Ranken on Disharmony and Business Ethics

ABSTRACT  This article is a response to Nani Ranken's paper 'Morality in business: disharmony and its consequences' ( Journal of Applied Philosophy , Vol. 4, p. 41). There she attacked the analogy sometimes made between businesses and persons, and concluded that businesses cannot be regarded as moral agents. Her thesis relies centrally on a very strict notion of a person's 'true good'. By exploring and expanding the concepts of 'true good' and 'moral agency' we are able to recover a sense in which businesses are indeed members of the moral community. Moreover, admitting businesses to the moral community also provides a working framework to examine the claim that what is good for business is in harmony with the dictates of morality.     

Killing, wrongness, and equality

This paper examines accounts of the moral wrongness of killing persons in addition to determining what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the morality of killing persons about the (in)equality of persons, and vice versa. I will argue that a plausible way of thinking about the moral wrongness of killing implies that the permissibility of killing innocent, nonthreatening persons depends on a person’s age. I address objections to this conclusion and discuss some potential implications of the view.     

When Manipulation Gets Personal

Many accounts of moral responsibility have emerged recently that question the importance of conscious choice for moral responsibility. Instead of this ‘volitional’ requirement, these ‘attributionist’ accounts claim that agents are responsible for their actions when their actions reflect who they are and what they value. This paper argues that attributionist accounts are too quick to dismiss the connection between volition and moral responsibility. By excising conscious control from their accounts, attributionists leave open the undesirable possibility that an agent may fulfil all necessary conditions for moral responsibility even when she is under the conscious control of another person. Through analyzing situations in which attributionist conditions for moral responsibility are met while an agent is controlled by someone else, the link between an agent's volition and her moral responsibility becomes more apparent.     

Moral Imagination,Perception, and Judgment

This paper develops an account of moral imagination that identifies the ways in which imaginative capacities contribute to our ability to make reason practical in the world, beyond their roles in moral perception and moral judgment. In section 1, I explain my understanding of what it means to qualify imagination as ‘moral,’ and go on in section 2 to identify four main conceptions of moral imagination as an aspect of practical reason in philosophical ethics. I briefly situate these alternative ideas in relation to standard accounts of moral perception and judgment with reference to some guiding examples. In section 3, I argue that the fourth conception of moral imagination, moral imagination understood as the capacity to generate new possibilities for morally good action, is not well accounted for within the standard categories of practical reason. Section 4 clarifies the scope and importance of this capacity and defends its claim to increased theoretical attention.     

What is Wrong With Moral Testimony?

Is it legitimate to acquire one’s moral beliefs on the testimony of others? The pessimist about moral testimony says not. But what is the source of the difficulty? Here pessimists have a choice. On the Unavailability view, moral testimony never makes knowledge available to the recipient. On Unusability accounts, although moral testimony can make knowledge available, some further norm renders it illegitimate to make use of the knowledge thus offered. I suggest that Unusability accounts provide the strongest form of pessimist view. I consider and reject five Unavailability accounts. I then argue that any such view will fail. But what is the norm rendering moral testimonial knowledge unusable? I suggest it lies in the requirement that we grasp for ourselves the moral reasons behind a moral view. This demand is one testimony cannot meet, and that claim holds whatever account we offer of the epistemology of testimony. However, while appeal to this requirement forms the most plausible pessimist view, it is another question whether pessimism is correct.     

Fairness in Financial Reporting

ABSTRACT Public companies in most countries are legally required to publish annual accounts, and these are widely used for making financial decisions. To prevent users of accounts being misled into making disastrous decisions, all major Western countries have introduced controls on the ways accounts are presented. By British and EEC law a company's accounts must give a 'true and fair view' of its financial state.
It has become widely accepted that if accounts are prepared according to standards drawn up by the accounting profession itself, then they can be considered as being 'true and fair'. In this paper it is argued that such an interpretation of 'true and fair' gives inadequate protection to users. How users' interests might be better protected is discussed. Finally, it is suggested that Rawls' notion of a 'veil of ignorance' could be used to ensure that in the preparation of accounts equal regard is paid to the interests of different types of user.     

Sentimentalist Practical Reason and Self-Sacrifice

ABSTRACT

For obvious reasons sentimentalists have been hesitant to offer accounts of moral reasons for action: the whole idea at least initially smacks of rationalist notions of morality. But the sentimentalist can seek to reduce practical to sentimentalist considerations and that is what the present paper attempts to do. Prudential reasons can be identified with the normal emotional/motivational responses people feel in situations that threaten them or offer them opportunities to attain what they need. And in the most basic cases altruistic/moral reasons involve the empathic transfer of one person’s prudential reasons and emotions to another person or persons who can help them. Practical/moral reasons for self-sacrifice also depend on empathic transfer and can vary in strength with the strength of the transfer.     

