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This paper explores how major work in contemporary practical and applied ethics can be incorporated into the teaching of ethics (including professional, business, and applied ethics) to enhance its practicality and relevance. It explores three areas. First, while ethics education often focusses on applying principles to fact situations, how and why practitioners in the real world will act morally also depends a quite different factor: legitimacy. Legitimacy refers to an entity’s moral status, and whether it warrants respect and support because of the presence of key qualities like efficacy, consent, deliberation, and democracy. Second, understanding ethical decision-making models can be valuable to future practitioners as it makes them aware of potential weak links in their attempts to act morally, and empowers them to think strategically about how these weaknesses may be combatted. Third, the use of philosophical theory in teaching practical ethics is a vexed question, involving issues of complexity, reductive-ness and indoctrination. However, explicitly confronting the range of epistemic states (beliefs and attitudes) that students can adopt helps show how these issues may be sensibly mitigated.

What is the relationship between human rights and corruption? This question can take different forms, including moral, legal, socio-political and economic variants. This paper focuses on two key moral questions, asking whether corruption can violate or impact on people’s natural rights (on the one hand) or human rights (on the other). In answer, I aim to establish a strong conceptual link between (a) corruption’s ‘abuse of entrusted power’; (b) the ‘arbitrary power’ targeted by natural rights theorists like John Locke and the broader republican tradition and (c) the ‘arbitrary interference’ with protected freedoms prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I argue that the deep thematic links between systemic corruption and violations of human rights are stronger than have hitherto been recognized. In the twenty-first century, corruption should be recognized as a ‘standard threat’ (in Shue’s sense) to human flourishing and protected freedoms, vindicating the human right to freedom from systemic corruption.

In this paper, we present a conceptual and terminological system – what we term the ‘Comprehensive Integrity Framework’ – capable of applying to both personal and institutional integrity, and to different levels of institutions (including sub-institutions and institutional complexes). We distinguish between three sorts of integrity: consistency-integrity (whether the agent’s acts accord with her claimed values); coherence-integrity (whether the agent’s character and internal constitution accord with her claimed values); and context-integrity (whether the agent’s environment facilitates her living up to her claimed values). We then employ this conceptual system to explore similarities, differences and overlaps between personal and institutional integrity, drawing in particular on moral philosophic work on personal integrity (on the one hand) and on ‘integrity systems’ and public administration approaches to institutional integrity (on the other).

The concept of the ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO) is contested on almost every imaginable dimension. Stakeholders may decry it as an industry-created ploy to ethics wash their operations and strategically manipulate community relations, while some industry figures despair over what they perceive as the arbitrary and even unilateral power that the weaponized concept of the social licence gifts to activists who seek to malign and disrupt law-abiding commercial operators. Others have lauded the social licence as a heaven-sent ethical tool, an effective lever for action that motivates leaders at profit-seeking enterprises to seriously consider ethical issues and prioritize community engagement. Still others will worry that a concept that can mean everything to everyone must ultimately mean nothing at all, and that the social licence is an empty and unhelpful buzzword. As the contributions to this Special Issue show, in different contexts – and sometimes even in the same context but for different stakeholders – all these views can be correct. From an ethical perspective, dangers, promises and irrelevance all attend the social licence.

This paper develops a comprehensive multidimensional legitimacy model that provides a generic framework for exploring legitimacy in institutions – including the legitimacy of rules, codes, collective activities and organisations themselves. Through the use of 10 dimensions, covering concerns with fairness, efficacy, integrity, expectations, inclusive decision-making and more, the model aims to capture the full suite of distinct features that may be morally relevant in any given case. Each dimension is a continuum and can provide reasons for moral challenge, toleration or pro-active support. The model can be used to diagnose ethical risk areas, to compare reform initiatives and to inform empirical studies of descriptive legitimacy and the social licence to operate. It may also be used as an applied ethics methodology to evaluate overall institutional moral legitimacy; the paper discusses the contextual judgments required for this, including the way that some legitimacy factors can operate as defeaters, such that a serious failure on a pivotal dimension cannot be overcome by support from other dimensions.

An influential strand of human rights theory explains human rights through appeal to their function. Such ‘function’ theories highlight the role human rights play in international practice and discourse as standards for appropriate state treatment of individuals. But standards in what sense? Standards to be promoted and encouraged through public critique, bilateral pressure, institutional censure or legal culpability? Or standards to be protected and defended through all necessary means? I argue that function theorists conflate (what states themselves recognize as) the important distinctions between these standards. Worse still, many function theorists argue that a major – even definitive – role of human rights involves demarcating permissibility conditions for humanitarian intervention. I argue that this claim gravely mischaracterizes international practice and discourse – in particular it fails to recognize the independent significance of other functional norms operating within the global context. The theorists correctly perceive that we have powerful reasons for wanting this role (of threshold conditions for military intervention) fulfilled, but by mistaking the norms that in fact fulfil it, they distort the actual function of human rights.