We should seek an ethic internal to marketing arising from marketing's societal function, rather than imposing some add-on ethic. This suggests that marketing should enhance the information and the freedom the potential customer brings to the market transaction. Defining and achieving this information and freedom is difficult, but marketers suggest that the market itself drives out major violators, a suggestion less persuasive concerning increasingly complex goods and services. Marketing also is tempted to appeal to our baser, darker side. These problems (...) are better addressed through self-regulation guided by a vision of advertising and business in the service of society, and by the marketer's own sense of integrity than through external regulation. (shrink)

The issues of profit, its moral meaning, justification and role, need careful examination. Mistakes to be avoided in making moral sense of profit include the assumption that profitability establishes a company's moral rectitude. Profit is too complex a phenomenon to establish any such thing. Steps toward clarifying these issues include distinguishing profit as the goal of the corporation from the larger goals of the economy itself, and clarifying what we mean by profit. Profit often includes the moral or value consideration (...) of having been rightly or fairly earned. This provides one starting point internal to business for formulating standards for business ethics. (shrink)

Arguing that the grounding of philosophical ethics is more complex than De George's reference to reason and human experience reflects, and that religious ethics is less doctrinaire and less given to indoctrination than De George suggests, Camenisch maintains that De George has portrayed an artifically wide gap between the two fields. Rejecting De George's typology of religious ethics as unhelpful, Camenisch suggests that the crucial distinction between philosophical and religious/theological ethics is the community or lived nature of the (...) latter. The implications of this dimension of religious ethics for business ethics is briefly explored in relation to the use of cases, the role of the lives of moral exemplars, corporate responsibility, and obligations to future generations, to indicate not that religious ethics generates answers different from those of philosophy, but that it provides a different perspective on some central moral matters. (shrink)

One afternoon in 1836 the Transcendental Club held its first meeting in Boston. The membership was noteworthy not only for the list of impressive personages, headed by Emerson, but for the general youthfulness of the group (Thoreau was only twenty-two) and for the fact (unusual for the day) that several women were invited to attend. The club consisted mainly of "bright young Unitarians seeking to find meaning, pattern, and purpose in a universe no longer managed by a genteel and amiable (...) Unitarian God." The club met irregularly for three years and then passed into oblivion. The intellectual activity it engendered continues to affect American thought and values even today. The transcendentalists concerned themselves with problems of law, truth, individuality, theology, mysticism, pantheism, and personality, to mention only a few. Moreover, they were prolific writers and produced reams of letters, essays, poems, sketches, and memoirs. Historian Paul Boller traces the movement from its earliest stirrings through its height as a powerful movement to its decline in the aftermath of the Civil War. Whenever possible, he lets the transcendentalists speak for themselves. He sorts the permanent from the transient and demonstrates the immeasurable importance of a body of ideas which still live a century and a half after their inception.--From publisher description. (shrink)

What kind of thing are we? Paul Snowdon's answer is that we are animals, of a sort. This view--'animalism'--may seem obvious but on the whole philosophers have rejected it. Snowdon argues that animalism is a defensible way of thinking about ourselves. Its rejection rests on the tendency when doing philosophy to mistake fantasy for reality.

The Pasadena game invented by Nover and Hájek raises a number of challenges for decision theory. The basic problem is how the game should be evaluated: it has no expectation and hence no well-defined value. Easwaran has shown that the Pasadena game does have a weak expectation, raising the possibility that we can eliminate the value gap by requiring agents to value gambles at their weak expectations. In this paper, I first prove a negative result: there are gambles like the (...) Pasadena game that do not even have a weak expectation. Hence, problematic value gaps remain even if decision theory is extended to take in weak expectations. There is a further challenge: the existence of a ‘value gap’ in the Pasadena game seems to make decision theory inapplicable in a number of cases where the right choice is obvious. The positive contribution of the paper is a theory of ‘relative utilities’, an extension of decision theory that lets us make comparative judgements even among gambles that have no well-defined value. (shrink)

Fish proposes that we need to elucidate what 'disjunctivism' stands for, and he also proposes that it stands for the rejection of a principle about the nature of experience that he calls the decisiveness principle. The present paper argues that his first proposal is reasonable, but then argues, in Section II, that his positive suggestion does not draw the line between disjunctivism and non-disjunctivism in the right place. In Section III, it is argued that disjunctivism is a thesis about the (...) special nature of perceptual experience, and the thesis as elucidated here is then distinguished from and related to certain other ideas about perception, namely, direct realism and also McDowell's epistemological disjunctivism. (shrink)

The authors argue that the time is ripe for national and corporate leaders to move consciously towards the development of global ethics. This papers presents a model of global ethics, a rationale for the development of global ethics, and the implications of the model for research and practice.