Some Features of Promises and their Obligations

Promises raise two main philosophical problems, one moral and the other conceptual. The moral problem concerns the normative significance of promising: what is the nature and basis of the obligations and rights to which promises typically give rise? The conceptual problem is to say what a promise is: what is involved in making a promise? In this paper I defend three controversial claims about promising. One is about the moral problem of promising, one is about the conceptual problem, and the last one is about the relationship between my conceptual claim and my moral claim. My conceptual claim is that a speaker makes a promise only if he communicates an intention to undertake an obligation to the hearer. (I refer to this as the “Obligation Conception Thesis.”) My moral claim is that the obligations typically attached to promises are such that they can be acquired only by those who communicate an intention to undertake an obligation. (I refer to this as the “Voluntary Obligation Thesis.”) My third claim is that if the Obligation Conception Thesis is true, the Voluntary Obligation Thesis is true.     

Moral Desert, Fairness and Legitimate Expectations in the Market

Do people morally deserve what they earn in the market? More specifically, can people legitimately claim to deserve what they earn in the market in a way that counts against redistributing those earnings? As most liberal political philosophers do, I argue that the answer is no. Unlike many of these philosophers, however, I do not focus on whether or not people can be deserving. Instead, I focus on the relationship between social institutions and moral desert, and advance two claims. First, in the market, desert claims are undermined by the very nature of the market even if people can be deserving in general. Second, part of the intuition that motivates accounts of moral desert may be explained instead with reference to a principle of fairness that demands the fulfillment of people's legitimate expectations as to what they will receive, and this principle places much weaker restrictions on redistributive policies than do claims of moral desert.     

The Social Bearing of Nature

The claim is that some collective entities can be thought of as part of the moral realm by virtue of their status as objects of moral concern. Collectivities are defined in terms of irreducibly corporate action and distinctive conditions of persisting identity. Their lack of sentience does not preclude moral concern, and their raison d'êtremay render moral concern for them appropriate. Recent attempts by Pettit, McMahon, and Broome to limit the moral realm to individuals are considered. They are rebutted on the grounds that they rest heavily on pre-existing moral intuitions; they ascribe a stronger thesis than is necessary to the sponsors of the moral significance of non-individuals; and they wrongly assume that what has value for individuals must have value becauseit has value for individuals. Collectivities can have moral importance even if they lack the intrinsicmoral importance attaching to human beings, and substantial consequences follow from that fact. In particular, routine appeals to the distinctness of persons become more problematic when collectivities, themselves composed entirely of persons, have independent moral significance which needs to be taken into account. That will affect both assessment of moral consequences and the process of moral decision-making.     

Possibilities of Moral Progress in the Face of Evolution

Evolutionary accounts of the origin of human morality may be speculative to some extent, but they contain some very plausible claims, such as the claim that ethics evolved as a response to the demands of group living. Regarding the phenomenon of moral progress, it has been argued both that it is ruled out by an evolutionary approach, and that it can be explained by it. It has even been claimed that an evolutionary account has the potential to advance progress in the moral domain. This paper explores the complex relationship between evolutionary explanations of morality and the possibility of moral progress. It seeks to answer the question as to what these explanations are able to tell us about the possibility of moral progress and the ways in which such progress can be achieved. It is argued that evolutionary explanations can inform moral education and other forms of moral enhancement, and that increased evolutionary knowledge figures among the changes in the circumstances of morality that can lead to moral progress. Evolutionary explanations can show us certain limits to the possibility for humans of progressing morally as well as certain enabling conditions. It is argued that both aspects – enhancement and changes in the circumstances – are equally important for the achievement of moral progress. This is illustrated by means of two examples of areas in which moral progress seems possible: our relationship towards the distant poor and our relationship towards non-human animals.     

Nietzsche and Murdoch on the Moral Significance of Perceptual Experience

Abstract: This paper examines a claim defended by an unlikely pair: Friedrich Nietzsche and Iris Murdoch. The claim is that perceptual experience itself—as distinct from perceptually based judgments and beliefs—can be morally significant. In particular, Nietzsche and Murdoch hold that two agents in the same circumstances attending to the same objects can have experiences with different contents, depending on the concepts that they possess and employ. Moreover, they maintain that this renders perception an object of moral concern. This paper explicates these claims, examines the way in which we might distinguish between better and worse perceptual experiences, and argues that if some version of the Murdochian/Nietzschean claim is accepted, then certain influential accounts of moral epistemology and agency must be rejected.     

