HIV/AIDS threatens international health on a scale never before seen in human history. Previous plagues and great epidemics, devastating though they were to imperial China, urbanizing Europe, and the colonizing Americas (McNeill 1998), were regionally contained. More than forty million people worldwide are HIV-positive: about half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where it apparently originated and where whole tribes and, indeed, most of the adult population of Botswana may very well die of the disease. (Joint UN/WHO 2004). India has another five million people who are HIV-positive, the largest number outside Africa. AIDS is spreading rapidly in China and devastating Thailand, a regional center for prostitution that spreads it further throughout the Asia-Pacific region. No part of the world is spared. The economic, social, and political impacts of this pandemic have only begun to be felt and to be considered.

Modern technological and organizational capacities—jet aircraft and globetrotting business and tourist travelers—turned what would have been, in previous eras, an African regional problem into an international crisis and made AIDS exceedingly difficult to contain. Yet, the human technological and organizational capacity to confront the AIDS pandemic also makes this health crisis different from epidemics in earlier times. Medical science applied by pharmacological research has created drug therapies that can control the disease, that can not only stave off death but make productive life possible for many years. The challenge of AIDS could be met, many in the health community say, if it were not that the life-sustaining drugs are owned by private enterprises (Oxfam 2002). The doctors at Médicins Sans Frontières contend, “Patents are not god-given rights. They are tools invented to benefit society as a whole, not to line the pockets of a handful of multinational pharmaceutical companies” (MSF 2003: 2). “[T]he patent monopoly means that a higher price than necessary has to be paid for patented inventions. This is acceptable if this higher price is merely an inconvenience…. However, if the patented invention is essential (say, if it could prevent your untimely death from disease), then the price is more of a dilemma” (MSF 2003: 5). These and other critics declare that drug makers put profits ahead of people and accuse the governments that grant them patent-intellectual property rights, especially the U.S. government, of contributing to this moral bankruptcy.

The pharmaceutical industry has in recent years come under attack from an ethical point of view concerning its patents and the non-accessibility of life-saving drugs for many of the poor both in less developed countries and in the United States. The industry has replied with economic and legal justifications for its actions. The result has been a communication gap between the industry on the one hand and poor nations and American critics on the other. This paper attempts to present and evaluate the arguments on all sides and suggests a possible way out of the current impasse. It attempts to determine the ethical responsibility of the drug industry in making drugs available to the needy, while at the same time developing the parallel responsibilities of individuals, governments, and NGOs. It concludes with the suggestion that the industry develop an international code for its self-regulation.

In recent years society has come to expect more from the “socially-responsible” company and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic in particular has resulted in some critics saying that the “Big Pharma” companies have not been living up to their social responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility can be understood as the socio-economic product of the organizational division of labor in complex modern society. Global poverty and poor health conditions are in the main the responsibilities of the world’s national governments and international governmental organizations, which possess society’s mandate and appropriate organizational capabilities. Private enterprises have neither the societal mandate nor the organizational capabilities to feed the poor or provide health care to the sick in their home countries or in the developing world. Nevertheless, private enterprises do have responsibilities to society that can be categorized as what they must do, what they ought do, and what they can do.

Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective.

Disputes regarding the ethics of work by children have intensified in recent years, with little resolution. The impasses stem from failure to recognize the diverse forms of child work and a lack of empirical research regarding its causes and consequences. We report on data gathered in Brazil’s export-oriented shoe industry, which is notorious for the employment of children. Central findings are: 1) the causes of child work have less to do with backwardness and more to do with how shoe workers are integrated into the global order; 2) local employers and children regard this work as benign, but the U.S. government sees it as hazardous to children and unfair to U.S. producers; 3) efforts to remove children from the shoe industry have been frustrated by local resistance and raise ethical questions; and 4) in certain circumstances, efforts to eliminate hazards from the workplace are morally superior to campaigns to remove child workers from employment.

“Ethical investing” is interpreted in the following paper to be the use of non-financial normative criteria by investors in the choice of securities for their portfolios.

Ethical investors may aim at fulfilling duties they feel they have, possibly including increasing the amount of good in society through the consequences of their buying and selling behavior. The main duties are those of not-profiting from bad corporate behavior and of punishing bad (or rewarding good) firms. The main consequence desired is that managers manage corporations in a more ethical manner. But ethical investors (as opposed to some other kinds of investors who are also interested in normative issues) also aim at receiving returns based on the market risk of their investments.

If the aim of managers is to maximize shareholder wealth, then ethical investors can fulfill their duties or achieve their desired consequences only if their trading activities affect shareholder wealth, i.e., share price. A theoretical argument is presented to show that this trading activity will not affect share price or return. In addition, reference is made to results of empirical studies which show that ethical stocks yield market returns, i.e., that the share price of ethical firms is unaffected by the actions of ethical investors.

If the trading activity of ethical investors fails to affect share price and return, then these investors fail to fulfill any of their goals or to achieve their ends.

This paper is a further development of two previous pieces of work (Moore 2002, 2005) in which modern virtue ethics, and in particular MacIntyre’s (1985) related notions of “practice” and “institution,” have been explored in the context of business. It first introduces and defines the concept of corporate character and seeks to establish why it is important. It then reviews MacIntyre’s virtues-practice-institution schema and the implications of this at the level of the institution in question—the corporation—and argues that the concept of corporate character follows from, but is a novel development of, MacIntyre’s schema. The paper contrasts corporate character and virtues with the more familiar concepts of corporate culture and values. The constitutive and substantive elements of corporate character, including the essential corporate virtues, are then drawn out and illustrated with reference to the cases explored in Koehn (1998). Finally, the paper acknowledges and counters a specific criticism of this approach.

Although the concept of corporate social performance (CSP) has become more clearly specified in recent years, an analysis of CSP from the perspective of one particular stakeholder group has been largely ignored in this research: employees. It is proposed that employees merit specific attention with regard to assessments of corporate social performance. In this paper, a model for evaluating and measuring CSP at the employee level is proposed, and implications for evaluating contemporary employment policies and practices are offered. An iterative process for systematically including normative content in the CSP model across stakeholder groups is also offered.