This articvle describes the fire, its probable cause and corporate criminal responsibility -whether reckless manslaughter or criminal act manslaughter.

Purdue Pharma was being investigated by United States Civil and Criminal compliance agencies for many years and a conclusion has now been reached. Although successful , this author feels that such extremely serious corporate frauds must also punish senior individual executives with long jail sentences -in this case-corporate manslaughter.

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...) one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defense of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behavior; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility (...) by showing how it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behavior, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behavior. (shrink)

The corporate meltdowns of this and the previous decade in the US - WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and in Australia - FAI, HIH and AWB being among the many examples - have resulted in the governments of those two countries introducing legislation and policy guidelines aimed at minimising future corporate misbehaviour. -/- The US has introduced the Sarbanes Oxley Act, with requirements on corporate accountants and auditors, as well as its whistleblowing provisions. It has revised the Federal Sentencing (...) Guidelines for Organizations. New rules for the NYSE and NASDAQ have also been introduced. In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Department of Justice have further strengthened the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act 1977, last revised in 1997. -/- Australia has revised the Corporations Act to include whistleblower protection clauses as well as adopted the ASX Corporate Governance guidelines. Standards Australia has issued its handbook on corporate governance. Although not a business issue, the Australian government has also announced that it will introduce whistleblower protection legislation for the public sector by the end of its first term in office. This legislation will likely influence whatever the private sector does in this respect. The inclusion of whistleblower protection in both Sarbanes–Oxley and the Corporations Act reflects a growing body of research that finds that people internal to an organisation are the most effective way to identify corporate wrongs. The Commonwealth Treasury has recently issued an options paper, stating that the Corporations Act has been ineffectual. It has sought submissions on revisions to the legislation that the Australian Government could take. This paper examines the policies advocated by over 20 organisations and academics concerned with whistleblowing issues. It draws the conclusion that on current indications, even after further reform, Australian legislation and policies are still likely to be less effectual than overseas practices. -/- --------------------------------- . (shrink)

Theorists have argued that under certain background conditions the commercial, for-profit corporation might bear responsibility to act to advance justice. However, other agents too may be responsible to take remedial action, especially when the state defaults. This raises the question of the sequence in which the agents should act. I develop a framework that offers guidance in determining when the corporation ought to intervene to advance justice. The existing literature typically identifies responsibility-bearers solely by their capacity to remedy an unjust (...) situation which I believe to be too simplistic. I introduce two additional grounds for identifying responsibility-bearers, a role-based account and participation-based account and show that this pluralist approach delivers a better account of who bears responsibility to act and when to discharge this responsibility. (shrink)

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are (...) solely responsible for deaths and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

In a world characterised by intense global poverty, do active corporate efforts to help the global poor constitute discretionary acts of charity, to be praised but not to be thought of as mandatory? Or, conversely, are such efforts a matter of binding moral duty? The traditional position among business ethicists – and still, perhaps, the dominant one – is that there is no such duty, except perhaps in exceptional circumstances such as rescue cases. In recent years, however, several authors (...) have made the case that corporations have quite wide-ranging positive duties to the global poor. This entry outlines the contours of the various arguments given in favour of the latter position, before highlighting two theoretical challenges which arise if we are to embrace this position – first, the issue of determining what sorts of actions count as adequately fulfilling positive duties to the global poor, and, second, the question of what limits there are, if any, to the demandingness of corporations’ positive duties. (shrink)

We reflect on the nature of corporate codes of conduct is this article. Based on John Austin’s speech act theory, four characteristics of a performative concept of corporate codes will be introduced: 1) the existential self-performative of the firm identity, 2) which is demanded by and responsive to their stakeholders; 3) Because corporate codes are structurally threatened by the possibility of failure, 4) embracing the code not only consists in actual corporate responsible behaviour in light of (...) the code, but in the incessant recapturing of the code in the struggle of firms against the possible incongruence between their ethical principles and their actual responsible behaviour. A performative concept of corporate codes helps to bridge classical dichotomies like individualist versus collectivist approaches of moral agency and restrictive versus empowering ethics, and opens a new perspective on the interaction between individual ethical behaviour and the corporate institutionalisation of codes. (shrink)

The Stoics are famously committed to the thesis that only bodies are, and for this reason they are rightly called “corporealists.” They are also famously compared to Plato’s earthborn Giants in the Sophist, and rightly so given their steadfast commitment to body as being. But the Stoics also notoriously turn the tables on Plato and coopt his “dunamis proposal” that being is whatever can act or be acted upon to underwrite their commitment to body rather than shrink from it as (...) the Giants do. The substance of Stoic corporealism, however, has not been fully appreciated. This paper argues that Stoic corporealism goes beyond the dunamis proposal, which is simply an ontological criterion for being, to the metaphysics of body. This involves, first, an account of body as metaphysically simple and hence fundamental; second, an account of body as malleable and continuous, hence fit for blending (krasis di’ holou) and composition. In addition, the metaphysics of body involves a distinction between this composition relation seen in the cosmology, and the constitution relation by which the four-fold schema called the Stoic Categories proceeds, e.g. the relation between a statue and its clay, or a fist and its underlying hand. It has not been appreciated that the cosmology and the Categories are distinct — and complementary — explanatory enterprises, the one accounting for generation and unity, the other taking those individuals once generated, and giving a mereological analysis of their identity and persistence conditions, kinds, and qualities. The result is an elegant division of Plato’s labor from the Battle of Gods and Giants. On the one hand, the Stoics rehabilitate the crude cosmology of the Presocratics to deliver generation and unity in completely corporeal terms, and that work is found in their Physics. On the other hand, they reform the Giants and “dare to corporealize,” delivering all manner of predication (from identity to the virtues), and that work is found in Stoic Logic. Recognizing the distinctness of these explanatory enterprises helps dissolve scholarly puzzles, and harmonizes the Stoics with themselves. (shrink)

