The discipline of business ethics has been slow to include Big Tech as a worthwhile object of examination. My goal in this presidential address is to make the case that the discipline of business ethics is overlooking novel harms and marginalized stakeholders in emerging and impactful technology industries. Furthermore, although the discipline is improving, the persistent narrowness of our field inhibits our ability to identify and examine novel issues in these important industries. I use standpoint theory to suggest one reason why we remain narrow in what we think counts in business ethics as valid objects of concern: because we are similarly narrow in who counts as a business ethicist. As scholars, we are a lens that we train on the world to identify who counts as a scholar, what we study, and who matters.

Lifeboat ethics is an anomalous concept that has been applied to many different situations, such as overpopulation. In this presentation, Lifeboat Ethics is applied to plant closings (Darlington, Amoco/Neodesha, Chrysler/Kenosha) and downsizing (BP Amoco). The power of the decision maker—not the rights of the employees—determines who will remain, who will be forced overboard, and who will be invited in.

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business.

Tom Carson’s recent paper on “Deception and Withholding Information in Sales” contains a critique of my contribution to sales ethics. In this response I outline the approach I develop in two earlier papers and address the four criticisms Carson makes. These criticisms are largely based on a misunderstanding of my position. I suggest that our fundamentally different approaches to applied ethics may lie at the root of Carson’s misunderstanding. Carson uses what I call a theory-application model in which the search for justification in terms of fundamental rules is central, while I attempt to contextualize ethical judgments and consider alternative ways of structuring social roles. In contrasting these approaches I raise the question of which way of doing applied ethics is likely to be more fruitful.

This study examines activities and processes through which projects of moral regulation are implemented as well as lived, transformed, and resisted by their targeted actors. Our ethnographic study focuses on discourses and practices of civic duty for orderly and hygienic conduct in the rehabilitation of marketplaces in Yaoundé, Cameroon. By drawing on the inhabited institutions approach and the literature on ethics as practice, our analysis extends research on moral work to put forward a perspective on moral regulation as a situated practice. We show how moral work is built on individual reflections but is simultaneously negotiated through actors’ relationships, that is, responsibilities to family, interactions within the community, and personal history.

We examine the moral and managerial significance of some empirical studies in cognitive psychology. We suggest that these results may plausibly be interpreted as expressing deontological commitments of experimental subjects, even though psychologists who discuss the results seem to suppose that they show that people are irrational consequentialists. We argue that the plausibility of our interpretation suggests how managers who wish to take seriously entrenched social views on morality might best craft corporate policy on corporate responsibility, and we suggest that the form of argument we employ may be regarded as a kind of appeal to reflective equilibrium.

In 1954, Richard Braithwaite chose as the topic of his inaugural lecture at Cambridge The Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher. Braithwaite argued that by using the recently developed mathematical theory of games, philosophers could resolve certain problems in moral philosophy previously considered unsolvable. Formal game theory is a product of the twentieth century. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern established game theory as an important new branch of social science with the publication of their 1944 treatise Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. However, the basic idea that motivates game theory has much older intellectual roots in the work of philosophers such as Hobbes (1651) and Hume (1740). This basic idea can be expressed in the following way: How agents behave in a given social interaction depends crucially upon their reciprocal expectations. To give an example adapted from Braithwaite’s lecture, if you and I wish to have a telephone conversation, then exactly one of us must call. I should wait for your call precisely when I expect you to call, which you should do when you expect me to wait. Even in an example this simple, issues of fairness can come into play. We both want to coordinate our behavior and have our telephone chat. But each of us may prefer to call, so as to avoid having the other pay for the call. Braithwaite used game theory to model this example, and to propose a method for assigning the roles of caller and receiver equitably. He conjectured that this method could be applied in general to problems of distributive justice.

Joining the dialogue on the relationship between the law and business ethics, Jeffrey Nesteruk and Eric W. Orts have offered conceptions of the law as a positive influence rather than a negative curb on corporate behavior. While these “legal optimists” pursue a noble end in promoting higher ethical standards for corporations through the law, they may be overly optimistic in their suggestion that these more skillfully wielded legal models will influence corporate behavior for the better. Reviewing the basic tenets of their two approaches, this paper uses corporate responses to environmental statutes to suggest that while legal optimism may offer hope for promoting corporate ethics, it has definite limitations in its current stage of development.

Martin Calkins proposes the “combined use of casuistry and virtue ethics as a way for both sides to move ahead on [the] pressing issue [of agricultural biotechnology].” However, his defense of this methodology relies on a set of mistaken, albeit familiar, claims regarding the normative resources of virtue ethics: (1) virtue ethics is egoistic; (2) virtue ethics cannot defend any particular account of the virtues as the objectively correct ones and is therefore inextricably relativistic; (3) virtue ethics cannot supply a procedure for providing practical or policy guidance in concrete situations; and (4) virtue ethics cannot adequately account for the possibility of conflicting or partial virtues. After a brief overview of the basic structure of virtue ethics, I take up each of these misconceptions in turn. I conclude with some comments on the implications of these considerations for Calkins’s proposed methodology for addressing the issue of agricultural biotechnology.

While jurisprudence in the United States has been cast in the general mode of the English common law, modifications over time have produced enough significant variations that American law has a distinctive quality. To illustrate: The exclusionary rule in criminal cases prohibiting the use of evidence (even from reliable witnesses) acquired through illegal search, is not followed in Britain—or, for that matter, in Canada, Germany, and Israel. The punitive-damage concept (PD) in tort law is also a jurisprudential novelty. Punitive damages are imposed in addition to compensatory awards given to tort victims to warn manufacturers and sellers to be careful in their safety and marketing practices. PDs are society's warning signals: Seller beware! Because they are one of society's ways to protect itself, PDs have recently been considered as fines which, to prevent excesses, should be under the rubric of the Eighth Amendment.

This essay introduces new elements into the discussion on torts by hypothesizing (1) PDs are fines which belong to the public purse; (2) that expenditures from the public purse should be given to local organizations (like orphanages and inner-city hospitals) which provide vital services for those unable to pay; and (3) that the victim (or the victim's survivor) has a right to designate what local organizations should benefit from his or her punitive-damage awards.

The hypotheses require reexamination of the concepts of citizenship, community, and work, respectively.

Tort law is an integral part of the American law of injuries, a body of judicial doctrine and legislation and a set of legal arrangements that also include compensation systems and safety legislation. It would have been unthinkable as recently as twenty-five years ago that the tort system would become a source of bitter contention. Today, however, it generates sharp rhetoric and dramatic proposals for change to address its contested problems, as well as strong views in favor of continuing the system essentially intact so as not to disturb its contended benefits.

The employment of foreign workers is one of the most crucial problems today in the domain of work relations. Absorbing workers from abroad poses serious questions concerning the moral obligations of the employers as well as the government authorities in the migrant-receiving country. Unfortunately, the moral dilemmas of foreign labor have been largely neglected by business ethics researchers. This paper develops a conceptual framework based on the multinational corporation (MNC) ethical research to help examine the moral obligations of employers and states toward foreign workers, as opposed to citizens. The main argument is that domestic employers, who have the power to affect crucial aspects in the lives of migrant workers, incur obligations to these people and bear moral responsibility for their subsistence. As regards the host country in a universal social order based on the existence of nation-states, the employment of foreign workers poses a genuine ethical dilemma between two valid moral duties: the duty to improve the welfare of nationals and the duty to promote the interests of everyone, regardless of their nationality.