do so in a way that does not take advantage of any market failures. Generalizing the MFA in this way has three benefits: first, we gain a unified understanding of the ethics of non-managerial market roles; second, we will develop an even better understanding of the duties of managers; finally, it gives us the resources to respond to some familiar objections to the MFA found in the literature. In the next section, I will further motivate the MFA and explain how this motivation can be easily generalized to other market roles. Importantly, one can avoid benefiting from a market failure in two distinct ways: by avoiding transactions that exploit market failures or by transacting in such markets and then remediating the harm done, by compensating those negatively affected by the market failure. This section concludes by discussing how the remediation duties are to be split between the transacting parties and how to identify the parties to whom compensation is owed. In section 3, I use the tools of the generalized MFA to develop a unified ethics of consumption, investment and labor, respectively. This is the basis of a grand abductive argument for the generalized MFA. The view is strongly supported by the fact that it provides attractive and unifying explanations of our obligations in domains as variegated as carbon offsetting, CEO compensation, the reparations white Americans owe to black Americans and occupational licensure. Section 4 briefly concludes. (shrink)

The field of business ethics has shown an increasing interest in the responsibilities of firms in taking climate action, (cf. Dietz et al., 2018; Heede, 2014). Especially multistakeholder initiatives are heralded as inclusive platforms in which public and private actors together can provide democratically legitimate solutions for taking effective (global) climate action (cf. Arnold, 2016; Bziuk, 2022; Hormio, 2017; Scherer et al., 2016; Tempels et al., 2017). Although this is promising, the effectiveness of these (political) efforts of firms to tackle (...) climate change are doubted (Coen et al., 2022; Dietz et al., 2021), and on a normative level PCSR is criticized for lacking pluralism and being predominantly libertarian and exclusive of marginalised stakeholders (Djelic & Etchanchu, 2017; Fougère & Solitander, 2020; Hussain & Moriarty, 2018; Mäkinen & Kasanen, 2014; Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012; Moog et al., 2015; Pek et al., 2023). Therefore, we strive to diversify PCSR by exploring the merits of workplace democracy for corporate responsibility in the context of climate change. Both academic and societal debate, democratisation of work has gained significant momentum (Ferreras et al., 2022; Frega & Herzog, 2020; Krüger, 2023; Malleson, 2023; Quijoux, 2020; Reinecke & Donaghey, 2021; Stehr, 2023). Drawing on arguments about the epistemic benefits of democratic decision making and insights from feminist standpoint epistemology, we show that democratically governed firms will make better decisions regarding corporate climate policies and the involvement of other stakeholders, and as such the democratisation of firms can play a crucial role in combating climate change. (shrink)