The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, status role, status function, convention (...) and constitutive rule. (shrink)

Internal audit, management review, and account reconciliation are popular tools for combating corporate fraud, but whistle-blowing is the most prevalent. Whistle-blowers frequently fear reprisal from coworkers and bosses. That is why they require protection and support. Many international organizations have advocated that countries adopt regulatory frameworks for protecting whistle-blowers. Therefore, the current study investigates the notion of whistle-blowing to compare it to Public Interest Disclosure Act 2017 of Pakistan, which was enacted. It identifies the influence of legal and ethical (...) cultural norms in organizations on whistle-blowing behaviour. (shrink)

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in (...) corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Realists about corporate agency, according to whom corporate agents may have aims above and beyond those of the individuals who make them up, think that individual agents may switch between participating in individual and corporate agency. My aim is, however, to argue that the inescapability of individual agency spells out a difficulty for this kind of switching – and, therefore, for realism about corporate agency. To do so, I develop Korsgaard’s notion of plight inescapability, which on (...) my take suggests that individual agents are continuously faced with fully exercising their individual agency (absent external limits at the time of its exercise). But then individual agents may not switch to acting as members of corporate agents if the aims of the corporation differ from their own, in the sense that they have different mental state tokens. But as it is possible to participate fully in the action of a corporate entity, this incompatibility between individual and corporate aims suggests that we ought to think of corporate agents as in some sense reducible to individual aims. (shrink)

The German Act on Autonomous Driving constitutes the first national framework on level four autonomous vehicles and has received attention from policy makers, AI ethics scholars and legal experts in autonomous driving. Owing to Germany’s role as a global hub for car manufacturing, the following paper sheds light on the act’s position within the ethical discourse and how it reconfigures the balance between legislation and ethical frameworks. Specifically, in this paper, we highlight areas that need to be more worked out (...) in the future either through ethical conventions, corporate measures or legal measures and examine how the law can be incorporated into the existing discourse on the regulation of technologies. Based on this examination, we derive implications for future discourse and elaborate on companies’ responsibilities in developing autonomous driving technologies in an ethical sense. (shrink)

This chapter examines the mechanistic psychology of Descartes in the _Passions_, while also drawing on the _Treatise on Man_. It develops the idea of a Cartesian “psychology” that relies on purely bodily mechanisms by showing that he explained some behaviorally appropriate responses through bodily mechanisms alone and that he envisioned the tailoring of such responses to environmental circumstances through a purely corporeal “memory.” An animal’s adjustment of behavior as caused by recurring patterns of sensory stimulation falls under the notion of (...) “learning,” behavioristically conceived. Indeed, Descartes’s animal-machine hypothesis may well be a distant ancestor to Watsonian behaviorism, via T. H. Huxley (1884). The final two sections of the chapter take stock of what psychological capacities Descartes ascribed to mind, body, or both, and consider those capacities that we might now plausibly construe as being explicable by nonmentalistic mechanisms as opposed to those that at present remain unreducedly mentalistic. -/- This chapter derives from a lecture delivered at the University of King's College (Halifax, Nova Scotia) as part of a year-long series on Descartes and the Modern. The lecture series was co-sponsored by the programs in History of Science and Early Modern and Contemporary Studies. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to develop a system of corporate ethics based on an understanding and interpretation of the ethical demand of human beings who are in relation with each other according to Emmanuel Levinas' teachings and the responsibility the human being has to and for herself and others whom she encounters based on Paul Ricoeur's teachings on human action, text and hermeneutics. While the philosophies to which we will be referring may not overtly present a normative (...) ethic, we shall convey them in such a way that is reasonably germane to the development of our system of corporate ethics that would, indeed, demonstrate why (and, perhaps, how in some instances) the human being must act in response to the demand of the other whom she encounters. -/- We must not abandon the discussion as it relates to the economy but rather include it in a broader and more comprehensive dialogue about working to promote, support and protect the human dignity of all people using the advancements of technology to improve the human condition. The broader discussion must include but not be limited to developing a working definition of corporate ethics. To engage in discussions about the economy as an indicator for human success, we must speak openly and honestly about all stakeholders that participate and are affected by the economy. Without forsaking other stakeholders, we find the corporation - the entity whose actions have the farthest reaching and, in some cases, longer lasting impact on the human condition - to be an appropriate point of departure for this endeavor. (shrink)

