This article examines the nature of the child´s right to be loved. In particular, it argues that besides reasons for ensuring that children are affectively cared for by their parents, we have strong reasons for why children should be loved unconditionally -that is, loved independently of their morally irrelevant features. The article defends this claim by engaging closely with an argument recently formulated by Samantha Brennan and Colin Macleod, according to which the child´s right to be loved would be violated (...) by strongly homophobic parents. I argue that Brennan’s and Macleod’s argument needs to be revised because, while it generates a convincing conclusion in the case of homophobic parents, it fails to do so in other cases. This problem calls for a reconsideration of the nature of the right to be loved. Drawing on Philip Pettit’s analysis of robust goods, I argue that this right is a right to be loved unconditionally and an appeal to unconditional love allows us to accommodate the conviction that strongly racist as well as homophobic parents wrong their children by failing to love them (unconditionally). (shrink)

People are often involuntarily laid off from their jobs through no fault of their own. Employees who are dismissed in this manner cannot always legitimately hold employers accountable for these miserable situations because the decision to implement layoffs is often the best possible outcome given the context—that is, layoffs in and of themselves may be “necessary evils.” Yet, even in circumstances in which layoffs qualify as “necessary evils,” morality demands that employers respect the dignity of those whose employment is involuntarily (...) terminated. In this paper I argue that to preserve the dignity of employees who are involuntarily terminated, in most cases employers have a substantial reason to offer a special kind of unemployment benefit, “severance pay.” To support my claim I draw and expand upon Bernard Williams’s analysis of “agent-regret,” which I believe greatly helps to address and articulate employers’ obligations in the context of involuntary termination. (shrink)

Much has been written about the general moral duty to love one’s neighbors. In this article, I explore the specific application of this moral duty in the work setting. I argue from a secular perspective that individuals have the moral duty to love their stakeholders. Loving one’s stakeholders is an affective valuing of the stake-related values these stakeholders pursue and as such is the real recognition of one’s stakeholders as stakeholders and of oneself as a stakeholder of one’s stakeholders. This (...) moral concept of stakeholder love offers promising contributions to stakeholder theory, leadership theories, and ethical theories in general and business ethics theories in particular. (shrink)