There are a number of concepts of common-sense morality, what one must do, what one ought to do, the supererogatory, the minimum that duty allows, the morally optional and the morally indifferent, that philosophers have been hard-pressed to represent in an integrated conceptual framework. Indeed, many philosophers have despaired at the attempt and concluded that only a fragment of these concepts belong to that fundamental sphere of morality that is the central focus of the ethicist. For example, the traditional scheme, (...) with its triad of the obligatory, the forbidden and the permissible, pigeonholes all actions into three mutually exclusive and exhaustive classes: those which are obligatory, those which are forbidden and those which are optional. Hence, at best, it can represent exactly two of the six aforementioned concepts. For from the standpoint of this scheme, what one must do and what one ought to do can't be distinguished and hence they can't both be represented. Although the morally optional can be represented, the supererogatory, one of its subclasses, cannot be represented. Furthermore, the morally indifferent, another subclass of the optional--one which is obviously disjoint from the supererogatory--cannot be represented. Finally, the minimum that duty allows finds no distinctive place in the traditional scheme. Thus, on the face of it, the traditional scheme is radically incomplete. ;I present, motivate and defend a new conceptual scheme for common-sense morality in which these concepts are represented and systematically integrated. An intuitively motivated semantic framework underpinning this conceptual scheme is also presented. Such a scheme, along with the associated semantic framework, is motivated by reflecting on the supererogationist's objections to utilitarianism and to the traditional scheme. But in addition, a new integrated network of linguistic motivations for this conceptual scheme is uncovered, one which is completely independent of supererogationistic considerations. Hence, these two separate sources of evidence for the centrality of this new scheme to our pre-theoretic thinking corroborate one another--thus jointly boosting the evidence beyond the mere sum of their separate evidential values. (shrink)

My topic is personal identity, or rather, our identity. There is general, but not, of course, unanimous, agreement that it is wrong to give an account of what is involved in, and essential to, our persistence over time which requires the existence of immaterial entities, but, it seems to me, there is no consensus about how, within, what might be called this naturalistic framework, we should best procede. This lack of consensus, no doubt, reflects the difficulty, which must strike anyone (...) who has considered the issue, of achieving, just in one's own thinking, a reflective equilibrium. The theory of personal identity, I feel, provides a curious contrast. On the one side, it seems highly important to know what sort of thing we are, but, on the other, it is hard to find any answer which has a ‘solid’ feel. (shrink)

In his famous Wager, Blaise Pascal offers the reader an argument that it is rational to strive to believe in God. Philosophical debates about this classic argument have continued until our own times. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of Pascal's Wager, including its theological framework, its place in the history of philosophy, and its importance to contemporary decision theory. The volume starts with a valuable primer on infinity and decision theory for students and non-specialists. A sequence of chapters then (...) examines topics including the Wager's underlying theology, its influence on later philosophical figures, and contemporary analyses of the Wager including Alan Hájek's challenge to its validity, the many gods objection, and the ethics of belief. The final five chapters explore various ways in which the Wager has inspired contemporary decision theory, including questions related to infinite utility, imprecise probabilities, and infinitesimals. (shrink)

Professor Donaldson in his book Corporations and Morality has attempted to use a social contract theory to develop moral principles for regulating corporate conduct. I argue in this paper that his attempt fails in large measure because what he refers to as a social contract theory is, in fact, a weak functionalist theory which provides no independent basis for evaluating business corporations. I further argue that given the nature of a morality based on contract and the nature of the modern (...) corporation, it is highly unlikely that any plausible contract theory of business ethics can be developed. (shrink)

The ability to imagine hypothetical events in one’s personal future is thought to involve a number of constituent cognitive processes. We investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory capacity contribute to facets of episodic future thought. College students completed simple and complex measures of working memory and were cued to recall autobiographical memories and imagine future autobiographical events consisting of varying levels of specificity . Consistent with previous findings, future thought was related to analogous measures of autobiographical (...) memory, likely reflecting overlapping cognitive factors supporting both past and future thought. Additionally, after controlling for autobiographical memory, residual working memory variance independently predicted future episodic specificity. We suggest that when imagining future events, working memory contributes to the construction of a single, coherent, future event depiction, but not to the retrieval or elaboration of event details. (shrink)