Every organization, as they grow has many stakeholders like shareholders, employees, customers, vendors, community, etc. For survival and growth, they have to rely upon healthy relations with all these stockholders. Hence organizations need to provide good returns for shareholders but also good jobs for employees, reliable products for consumers, responsible relations with the community and a clean environment. -/- Business ethics is the application of general ethical principles to business dilemmas and encompasses a broader range of issues and concerns than (...) laws do, as everything that is legal is not ethical. Ethics involves learning what is right or wrong, and then doing the right thing -- but "the right thing" is not nearly as straightforward. -/- Business Ethics has the following purposes: - To give people the tools for dealing with moral complexity in business - Business decisions have an ethical component - Ethical implications must be weighed before acting -/- Corporate governance is concerned with the ownership, control and accountability of companies, and how the corporate pursuit of economic objectives relates to a number of wider ethical and societal considerations. It is the application of best management practices, compliance of law in true letter and spirit and adherence to ethical standards for effective management and distribution of wealth and discharge of social responsibility for sustainable development of all stakeholders. -/- Good Corporate Governance is key to Growing Profits and Reputation. It represents the relationship among stakeholders that is used to determine and control the strategic direction and performance of organizations. Accountability is a key element as well as requirement for corporate governance, fortifying the latter in such a way that it provides a transparent template for governing critical decisions, procedures, and activities. -/- Corporate Governance deals with the questions: (1) Who benefits from corporate decisions/senior management actions? (2) Who should benefit from corporate decisions/senior management actions? -/- There are a number of reasons why businesses should act ethically .As behavior is based on values priorities, a mutual effort at all levels to deal with corporate ethics begins with a clear understanding of core values, both individually and organizationally. -/- Good corporate governance begins with a company's own internal practices and policies. While corporate governance issues are common across organizations, each company requires governance principles that are unique in their approach. Good governance is, ultimately, the sine qua non for continued growth and prosperity. -/- Corporate governance ensures that long term strategic objectives and plans are established and that the proper management structure is in place. Companies that provide good governance, both in terms of practices and results can expect the backing not only of investors but of customers too. -/- Corporate Governance represents the moral framework, the ethical framework and the value framework under which an enterprise takes decisions. In the long run ethical behavior has a positive impact on the company's performance. -/- This paper discusses the elements of corporate governance, inter-relationship between business ethics and corporate governance with reference to some of the Indian companies over the years and their impact in this era of globalization and liberalization. (shrink)

This paper looks at the specific proposed amendments to European directive 2007/36/EC and 2013/34/EU, and evaluates as to how such amendments alter shareholders’ moral responsibilities. To be responsible is here simply to be understood as being under an obligation, where an obligation is a requirement on an agent to either act or refrain from acting in a given way. In order to determine whether changes to the proposed directives alter shareholders’ moral responsibilities the following analysis argues that we need to (...) look at three factors: whether such changes do in fact alter the subject matter of shareholders’ obligations, a closer look at the agent i.e. shareholders to whom the obligation is to apply and thirdly whether they do actually apply. (shrink)

Greatly aided by an information age in which protesting laborers in a remote offshore outpost can capture front page headlines around the globe, theSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SARBOX) has made corporate transparency the linchpin for good corporate governance. Under a SARBOX-enhancedregulatory framework, publicly traded corporations are required to rapidly disclose material changes in their financial conditions or operations—changes such as impairments to goodwill, a trademark, or some other intangible corporate asset. Especially challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) with (...) far-flung corporate empires is the need to stay abreast of the ebb and flow of goodwill, at a time when transnational human rights groups are aggressively mobilizing world opinion against the sweatshop labor conditions that abound at the offshore production sites favored by MNCs. The author explains why the convergence of a digital age of free-flowing information and the advent of SARBOX, a legislative enactment of paraenetic design, is causing the boards of MNCs to more critically evaluate the long-term costs of their offshore operations. (shrink)

If one can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, one can surely judge a society by how it treats cognitively- and learning-impaired children. In the United States children with physical and cognitive impairments are subjected to higher rates of corporal punishment than are non-disabled children. Children with disabilities make up just over 13% of the student population in the U.S. yet make up over 18% of those children who receive corporal punishment. Autistic children are among the most (...) likely to receive corporal punishment. -/- Although they may deny or redescribe particular instances of corporal punishment or their use of restraints, educators defend such actions as legitimate punishment. In this paper, I assess the logic underlying the use of restraints and corporal punishment on autistic children by educators. The rationalizations for the corporal punishment or restraint of autistics stems from the educator’s desire to control the autistic children so as to end typical autistic behaviors such as rocking, repetitive verbalizations, or “flapping” but also the autistic child’s non-affective responses such as not appearing to feel remorse or shame or the absence of a verbal acknowledgement of remorse or shame. The educators assume that the autistic’s failure to exhibit the desired responses is evidence of the autistic’s moral incorrigibility and is, therefore, evidence of the appropriateness of corporal punishment. But this assumption of the incorrigibility of the autistic child is questionable. -/- Indeed accepting this incorrigibility assumption reveals two important problems. First, instructors using physical punishment on autistic children do not understand autism. Second, they are not working with a tenable conception of punishment. Any action undertaken to induce socially acceptable behaviors (whether it be the end of autistic acts or responses such as remorse) is to fail to understand what the legitimate punishment of children is about. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

This study draws on deontic justice theory to examine an unexplored socioemotional micro-foundation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), namely anticipated guilt, in an effort to improve our understanding of employees’ moral reactions to their organization’s CSR. We empirically investigate whether environmental CSR induces anticipated guilt (i.e., concerns about future guilt for not contributing to organizational CSR) leading to organizational environmental citizenship behavior. We also consider two boundary conditions related to the social nature of anticipated guilt: line manager support for (...) the environment and negative environmental group norms. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed data from a convenience sample of 503 managers working in Mexican organizations, using Latent Moderated Structural equation modeling. Overall, our results support the deontic argument that employees care about CSR because CSR embodies moral concerns. Specifically, our findings show that efforts to avoid a guilty conscience increase when the line manager provides increased resources and control to act for the environment, and when group members do not care for the environment, suggesting that employees feel they have to compensate for their group’s moral failure. (shrink)

