International Journal of Applied Philosophy

Does “business ethics,” as we have developed it in the United States, apply without change when business goes abroad? We argue that we cannot assume, in foreign nations (especially in the developing world), that the assumptions of U.S. business practice and business ethics hold without modification. An attempt to find a universally applicable ethic for global business results in the tentative formulation of “ten commandments” to guide the practice of business in the nations of the world.

The fact that corporate responsibility supervenes on human action implies that there are two possible kinds of account of the former, namely reductive accounts in which the responsibility of the corporation devolves down without remainder to its officers, and those in which it does not. Two versions of the latter are discussed here. The first, due to Peter French, tries to satisfy the supervenience requirement by defining corporate action in terms of human action. It is argued that the corresponding view of intention, intentions as plans, does not serve to show how the defined notion of corporate action also brings with it attributions of responsibility. An alternative account, taking its point of departure from Feinberg’s ideas of vicarious and collective responsibility, is therefore proposed. It is argued that when officers of a corporation substitute the “decision-making mechanism” of the corporation for their own, then responsibility, but not action, can transfer to the corporation. Furthermore, it is argued that this nonreductivist account can be defended against the reductivist charge that attributions of moral responsibility to corporations is a category mistake.

In my paper I propose to explore a defensible philosophical basis for affirming the significant uniqueness of the Holocaust in relation to other similar instances of genocide and, accordingly, to contribute to efforts to better secure its place in history for future generations, especially in terms of its impact on aspects of institutionalized remembrance in law and morality. The twentieth century has been a century of democide (a state’s killing of its own people) and genocide (a state’s murder of its own minorities in the general population): it ought to be or to promote a century of indelible remembrance. Perhaps the twenty-first century will be one not only of further institutionalized forms of remembrance to dissuade future genocidists, but also of the actualization of more effective internal mechanisms for preventing genocidal policies and practices. Short of prevention, however, mechanisms ought to be in place for either intervening in or stopping genocidal atrocities once they begin, and of apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing the perpetrators. Certainly the conceptual framework exists in international law and in popular moral discourse for identifying genocidal possibilities or attempts at genocide. Only a persistent global will needs to be present to make these mechanisms a reality.

Academic freedom has become the enemy of the individual professors working in colleges and universities across the United States. Despite its historical (and maybe even essential) roots in the First Amendment, contemporary case law has consistently shown that professors, unlike most members of society, have no rights to free speech on their respective campuses. (Ironically, this is especially true on our State campuses.) Outlined is the dramatic change in the history of the courts from recognizing “academic freedom” as a construct needed to protect professors from the status quo, to the abuse of “academic freedom” appropriated to protect the institution from “undesirable” professorial actions such as politically incorrect speech or research. Klein warns all those in the academy to become familiar with this pernicious 180-degree turn in the use of the “academic freedom” construct.

Unimpressed by the exhortations of previous generations, our modern society accepts premarital sex. Advisably? In an attempt to answer this question, I shall make three related points, drawing on findings from evolutionary psychology and bargaining theory. First, premarital sex is potentially exploitative. Second, to allow premarital sex is not merely to extend a certain freedom, but indirectly to compel women to practice premarital sex, hence effectively to foster their exploitation. Third, some of the measures taken to combat the sexual exploitation of single women can make matters worse, as the implementation of these measures tends to increase rather than decrease the level of the exploitation.

In this paper I focus on the role that cyberspace should play in social or political protest, and, in particular, in acts of civil disobedience. I have two main purposes in doing so. First, I want to address the question, “When is hacktivism civil disobedience?” I answer the question by including a more complete and explicit analysis of civil disobedience, as it is affected by information technology, than is currently done in the literature on hacktivism. This allows a clearer answer to the question posed here than currently provided in the relevant literature. Second, I analyze James Moor’s claim that information technology transforms old processes, as this claim applies to the context of civil disobedience. As we will see, while information technology may exacerbate certain issues, little transformation seems required in this case.

Our courts are regularly confronted with the claims of expert witnesses. Since experts are permitted to present testimony in the courtroom, we have to assume that judges and juries understand what it means to have expertise and can consistently recognize someone who has it. Yet these assumptions need to be examined, for the legal system probably underestimates the difficulty of identifying expertise. In this paper, several philosophical issues pertaining to expertise will be discussed, including what expertise is, why we rely on experts, what measures can be taken to verify expertise, and how we determine whether a particular individual is an expert.

The twentieth century was unprecedented in the scope and enormity of the terrible deeds that human beings perpetrated against their fellows. Oftentimes, the unjust detention, imprisonment, tortures, and executions were set in motion by the event of the arrest. This paper examines the phenomenon of the arrest as it is depicted in two of the century’s literary giants -- Franz Kafka and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Uncanny correspondences can be detected particularly between Kafka’s novel The Trial and Solzhenitsyn’s memoir The Gulag Archipelago. Moreover, through Kafka’s powerful literary imagination, he created works containing many features that were later to stand at the heart of the terror of totalitarian regimes. This paper analyzes and explores the arrest and, as a result, a philosophical typology of the arrest emerges. Due to the power and scope of Kafka’s genius, his work both prefigures and expresses many of the essential characteristics of totalitarian regimes that come to be enacted in flesh and blood later in the century. In The Trial, the arrest may be seen as an eerie and surreal foreshadowing of the millions of morally outrageous and legally spurious arrests that were to come in the twentieth century.

In his critique of a common argument in favor of vegetarianism, Holmes Rolston III does not sufficiently address the nutritional factor. The nutritional factor is the important fact that the eating of animals is not nutritionally required to sustain human life. Also, although Rolston’s criterion for distinguishing when to model human conduct on animal conduct is defensible, he applies it inconsistently. One reason for this inconsistency is that Rolston misplaces the line he attempts to draw between culture and nature. Although he himself makes a distinction between culture and nature Rolston fails to recognize that the nutritional “need” to eat meat is a cultural creation, not a natural event. For these reasons, Rolston’s defense of eating animals as a purported way of respected ecology is severely impaired.