Search results

The justification of punishment is an age-old debate which continues unresolved. In late twentieth century several attempts were made to reconcile the two opposing justifications: retributivism and consequentialism. But these attempts focused narrowly on merely one manifestation of punishment, i.e.: criminal punishment carried out by the state. To the extent that these mixed justifications are successful, they relate to only one (undoubtedly important) manifestation of punishment. But clearly punishment can occur in many different institutional contexts, and the institutions in each context vary dramatically in complexity and relevance. I recommend analyzing punishment in its manifold manifestations.

Purpose — (Dis)honesty as a quality of our actions can be assessed at different levels. Often these levels have not been differentiated. Semantically we cannot talk about a dishonest society or dishonest organizations — dishonesty can only be attributed to individual actions. We can approach a dishonest act through its essence (deontology), consequences (utilitarianism), and also through the person committing the act (virtue ethics), but most often organizational spheres are too complex objects of study to face ethical dilemmas without the influences that their context can bring. Therefore, the purpose of the chapter is to look at dishonesty as an unethical act through the lenses of behavioral ethics, since behavioral ethics is able to grasp the framing effects of ethical situations while combining the main elements of the previously mentioned traditional ethical theories.Design/methodology/approach — In the current chapter it will be differentiated between traditional ethical theories and acknowledged that depending on the level of analysis (individual, organization, or the society level) with their distinctly different ontological backgrounds, we will have different groundings for making any kind of axiological statements about the dishonesty of an action.Findings — In order to give ethical statements about (dis)honesty in organizations, we cannot neglect the influences brought by context. Organizations with endless social interactions both locally and globally usually have no universal basis for making axiological statements.Originality/value — The originality of this chapter is twofold: firstly to cover the importance of making sense of what ethical approaches we take as a grounding when we make ethical judgments in organizational context, and secondly to analyze whether and how the question of dishonesty differs when we switch between the most traditional ethical approaches. The chapter proposes a new framework how ethical decision-making should be assessed depending on the level of social interactions and how dishonesty is associated with gaining social approval.

Contemporary Anglo-American economics, which I admire, faces two major obstacles. First, in its drive at least since Milton Freedman to be a positive science free of normative issues, it ignores its own current intellectual foundations buried at the heart of its analysis of the “advantages of trade”: Fairness. Second, the major driver of economic growth in the past 50,000 years has been the explosion of goods and production capacities from perhaps 1,000 to 10,000 long ago, to perhaps 10 billion goods and production capacities today. Economics, lacking a theory for this explosion, deals with this explosion by ignoring it and treating it as “exogenous” to its theory.

The “Edgeworth Box” carries the heart of advantages of trade, demonstrating for properly curved isoutility curves a region where you and I are better-off trading some of my apples for some of your pears. The ratio of these in trade constitutes price. But spanning the region of advantages of trade is the famous CONTRACT CURVE, where we have exhausted all the advantages of trade. Different points on the curve correspond to different prices. But the Contract Curve is Pareto Optimal, motion on the curve can only make one of us better-off at the expense of the other. Critically, economics has NO THEORY for where we end up on the Contract Curve. Nor, since different points on the curve correspond to different prices, can PRICE settle the issue.

Using the Ultimatum Game I will show that FAIRNESS typically drives where we settle on the Contract Curve, as long as we do not have to trade with one another. Thus ethics enters economics at its foundation, yet cannot be mathematized, so is ignored in Freedman’s name of a positive science.

Perhaps more important, unlike physics, no laws entail the evolution of either the biosphere or the “econosphere.” There are no laws of motion whose integration would entail that evolution. Lacking an entailing theory of the growth of the economy in diversity, often of new goods and production capacities, economists ignore the most important feature of economic growth, wrongly treating it as “exogenous.”

The failures above are likely to play major roles in the lapse to mere greed in our major financial institutions, and in our inadequate capacities to help drive growth in much of the poverty-struck world.

One feature of Utilitarianism that provides its link to rational decision making is that the basic principle of utility demands that one maximize the good. One can disagree about what exactly the good is – perhaps it is pleasure, autonomy, beauty, or some set of items on a list mixing a variety of intrinsic goods. However, whatever the good turns out to be, we ought – morally – to maximize it. A failure to maximize the good is seen as not only a moral failure but also a rational one. So, for example, suppose that a friend of yours offers you a choice between $100 and $10. Most would hold that the rational thing to do is maximize the good and take the $100, all other things being equal. The person who took the $10 option would be considered irrational and imprudent. Maximizing or optimizing one's finances, all other things being equal, would be prudent, but the general point about maximizing carries over to the moral area. What one ought to do, morally, is maximize the good. In the moral area, this means maximizing human well-being, impartially considered. The above illustration is an artificial one, and real life introduces all sorts of complexities such as how to weigh disparate goods and how to deal with risk and uncertainty. However, the basic point that one ought to maximize the good, or do the best one can, stands.