It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their individual members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question. The most extensive defence of corporate free will that I am aware of (Hess [2014], “The Free Will of (...) Corporations (and Other Collectives)”, Philosophical Studies 168 (1): 241–260) rests on a compatibilist understanding which takes reasons-responsiveness and acting from one’s own ‘actional springs’ as key conditions for free will but says little about a condition that free-will libertarians emphasize: the possibility of doing otherwise. In this paper, I will argue that group agents can have free will not only in a (less demanding) compatibilist sense, but also in a recognizably libertarian sense, which includes the possibility of doing otherwise. In developing this account of corporate free will, I will bring together recent work on group agency and recent work on free will. (shrink)

Corporative global media cannot be an instrument of the culture of peace, because they have made widespread individualistic values of the consummative society. Through their symbolic power, they successfully dominate over every sphere of existence of a society: politics, economic life, social ties, national culture, human communication and private life. Traditional media could not be a factor in the promotion and development of culture of peace, simply because they are proponents of corporative economic and political interests. It is in the (...) interest of citizens to counter the activities of “rapacious capitalism” (SCHMIDT 1998), of local comprador political and economic elites, and the practice of robbery of their work; to bridle the proliferation of weapons and acts of aggression. (shrink)

How should we make sense of praise and blame and other such reactions towards collective agents like governments, universities, or corporations? Collective agents can be appropriate targets for our moral feelings and judgements because they can maintain and express moral positions of their own. Moral agency requires being capable of recognising moral considerations and reasons. It also necessitates the ability to react reflexively to moral matters, i.e. to take into account new moral concerns when they arise. While members of a (...) collective agent are capable of this, the collective frames the thinking of the individual moral agents within it and affects their options in myriad ways. The moral positions thus formed and expressed belong to the collective. Crucially, unlike marginal moral agents, collective agents as moral actors can be held fully responsible for their acts and omissions. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robotics is pervasive in daily life and set to expand to new levels potentially replacing human decision-making and action. Self-driving cars, home and healthcare robots, and autonomous weapons are some examples. A distinction appears to be emerging between potentially benevolent civilian uses of the technology (eg unmanned aerial vehicles delivering medicines), and potentially malevolent military uses (eg lethal autonomous weapons killing human com- batants). Machine-mediated human interaction challenges the philosophical basis of human existence and ethical conduct. Aside (...) from technical challenges of ensuring ethical conduct in artificial intelligence and robotics, there are moral questions about the desirability of replacing human functions and the human mind with such technology. How will artificial intelligence and robotics engage in moral reasoning in order to act ethically? Is there a need for a new set of moral rules? What happens to human interaction when it is mediated by technology? Should such technology be used to end human life? Who bears responsibility for wrongdoing or harmful conduct by artificial intelligence and robotics? -/- Whilst Kant may be familiar to international lawyers for setting restraints on the use of force and rules for perpetual peace, his foundational work on ethics provides an inclusive moral philosophy for assessing ethical conduct of individuals and states and, thus, is relevant to discussions on the use and development of artificial intelligence and robotics. His philosophy is inclusive because it incorporates justifications for morals and legitimate responses to immoral conduct, and applies to all human agents irrespective of whether they are wrongdoers, unlawful combatants, or unjust enemies. Humans are at the centre of rational thinking, action, and norm-creation so that the rationale for restraints on methods and means of warfare, for example, is based on preserving human dignity as well as ensuring conditions for perpetual peace among states. Unlike utilitarian arguments which favour use of autonomous weapons on the basis of cost-benefit reasoning or the potential to save lives, Kantian ethics establish non-consequentialist and deontological rules which are good in themselves to follow and not dependent on expediency or achieving a greater public good. -/- Kantian ethics make two distinct contributions to the debate. First, they provide a human-centric ethical framework whereby human exist- ence and capacity are at the centre of a norm-creating moral philosophy guiding our understanding of moral conduct. Second, the ultimate aim of Kantian ethics is practical philosophy that is relevant and applicable to achieving moral conduct. -/- I will seek to address the moral questions outlined above by exploring how core elements of Kantian ethics relate to use of artificial intelli- gence and robotics in the civilian and military spheres. Section 2 sets out and examines core elements of Kantian ethics: the categorical imperative; autonomy of the will; rational beings and rational thinking capacity; and human dignity and humanity as an end in itself. Sections 3-7 consider how these core elements apply to artificial intelligence and robotics with discussion of fully autonomous and human-machine rule-generating approaches; types of moral reasoning; the difference be- tween ‘human will’ and ‘machine will’; and respecting human dignity. (shrink)

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 (...) thinking about immoral behaviour in the food and beverage industry, and identify under what conditions sales and marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to adults and children is wrong. Based on this analysis we argue that firms should take into account: whether consumers are able to identify manipulative marketing, the degree of manipulation, as well as the negative impact a product has on health. We hold that for the food industry to act responsible it should re-evaluate the marketing of unhealthy products to adults and refrain from marketing to children. We conclude this study by making several recommendations on how the food industry should interact with consumers and highlight what changes need to be made in corporate practice. (shrink)

Can humans exist without machines? Yes, in principle; but not in the numbers or in the manner to which they have become accustomed. However, the quality of machine-intensive existence is directly proportional to the degree of humans' control over their technology. Such control they can exercise, if at all, only by controlling the corporations from which technologies emanate. This can't be achieved by individuals acting in isolation but requires collective cooperation, e.g., in the form of worker control, which may eventually (...) lead to altered modes of human existence. In the meantime, our identity will not necessarily be found in what we make. (shrink)

