ABSTRACT:Whether at the executive or the line-management levels, businesspeople face moral decisions that cannot be easily resolved with reference to a shared ethos, whether because of diversity of ethea in the organization or its environment, or because the organization's ethos is inadequate for the problem at hand. These decisions are made more common by the changing norms of a pluralistic business environment, and require collective moral deliberation to be adequately resolved. Discourse ethics ideally characterizes the form of valid collective moral (...) deliberation. I argue that accommodation for the limitations of actual discourse makes discourse ethics, conceived in terms of the rules of practical discourse, practical for realizing improvements in the openness and validity of moral decision-making over states in which these rules are flagrantly violated. These rules have normative implications at the organizational level for the integrity approach to corporate ethics programs, and at the individual level for ethical leadership. (shrink)

The Internet presents opportunities for corporations to efficiently build their brands online and to enhance their global reach. But there are threats as well as opportunities, since anti-branding and free-riding activities are easier in cyberspace. One such threat is theunauthorized incorporation of a trademark into a domain name. This can lead to trademark dilution and cause consumer confusion. But some users claim a right to use these trademarks for the purpose of parody or criticism. Underlying these trademark conflicts is the (...) familiar tension between property rights and free speech rights. While some trademark scholars are reluctant to consider a trademark as property, we find strong support for the property paradigm in Hegel’s philosophy. Assuming that a trademark is an earned property right, we propose that a trademark owner should be allowed to control the permutations of its trademark incorporated into domain names unless a reasonable person would not confuse that domain name with the company’s mark. But we also conclude that there must be latitude to employ a domain name for negative editorial comment, so long as the source and purpose of that domain name is plainly apparent. (shrink)

The Internet presents opportunities for corporations to efficiently build their brands online and to enhance their global reach. But there are threats as well as opportunities, since anti-branding and free-riding activities are easier in cyberspace. One such threat is theunauthorized incorporation of a trademark into a domain name. This can lead to trademark dilution and cause consumer confusion. But some users claim a right to use these trademarks for the purpose of parody or criticism. Underlying these trademark conflicts is the (...) familiar tension between property rights and free speech rights. While some trademark scholars are reluctant to consider a trademark as property, we find strong support for the property paradigm in Hegel’s philosophy. Assuming that a trademark is an earned property right, we propose that a trademark owner should be allowed to control the permutations of its trademark incorporated into domain names unless a reasonable person would not confuse that domain name with the company’s mark. But we also conclude that there must be latitude to employ a domain name for negative editorial comment, so long as the source and purpose of that domain name is plainly apparent. (shrink)

Conceptualizing and investigating the interarticulation of disparate registers of value expression, this article treats, specifically, the imbrication of anxieties about sexual ambiguity and counterfeit money. The expressions of such anxieties and the metaphoric slippage between them are shown in a variety of venues and cultural texts, but the main come from a reading of William Friedkin's film, To Live and Die in LA.

ABSTRACT:Lateral hiring is the intentional action of one employer to identify, solicit, and hire an individual or group of employees currently employed by another firm, a practice often pejoratively labeled “poaching.” We use the method of critical genealogy to demonstrate that the norms that discourage lateral hiring are constructions used by powerful employers to control the turnover of their employees, making them subjects of their employer’s power rather than free and autonomous people in their own right. We suggest instead that (...) ethical responsibility for entertaining or rejecting lateral hiring offers rests with the focal employee(s). We conclude that the form and symmetry of loyalty between employees and their current employers are the determinants of the appropriateness of an employee’s decision to entertain and accept outside offers. These conclusions imply responsibilities for employers to forge (and employees to honor) symmetrical relational loyalty in the workplace, but not for alternate employers to refrain from making lateral hiring offers. (shrink)

When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption. In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended). This overlooked (...) argument satisfies the first half of a thesis Hegel applies to action in the Encyclopaedia Logic, namely, that the outer must be inner, and thus provides a necessary complement for his more explicit treatment of the second half of that thesis, that the inner must be outer. The claim that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do might appear, at first, to risk conflating legal and moral responsibility and to lack the necessary means to deal with the phenomenon of moral luck, but I argue that if it is properly situated within the whole of Hegel's philosophy of action it can be saved from both of these consequences and so take its place as an essential component of Hegel's full theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)