A commonly accepted criticism of the social contract approach to justifying political authority targets the notion of hypothetical consent. Hypothetical contracts, it is argued, are not binding; therefore hypothetical consent cannot justify political authority. I argue that although hypothetical consent may not be capable of creating political obligation, it has the power to legitimate political arrangements.

One of the more recent trends in business ethics theory is to argue for norms for corporations on the basis of a social contract model. So far, however, the application of this method of argument has been without sufficient attention for the defining features characterizing the domain of business ethics and the specific assumptions of the social contract argument. In this paper, I situate the new trend of arguing for norms of corporate morality on the basis of a social contract against the background of two earlier traditions of social contract argumentation, i.e. contract theories of politics and of social justice. A comparative analysis of these earlier families of contract theory provides an indication as to how a well-formed contract theory for business ethics should be set up.

A comparison will be made between some of the aspects of Rawls' social contract theory and the integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) proposed by Donaldson and Dunfee. The conception of the person in both theories will be analyzed. To what extent ISCT represents a communitarian conception of business ethics will be discussed.

The utilitarian argument of John Harris and the libertarian position of Ronald Green concerning genetic modifications of children omit a parental perspective. John Rawls proposes that the negotiators of obligations to future generations be viewed as heads of families. Drawing upon John Rawls, Erik Malmqvist, and Michael Sandel, I defend four claims: first, in seeking to balance social stability, autonomy, and general welfare the negotiators of obligations to future generations would assign priority to social stability; secondly, the negotiators would preserve a distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic human genetic modifications; thirdly, they would rule out non-therapeutic genetic modifications of children; finally, the negotiators would endorse a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of genotype.

This paper presents a critique of American liberal capitalism, a system that began as a mere experiment but has now become the only form of life that isbroadly recognized as legitimate. Such legitimation is sustained by the seemingly objective and transcendent authority of a consensus that, as a matter of fact, isincapable of self-critique and judgment. For in liberal capitalism, the quest for happiness is measured primarily by the successes of free enterprise and the freemarket in general. These successes have thus become the only legitimate sources of individual and collective action. But in spite of such successes, liberal capitalism does nothing about the actual unjust relations between different social classes and between different countries. In order to address this unjust situation, liberal capitalism rightly searches for a theory of justice that can provide genuine selfjustification or self-legitimation. But capitalist culture has wrongly found such self-justification in the liberal theory of Rawls, whose veil of ignorance ends up legitimating capitalism’s own “worst of all possible situations.”

This paper explores the relationship between justice and government, examining views on the subject expressed by traditional political philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, as well as those expressed by contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. According to Rawls, justice is one of the fundamental concerns of a governing body; Locke and Rousseau agree that government and justice are essentially connected. Nozick and Max Weber, however, claim that the essential characteristic of government is not justice, but power. This paper argues that government, as an institution formed and controlled by human beings, is subject to the moral injunction to treat human beings as entities accorded certain rights, and included among these rights is the right to just treatment. Governments are therefore enjoined to be just because human beings, as rational agents, and therefore persons, are owed the minimal respect due a person, such as the right to freedom and the right to forbearance from harm by others to self and property.

Hypothetical Consent Situations are widely employed in normative argument as if they help to justify normative claims or to explain normative facts. Historically, however, there is plenty of suspicion about them. In this light, there is a tendency to prefer theories of political obligation that do not depend upon hypothetical consent to explain political obligations – those that appeal, for instance, a general moral principle (like a natural duty) or to actual consent. This paper makes no full-throated defense of hypothetical consent. But it does try to identify more carefully than is usually done what sorts of cases they represent and to show that at least two concerns about them are unwarranted.

Social contract theory has been criticized as a “theory in search of application.” We argue that incorporating the nano- or individual level of analysis into social contract inquiry will yield more descriptive theory. We draw upon the psychological contract perspective to address two critiques of social contract theory: its rigid macro orientation and inattention to the process of contract formation. We demonstrate how a psychological contract approach offers practical insight into the impact of social contracting on day-today human interaction.

The call for practical guidance is a catch phrase for a widespread tendency among present theories of business ethics. Many of these explicitly seek to provide very detailed and concrete instructions for business practioncrs. We argue that on the whole this quest for practical guidance is based on a misapprehension of what applied normative theories can realistically achieve. This concern is further elaborated with special reference to the current paradigm of contractarian business ethics, Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT).

The priority and absoluteness of rights is often gist for ethical debates. I consider these issues from the perspective of my ethical theory, which I call the "ethics of social consequences." The ethics of social consequences is one means of satisfying non-utilitarian consequentialism. It is characterized by the principles of positive social consequences, humanity, human dignity, legality, justice, responsibility, tolerance as well as moral obligation. I analyze Gewirth’s position regarding the absoluteness of rights as well as Nagel’s opinion that rights enjoy priority forever. However, I also concentrate on Williams’s critique of utilitarianism. I contend that the priority of the protection and respect of individual rights in ordinary situations is acceptable. However, the individual must respect the rights and justified interests of other concerned people. Nevertheless, in extraordinary situations one must accept that consequences are more significant than rights.