What a person is doing often depends on that person’s thought about what they are doing, or about the wider circumstances of their action. For example, whether my killing is murder or manslaughter depends, in part, on whether I understand that what I am doing is killing you, and on whether I understand that my killing is unjustified. Similarly, if I know that the backpack I am taking is yours, then my taking it may be an act of theft; (...) but it is not theft if I simply mistook your backpack for my own. And if I don’t know that in signing a document I’m promising to do some thing, then in signing it I’m not promising to do this at all. -/- According to Elizabeth Anscombe, a central task of philosophical psychology is to articulate this dependency of action on thought. And in a range of papers published during the 1960s, Anscombe sought to elucidate various aspects of this dependency. In this paper we give a systematic overview of how Anscombe understands this dependency, and in the process reveal the conceptual framework underlying Anscombe’s thinking about perception, desire, intention, voluntariness, responsibility, guilt, and sin. (shrink)

In forming groups—corporations, teams, academic departments, juries—humans gain new ways of acting in the world. Jennifer Lackey argues that groups need to be held responsible for their actions, and therefore need to be subject to epistemic evaluation. To criticize receptive or reckless behavior on the part of a corporation, for example, we need some account of what it is for a group to believe something, and for a group belief to be justified. In Lackey’s account, group epistemic states are a (...) function of the states of individual operative members. After raising some difficulties for her formulation of this function, this article raises questions about Lackey’s operative-member account can apply to new types of group agent, with a particular focus on the epistemic status of algorithmic systems that harvest human data. (shrink)

The Law Society recently published a practice note titled 'Prosecutions of victims of trafficking'. This practice note comes many years after many lawyers had highlighted the problem and after the government machinery had chuntered into action and passed the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 with explanatory notes and non-statutory guidelines for corporations. Since 2012 there had been issued warnings about the way defence lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK police were dealing with trafficking and the Criminal Cases Review (...) Commission as far back as 2012 had note the severe failings by defence solicitors, prosecution and police, leading to many appeals and potential miscarriages of justice. Even in 2012 there were 946 known human trafficking victims, including 234 children. There was an attempt at a Human Trafficking Bill in 2010 which came to a halt and several reports including one by the Prison Reform Trust and Cambridge University Press, notwithstanding many books by notable academics for many years before today. This article examines the inadequacies of the Law Society practice note on defending victims and the jumble of high-ideals but short-sighted and impractical parts of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. (shrink)

Suicide is a complex act whose meanings, while sometimes tragic, vary widely. This chapter surveys the ethical landscape surrounding algorithmic methods of suicide prevention especially as it pertains to social media activity and to the moderation of online suicide communities. We begin with a typology of suicide, distinguishing between varied goals in which suicide may factor as a means. Suicides should be understood as an act with varied eliciting desires, meanings, consequences, and ethics. Further,while many suicides may be grounded on (...) irrational desire, we argue that a desire to suicide may nonetheless be rational in some cases. We then offer a survey of the attempts by social media corporations to create suicide prediction algorithms and launch interventions aimed at preventing suicide as well as an overview of the current ethical debate. We argue that the values embedded within algorithmic suicide prevention nudges are “thick” in a substantive sense and deserving of scrutiny. Given that debates about the rationality, meaning, and permissibility of suicide are common and subject to intracultural and cross-cultural differences, we maintain that the task of suicide prediction is ill-suited to algorithmic approaches. Despite an algorithm’s ability to quantify a complex phenomenon like suicide risk and its appearance of objectivity, any suicide prediction algorithm is thoroughly subjective and involves moral judgments all the way down. Any such algorithm would necessarily impose a normative stance on suicide onto its user base that is subject to reasonable intra and cross-cultural disagreement. (shrink)

Some form of assisted dying (voluntary euthanasia and/or assisted suicide) is lawful in the Netherlands, Belgium, Oregon, and Switzerland. In order to be lawful in these jurisdictions, a valid request must precede the provision of assistance to die. Non-adherence to the criteria for valid requests for assisted dying may be a trigger for civil and/or criminal liability, as well as disciplinary sanctions where the assistor is a medical professional. In this article, we review the criteria and evidence in respect of (...) requests for assisted dying in the Netherlands, Belgium, Oregon, and Switzerland, with the aim of establishing whether individuals who receive assisted dying do so on the basis of valid requests. We conclude that the evidence suggests that individuals who receive assisted dying in the four jurisdictions examined do so on the basis of valid requests and third parties who assist death do not act unlawfully. However, further research on the elements that may undermine the validity of requests for assisted dying is warranted. More research on the reasons why requests for assisted dying are refused is also desirable. (shrink)