Students of the social sciences do not need to be reminded that one of the leading modern schools of ethics has been made up chiefly of economists. I refer of course to the utilitarian school. Utilitarianism, or economic ethics, is the type of ethical theory which has been predominant in the past century and a half – the “modern era” if we date from the great overturn in social theory brought in by the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions. If its predominance in literary and academic discussion may possibly be questioned, its predominance in the thought and actions of statesmen, law-givers, publicists, and reformers certainly cannot be. A brief consideration of the utilitarian ethics will form the starting point for my argument.

Montes's interpretations of propriety and of self-command, the master Smithian virtue, led him to place Smith's ethics in the deontology camp with Immanuel Kant, clearly opposed to the utilitarians. This is an issue that is worth pursuing for two reasons. First, the relation between Smith and Kant has not been sufficiently explored in the secondary literature. Samuel Fleischacker (1991, 1996) has investigated the lines of influence from Smith to Kant. There is, for example, a striking mention of the impartial spectator in the form of “an impartial rational spectator” in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant [1785] 1997, 4:393, p. 7), yet it is impossible to tell exactly and to what extent Kant's reading of Smith contributed to the development of his own thought. Be that as it may, there is, nonetheless, a logical consistency between Smith's description of the operation of the conscience, as agents learn to construct the perspective of an ideal impartial spectator from which to accurately judge their own thoughts and actions on the one hand and the categorical imperative on the other. Smith's emphasis on impartiality in judging and Kant's emphasis on universality seem to be just different ways of getting at the transcendent nature of true moral character and action. In Smith, then, it is the virtue of self-command through which agents participate in the molding of their own character and stir themselves up for right action (as judged from this ideal perspective). As Montes argues, the spectator judges self-command in terms of the spectator's sense of propriety, not through an analysis of the merit or demerit of an action. It is a deontological argument, not a consequentialist one. When properly understood, self-command entails the development of a morally autonomous agent, similar to Kant's. Thus, Montes concludes:The philosophical meaning of propriety, underpinned by the virtue of self-command, and the role of the conscience introduced by the supposed impartial spectator, situates the sympathetic process within a philosophical tradition that seems closer to Kant than to utilitarianism. (p. 53)

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promise great benefits, including improving safety, reducing congestion, and providing mobility for elderly and the disabled; however, there are discussions on how they should be programmed to respond in an ethical dilemma where a choice has to be made between two or more courses of action resulting in loss of life. To explore this question, the authors examine the current academic literature where the application of the existing philosophical theories to ethics settings in AVs has been discussed, specifically the utilitarianism and the deontological ethics. These two theories are widely regarded as rivals, and are useful in demonstrating the complex ethical issues that must be addressed when programming AVs. We also look at the legal framework, specifically normative principles in criminal law used to regulate difficult choices in an emergency, which some have suggested as a plausible defence for manufacturers who seek to program AVs using a utilitarian framework. These include the doctrine of necessity, the sudden emergency doctrine, and the duty of care. The authors critique each theory, highlighting their benefits and limitations. The authors then make a case for programming AVs using a randomized decision system (RDS) and propose that it could be a viable solution in dealing with certain moral dilemmas. Finally using our assessment, the authors suggest certain objectives for manufacturers and regulators in designing and programming AVs that are technically viable, and would make them morally acceptable and fair.

This chapter is an exploratory study of business ethics as it relates to family firms; it primarily aims to explore virtue ethics as an alternative proposal for the ethical concerns that family firms face in their management, thus overcoming the limitations of relevant business ethics approaches and integrating them into an overarching paradigm. Ethics can be classified into three main streams: (1) deontology, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) virtue ethics. The former two approaches have been widely used in the realm of business and family firms for many years and they tend to instrumentalize ethics for business purposes. Yet, they are mostly powerless to explain and promote the ethical concerns surrounding the family firm’s culture. Virtue ethics regained philosophical interest in the second half of the twentieth century, shifting the focus of morality from “the right thing to do” to the “best way to live.” By bringing together two consolidated research fields, family firms and virtue ethics, this chapter contributes a rich perspective to current research in both fields and opens up new ways of answering many of the cultural questions that family firms bring to the table.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the roles of ethics and wisdom in knowledge economies and specifically the place of ethics and wisdom in social research in knowledge economies.

Approach – It does this through examining traditional theories of ethics, their application in the context of research ethics, and the origins of the current institutional ethics approval regimes. The limitations of consequentialist and deontological approaches to ethics in social research are articulated, as is the rise of neo Aristotelian virtue ethics – to which wisdom is integral. Questions are posed about several high-profile cases of past social research, and the extent to which these might be considered both unethical and unwise. Attention is then given to the place of wisdom in the practice of social research. Aristotle presents practical wisdom as an executive virtue that coherently integrates intellectual and ethical virtues to create deliberative excellence.

Findings – Practical wisdom is thus seen as a way of performing as an educated, skilled, and ethical social actor with carefully constructed predispositions which automatically seek excellence and well-being. Furthermore, a wise social researcher considers the needs of others carefully to try to find the right thing to do, but in understanding others emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise, is not manipulative. The conclusion poses the question as to how practical wisdom might be developed applied to the practices of contemporary social research.