A Biological Alternative to Moral Explanations

Some moral realists claim that moral facts are a species of natural fact, amenable to scientific investigation. They argue that these moral facts are needed in the best explanations of certain phenomena and that this is evidence that they are real. In this paper I present part of a biological account of the function of morality. The account allows the identification of a plausible natural kind that could play the explanatory role that a moral kind would play in naturalist realist theories. It is therefore a candidate for being the moral kind. I argue, however, that it will underdetermine the morally good, that is, identifying the kind is not sufficient to identify what is good. Hence this is not a natural moral kind. Its explanatory usefulness, however, means that we do not have to postulate any further (moral) facts to provide moral explanations. Hence there is no reason to believe that there are any natural moral kinds.     

Saving Strawson: Evil and Strawsonian Accounts of Moral Responsibility

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal “Freedom and Resentment,” Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents.     

A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame

Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One's blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent's wrongdoing. 3. One is warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target's wrongdoing is some of “one's business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing”. Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone's standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer's action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non‐hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our “moral fragility”, the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the “equality of persons”.     

Identification and Responsibility

Real-self accounts of moral responsibility distinguish between various types of motivational elements. They claim that an agent is responsible for acts suitably related to elements that constitute the agent's real self. While such accounts have certain advantages from a compatibilist perspective, they are problematic in various ways. First, in it, authority and authenticity conceptions of the real self are often inadequately distinguished. Both of these conceptions inform discourse on identification, but only the former is relevant to moral responsibility. Second, authority and authenticity real-self theories are unable to accommodate cases in which the agent neither identifies nor disidentifies with his action and yet seems morally responsible for what he does. Third, authority and authenticity real-self theories are vulnerable to counterexamples in which the provenance of the agent's real self undermines responsibility.     

Axiological Absolutism and Risk1

Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations (like being able to save a life) that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations (like being able to avert a mild headache). In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what does it require of you when deciding under risk? What ought you to do when there is a chance that, say, you will not succeed in saving the life? In recent years, various critics have argued that moral absolutism cannot satisfactorily deal with risk and should, therefore, be abandoned. In this paper, we show that moral absolutism can answer its critics by drawing on—of all things—orthodox expected utility theory.     

A Political Account of Corporate Moral Responsibility

Should we conceive of corporations as entities to which moral responsibility can be attributed? This contribution presents what we will call a political account of corporate moral responsibility. We argue that in modern, liberal democratic societies, there is an underlying political need to attribute greater levels of moral responsibility to corporations. Corporate moral responsibility is essential to the maintenance of social coordination that both advances social welfare and protects citizens’ moral entitlements. This political account posits a special capacity of self-governance that corporations can intelligibly be said to possess. Corporations can be said to be “administrators of duty” in that they can voluntarily incorporate moral principles into their decision-making processes about how to conduct business. This account supplements and partly transforms earlier pragmatic accounts of corporate moral responsibility by disentangling responsibility from its conventional linkages with accountability, blame and punishment. It thereby represents a distinctive way to defend corporate moral responsibility and shows how Kantian thinking can be helpful in disentangling the problems surrounding the concept.     

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood

It is intuitively plausible that not every evildoer is an evil person. In order to make sense of this intuition we need to construct an account of evil personhood in addition to an account of evil action. Some philosophers have offered aggregative accounts of evil personhood, but these do not fit well with common intuitions about the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral reform, and the relationship between evil and luck. In contrast, a dispositional account of evil personhood can allow that evil is explanatory, that an evil person can become good, and that luck might prevent evil persons from doing evil or cause non-evil persons to do evil. Yet the dispositional account of evil personhood implies that some evil persons are blameless, which seems to clash with the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Moreover, since it is likely that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform evil actions in some environments, the dispositional account threatens to label a large proportion of people evil. In this paper I consider a range of possible modifications to the dispositional account that might bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions about moral condemnation and the rarity of evil persons. According to the most plausible of these theories, S is an evil person if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour S’s autonomy.     

Quasi-Realism's Problem of Autonomous Effects

Simon Blackburn defends a 'quasi-realist' view intended to preserve much of what realists want to say about moral discourse. According to error theory, moral discourse is committed to indefensible metaphysical assumptions. Quasi-realism seems to preserve ontological frugality, attributing no mistaken commitments to our moral practices. In order to make good this claim, quasi-realism must show that (a) the seemingly realist features of the 'surface grammar' of moral discourse can be made compatible with projectivism; and (b) certain realist-sounding statements which we might use in describing the nature of our moral commitments can be understood in projectivist terms. Much attention has been devoted to whether quasi-realism can deliver (a). I raise an important difficulty with regard to (b).