In this study, the starting point is the well-known physical laws applied to human social life. On the basis of natural laws human actions are considered and through the prism of physical laws such concepts as use and possession are defined. A parallel is drawn between such a representation of these concepts and those conflicting views that are available in the literature regarding the concept of property. To complete the definitions of use and possession nature is introduced as a fictitious (...) owner. And on this basis, the positive possibility of a theoretical solution to the problem of initial assignment is shown. Again, on the basis of physical laws, the fundamental concept of [human] needs is introduced. It is shown that the collision of people's needs on the same thing allows uniform classifying property defined in literature as the relationship between a person and a thing or as the relationship between people because of a thing. Considering the relationship between two human beings through needs and costs, as a natural necessity, people inevitably renounce their claims to possess and use certain things in favor of other people. It is shown that this refusal forms the right of those people in whose favor this refusal is carried out to possess and use things. The right of one is the refusal of all others to own and use the thing. It is shown that the right was ensured and will always be ensured by force. The use or threat of the use of force is something that can reliably ward off a person from the unbridled realization of his needs. In the process of the formation of mankind, nature itself forces people to organize into communities that can oppose their individual members and their associations with significantly greater power. The whole, as a rule, is stronger than its part. And it is society that can reliably ensure the exercise of rights for its members. Natural laws also make it possible to resolve, on the basis of the concept of law, as a renunciation of possession and use, the issue of belonging to what nature gives us. These are natural resources and the human body. It is shown that the human body should belong to the person himself, and the resources to all members of society equally. The affiliation of all other things produced by man can be unambiguously determined within the framework of contractual relations between members of society, their associations and society as a whole. Since the right of everyone is ensured by the society, and, therefore, by each member of the society individually, a necessary condition for membership is understanding and recognition of the rights of certain things to other members of the society. And this may be the main criterion for joining full members of society, as opposed to the commonly used age criterion, which works on the bulk of people, but gives failures in many special cases. A typical example of such cases is the deprivation or infringement of the rights of persons of full legal age, but committed acts that are called unlawful in society. As part of the research on ownership issues, ownership is considered. It is shown that the necessary tool for using the objects of co-ownership is the voting of co-owners. A special case of co-ownership, when all co-owners have equal shares in co-ownership, is indistinguishable from what is called democracy. It is shown that voting in general and democracy in particular, as procedures for aggregating preferences, can have a positive decision, in refutation of the universality of the conclusion of Arrow's theorem. (shrink)

In forming groups—corporations, teams, academic departments, juries—humans gain new ways of acting in the world. Jennifer Lackey argues that groups need to be held responsible for their actions, and therefore need to be subject to epistemic evaluation. To criticize receptive or reckless behavior on the part of a corporation, for example, we need some account of what it is for a group to believe something, and for a group belief to be justified. In Lackey’s account, group epistemic states are a (...) function of the states of individual operative members. After raising some difficulties for her formulation of this function, this article raises questions about Lackey’s operative-member account can apply to new types of group agent, with a particular focus on the epistemic status of algorithmic systems that harvest human data. (shrink)

This study examines from an ethical framework the circumstances of workers who are engaged in non-professional services that are offered through corporations that are organized to serve high volume of costumers. Drawing on the relevant ethical teachings of the Catholic social tradition (CST), it explores some practices, strategies, and policies that could address the problems experienced by many service providers in the United States today. CST refers to a wide variety of documents of the magisterium of the Catholic Church which (...) respond to the changing social and economic challenges of the modern world. The study argues that the primacy of the person, love and subsidiarity, sense of community, and respect for worker’s rights and unionism in CST are not only moral principles that uphold intrinsic human goods, they are likewise instrumental to operational effectivity because they promote job satisfaction, smooth interpersonal relationship, and long-term commitment with the company. They enable service providers to work efficiently, deliver exceptional service, and act as conduit between the customers and the business establishment, rather than simply being caught between their conflicting demands. (shrink)

This book explores a universal question of human social order: Under what circumstances and to what extent is the individual to be held morally responsible for collective events? This question reaches far beyond the intentions and actions of a particular business enterprise, state or a similar large-scale collective. The philosopher Wolfgang Sohst (Berlin, Germany) investigates the subject with unprecedented thoroughness, covering the whole range of contemporary discussion on this subject. He provides a detailed analysis of the functions of individual members (...) in such a collective, the structural prerequisites for them to be held responsible for acts which they have not directly committed themselves and the transmission of responsibility even to successor generations of the perpetrators collective. -/- Table of contents: -/- Introduction 1 Actors and Moral Action 1.1 On the concepts of actors and action 1.2 The simultaneous emergence of actor and action 1.3 The difference between a unit of event and a unit of action 1.4 The difference between legal and moral responsible action -/- 2 The Continuum Between Individual and Corporate Actor 2.1 The relationship between a single human actor and a corporate actor 2.1.1 The primary responsibility of the individual actor and the ontological status of the collective 2.1.2 Additional arguments for putting collective responsibility onto the individual actor 2.2 The levels within structural consolidation 2.3 A different schematic view: Community, Society, State 2.4 Direct vs. organized sociality 2.5 Conflicts of application in assigning collective responsibility -/- 3 Individual and Collective Actions 3.1 A better form of social reductionism 3.2 Corporate bodies as a bundle of agency relationships 3.3 The horizon of view for collective social phenomena -/- 4 The Corporate Entity as a Moral Subject 4.1 Are corporate actors also morally responsible? 4.2 Corporate bodies as norm subjects -/- 5 Possible criteria for the moral qualification of collective action 5.1 Membership in a group 5.2 Success of an action 5.3 Shared intentionality or purpose, common interests and common consciousness 5.4 Social relationships between actors as a condition of collective action 5.5 Subjective and factual feelings of collective responsibility 5.6 The community of shared values 5.7 Social identity 5.8 Origin and ethnic belonging 5.9 No equality in injustice -/- 6 Norm-based and Purpose-oriented Organization 6.1 No collective responsibility without inner organization 6.2 Collective shame as an indication of collective responsibility 6.3 Individual responsibility for collective norms 6.4 The collective organization as an independent unit of purpose for the collective 6.4.1 The actualistic perspective 6.4.2 Structural persistence 6.4.3 Possible counter-examples of structural persistence 6.5 The other side of collective responsibility 6.6 Interim Result -/- 7 Moral Responsibility of the Individual from an International Perspective -/- 8 Social Norms and Our Responsibility for their Fulfillment 8.1 Norm dimensions 8.2 The overarching importance of norm ranking in assigning collective moral responsibility 8.3 Private and public norms 8.4 Subjective ‘ought’ and personal responsibility 8.5 The obligation to morally acceptable and coherent behavior -/- 9 The Difference between Culpability and Responsibility 10 The Temporal Horizon of Collective Moral Responsibility Index Bibliography. (shrink)

This Article explores the interpretation and construction of executive orders using as examples President Trump’s two executive orders captioned “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” (the “Two Executive Orders”). President Trump issued the Two Executive Orders in the context of (among other things) Candidate Trump’s statements such as: “Islam hates us,” and “[W]e can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred.” President Trump subsequently provided further context including his tweet about the second (...) of his Two Executive Orders: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call [the second of the Two Executive Orders] whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Although President Trump replaced the first of the Two Executive Orders with the second one and although the Supreme Court by orders dated October 10, 2017 and October 24, 2017, vacated and remanded litigation involving the second order on grounds of mootness, the Two Executive Orders remain highly instructive for those who would understand the interpretation and construction of executive orders. This article therefore examines in detail the original speaker's (i.e., President Trump's) intended meaning and effect of the Two Executive Orders. It performs such examination using insights from the semiotic subfield of pragmatics, a semiotic subfield which explores how real-world people actually use, interpret, and construe language in various real-world contexts (including contexts where the issuer of the Two Executive Orders himself has claimed that “Islam hates us” and has tweeted “TRAVEL BAN!”). Using such insights of pragmatics, this Article also explores why reasonable judges thoroughly versed in legal theory, legal practice, and pragmatics should conclude that President Trump unlawfully targeted Muslims in the Two Executive Orders. This Article, among other things, also questions the sensibility of such notions as “facial legitimacy” to the extent such notions suggest text has meaning apart from context. Keywords: executive orders, speaker meaning, interpretation, construction, semiotics, pragmatics, originalism, speech acts, context, facial legitimacy, Constitutionality, First Amendment,Trump v. Int’l Refugee Assistance Project, Scalia, immigration, semantics, original meaning, travel ban, Trump, textualism. (shrink)

Across two studies the hypotheses were tested that stressful situations affect both leadership ethical acting and leaders' recognition of ethical dilemmas. In the studies, decision makers recruited from 3 sites of a Swedish multinational civil engineering company provided personal data on stressful situations, made ethical decisions, and answered to stress-outcome questions. Stressful situations were observed to have a greater impact on ethical acting than on the recognition of ethical dilemmas. This was particularly true for situations involving punishment and lack of (...) rewards. The results are important for the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of an organization, especially with regard to the analysis of the Stressors influencing managerial work and its implications for ethical behavior. (shrink)

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)

Ex nihilo nihil fit. Philosophy, especially great philosophy, does not appear out of the blue. In the current volume, a team of top scholars-both up-and-coming and established-attempts to trace the philosophical development of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Featuring twenty new essays and an introduction, it is the first attempt of its kind in English and its appearance coincides with the recent surge of interest in Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy.Spinoza's fame-or notoriety-is due primarily to his posthumously published (...) magnum opus, the Ethics, and, to a lesser extent, to the 1670 Theological-Political Treatise. Few readers take the time to study his early works carefully. If they do, they are likely to encounter some surprising claims, which often diverge from, or even utterly contradict, the doctrines of the Ethics. Consider just a few of these assertions: that God acts from absolute freedom of will, that God is a whole, that there are no modes in God, that extension is divisible and hence cannot be an attribute of God, and that the intellectual and corporeal substances are modes in relation to God. Yet, though these claims reveal some tension between the early works and the Ethics, there is also a clear continuity between them.Spinoza wrote the Ethics over a long period of time, which spanned most of his philosophical career. The dates of the early drafts of the Ethics seem to overlap with the assumed dates of the composition of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being and precede the publication of Spinoza's 1663 book on Descartes' Principles of Philosophy. For this reason, a study of Spinoza's early works can illuminate the nature of the problems Spinoza addresses in the Ethics, insofar as the views expressed in the early works help us reconstruct the development and genealogy of the Ethics. Indeed, if we keep in mind the common dictum. (shrink)

Individuals suffering from depression consistently report experiencing a lack of connectedness with others. David Karp (2017, 73), in his memoir and study of depression, has gone so far to describe depression as “an illness of isolation, a disease of disconnectedness”. It has become common, in phenomenological circles, to attribute this social impairment to the depressed individual experiencing their body as corporealized, acting as a barrier between them and the world around them (Fuchs 2005, 2016). In this paper, I offer an (...) alternative view of the experience of social disconnectedness in depression, suggesting that rather than necessarily experiencing their body as object-like, the depressed individual’s bodily is saturated with experiences of lethargy, tiredness, heaviness, sadness, hopelessness and so on, to the exclusion of being able to bodily connect to others. I suggest that depression does not involve a complete social impairment but a specific impairment of affective forms of interpersonal experience. (shrink)

Today every organization is acting in a dynamic environment and in a world characterised by turbulent change and fierce competition due to technological advancement and the knowledge based economy, an organization must always ready to adapt and transform themselves so as to be able to confront the shifting needs of the new environment, more demanding customers, smarter workers, anticipating ability to changes, accelerating the development of new products, processes and services, changing technologies and customer expectations, businesses have realised the importance (...) of Customer Relationship Management in acquiring new customers, retain existing ones and maximize their lifetime value. The wide spread availability of the internet across the world has led airlines to use their corporate web-sites to bypass travel intermediaries and focus on online communication, information and transaction. The paper considers five dimensions of Web site quality-usability, web site design, service quality, information quality and enjoyment on a sample of 150 respondents from four airlines namely, Air India, Spicejet, Indigo and Jet Airways. Respondents consisted of 40 employed, 80 business men and 30 students. Overall, the majority of respondents are frequent, experienced Internet users and likely to be relatively good judges of Web quality. Analysis of results shows that customers’ priority about airlines website are changing. As the self-service, no-frills and low-cost trend for air travel has grown in recent years, so consumers have been driven less by service quality and more by easy access to good information packaged in an entertaining and fun "wrapper'. More over the airlines have pursued different strategies for their Web sites over the period of study .Air India rated badly for service quality and Jet Airways and Spice jet scored high on service and information quality. The paper suggests that careful management and selection of subjects to be placed on web site can retain the customers and reduce switching intentions. (shrink)

Climate change can be construed as a question of collective responsibility from two different viewpoints: climate change being inherently a collective problem, or collective entities bearing responsibility for climate change. When discussing collective responsibility for climate change, “collective” can thus refer to the problem of climate change itself, or to the entity causing the harm and/or bearing responsibility for it. The first viewpoint focuses on how climate change is a harm that has been caused collectively. Collective action problem refers to (...) an aggregation of individual actions which together produce an outcome that is not intended at the level of an individual action. It cannot be solved by any one agent acting unilaterally. Instead, climate change action must be enacted and supported by numerous agents. The second way to conceptualize climate change as a question of collective responsibility focuses on the collective entities that bear responsibility for climate change. As a global problem, climate change is linked to the realm of international politics, where states, governments, and intergovernmental organizations are the main collective entities. Other important agential collectives in terms of climate responsibility are corporations, including carbon majors who have produced the bulk of emissions. Climate change has also been theorized as a structural injustice, which combines elements from both the viewpoints on what is collective about responsibility for climate change. (shrink)

The author has extensive law enforcement experience and the paper is intended to provoke thought on the use of technology as it pertains to information sharing between the police and the private sector. -/- As the world edges closer and closer to the convergence of man and machine, the human capacity to retrieve information is increasing by leaps and bounds. We are on the verge of knowing everything and anything there is to know, and literally in the blink of an (...) eye! -/- This means that police will have the capacity to learn everything about everyone with the only restriction being privacy legislation. But it also means that those involved in immoral, unlawful or illegal activity will have that same capacity and with no such restriction. ‘Bad Brother’ may be far more dangerous than ‘Big Brother!' -/- The global community requires a secure and credible system to retrieve and assess all of the information ‘generally available to the public.' A system that will strive to keep ‘Big Brother’ in check and ‘Bad Brother’ out, all the while providing a means of alerting citizens to genuine risks or to dangerous people. Such as system would help diffuse the systemic inaccurate and harmful profiling that is often based on rumours and innuendo. -/- There is an identified public-private partnership opportunity. A chance to work with privacy advocate groups and background checking private companies to define, design and deliver on something that will be of immense benefit to citizens around the globe. -/- We have an opportunity to create something that will work to ensure that only the best information gets used and in a moralistic, lawful and legal way! Technology continues to move forward at incomprehensible speeds – failure to act could have serious consequences. (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

The paper aims to give an account of practical knowledge by outlining a hylomorphic and conceptualist account of intentional action in analogy to McDowell's conceptualist account of experience. On this view, practical concepts provide the ideal or formal structure that unifies a manifold of bodily movements into a single intentional action, and hence intentional actions are structured conceptually. -/- - §1 sets out the basic features of this view in contrast to a common dualistic or two-component view of practical knowledge, (...) as an "inner" mental state with propositional content that functions as the efficient cause of some bodily movement in the "external" world, and introduces the claim that practical knowledge is the constitutive form of intentional action. - §2 illustrates the hylomorphic unity of concept and movement in action, and thus (contra Dreyfus) the corporeality of practical reason, by means of an account of practical concept formation, on which both the formation and tradition of practical concepts take place in bodily movement iself. - §3 elucidates the concept of a self-conscious disposition or rational capacity for action, actualizations of which are characterized by a syllogistic structure that accounts for both the explanation and the justification of action and thereby renders intelligible in what sense practical judgment is internal to acting itself. - Skillful exercises of such capacities express a knowledge-how that manifests itself in practical representations. §4 characterizes representations of this kind as a perceptually situated recognition of a practical pattern that amounts to the imaginative anticipation of a movement form by which the agent determines their next steps; a practical perception of the agent's particular situation that is both normative and motivational for them. - §5 starts by developing an identity theory of practical truth, on which the conceptual content of a (true) practical judgment is numerically identical with the formal structure of a (good) action, and concludes with explaining the unity of four features commonly attributed to practical knowledge, viz. that it is at the same time descriptive, normative, causally productive, and non-observational (or self-conscious). (shrink)

According to the Stoics, ordinary unified bodies—animals, plants, and inanimate natural bodies—each have a single cause of unity and being: pneuma. Pneuma itself has no distinct cause of unity; on the contrary, it acts as a cause of unity and being for itself. In this paper, I show how pneuma is supposed to be able to unify itself and other bodies in virtue of its characteristic tensile motion (τονικὴ κίνησις). Thus, we will see how the Stoics could have hoped to (...) account for corporeal unity by positing another body (pneuma) apparently itself in need of unification. (shrink)

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where it (...) is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)