Certainly, to read Hobbes in this discussion of angels, of revelation, and of the proper worship of God. But way requires one to take some of his statements at something other than despite these not being, strictly speaking, philosophy, Hobbes does in fact face value. Things outside philosophy in its strict sense may not be amenable to thorough In the Elements of Law Hobbes offers a cosmological argument for the causal explanation in terms of the motions of bodies, but they may well existence of God Hobbes , However, he argues, the only thing still be within the limits of rational discussion.
So when we more recently. Thus when Mintz , in a Hobbes , However, in later work, such as the appendix to the witnessed the ascension of Christ, that witchcraft is a myth and Latin edition of Leviathan, Hobbes proposes a different view. By this he means at plausibility of claims to know things because told by God: least that God is extended.
However, Hobbes does seem well observed his own slumbering Hobbes , Indeed, he goes to some This does not rule out the possibility that God might indeed communicate pains to defend this as an acceptable version of Christianity.
Whether or directly with an individual by means of a vision. But it does rule out other not one believes that, this is still on the surface an odd theism rather than people sensibly believing reports of such occurrences, for the events atheism. This is notable to some extent in his Hobbes takes a similarly sceptical attitude to reports of miracles.
Emphasizing the occasional a warning about believing too hastily in reports of miracles. Dreams had in stressful circumstances, when one sleeps briefly, the evidence for belief in miracles, but a similar sceptical attitude is are sometimes taken as visions, Hobbes says.
He uses this to explain a present. Moreover, these interpreters claim, there are various pieces of evidence that point to this 6. Reception hidden underlying view. Opinions differ on what the crucial evidence of the hidden atheism is. In many cases, the claims about a material God do not add up. The Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, for example, devoted considerable energy to arguing against Hobbesian atheism and There is what I would take to be a fairly obvious problem of materialism.
If Hobbes is aware of this circularity, he does not call Of all the canonical philosophers in the period from Descartes to Kant, attention to it. Perhaps he just did not notice it. Leibniz found himself.
On the other hand, later empiricist There are some tricky general methodological questions here, about when philosophers, in particular Locke and Hume, develop several Hobbesian we can reasonably say that an author is trying to communicate a view themes. Indeed, one might well speak of Hobbes, not Locke, as the first of other than the one apparently stated.
Note, however, that for someone the British empiricists. This was not a recipe for a and his early adoption of the view that reasoning is computation, were quiet life. One might see Hobbes as thinking that these things could be both discussed above. This should enable readers to find unclear if Hobbes ever received them, and there is no evidence of any references in editions other than the ones used here even though most replies.
All other throughout his philosophical career, even if that engagement was never references are given by volume and page number. Most works are referred quite as intense as it was in a brief early period. Clark ed. Cottingham, decaying sense. Russell ; argues convincingly that Hume R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch ed. And Hume, like Hobbes, combines apparent acceptance of a basic Descartes, R. Malcolm ed. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, rather than of the more conventional trio of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Gaskin ed. Curley ed. The best variants from the Latin edition of , Indianapolis: Hackett, Hobbes, T. Martinich trans. Molesworth ed. Darwall, S. Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of , Duncan, S. Hobbes Studies, —78 [Preprint available from the author]. Leibniz, G. Parkinson Fodor, J. Goldie, M. Burns and M. Loemker Goldie ed. Kluwer, , — Gorham, G. Garber ed. Hackett, , 10—8. Hattab, H. Journal of the History of Philosophy, — Haugeland, J. Hungerland, I.
York: Abaris Books, 7— Bernstein, H. Research Archives, 3: — Jesseph, D. Bostrenghi ed. Curley, E. Journal of the History of Ideas, 51— Leijenhorst, C. Shapin, S. Malcolm, N. Sorell, T. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon, — Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 83— Martinich, A.
Philosophy, — Mintz, S. Moll, K. Obligation, Oxford: Clarendon. Friedman and S. University Library. Ebbesen ed. Philosophy, 5: — Pettit, P. This is where business ethics comes in, according to the MFA.
Businesspeople have a moral obligation not to exploit the market failures that the law allows them to exploit. Put another way, the moral obligations of businesspeople are identified by the ideal regulatory regime—the one we would have if regulations were costless and written and administered by a godlike figure.
Selecting a normative framework and applying it to a range of issues is an important way of doing business ethics. But it is not the only way. Indeed, the more common approach is to identify a business activity and then analyze it using intuitions and principles common to many moral and political theories. Firms and consumers The main way that firms interact with consumers is by selling, or attempting to sell, products and services to them.
Many ethical issues attend this interaction. Among the things commonly said to be inappropriate for sale are sexual services, surrogacy services, and human organs. Some writers object to markets in these items for consequentialist reasons. They argue that markets in commodities like sex and kidneys will lead to the exploitation of vulnerable people Satz Others object to the attitudes or values expressed in such markets.
Whether selling a particular thing for money expresses disrespect, they note, is culturally contingent. When is a product too unsafe to be sold? This question is often answered by government agencies. In the U. In some cases these standards are mandatory e. The state identifies minimum standards and individual businesses can choose to adopt higher ones. Questions about product safety are a matter of significant debate among economists, legal scholars, and public policy experts.
But business ethicists have paid scant attention to these questions. Existing treatments often combine discussions of safety with discussions of liability—the question of who should pay for harms that products cause—and tend to be found in business ethics textbooks. There is much room for exploration of these issues. On what basis should the former be prohibited but the latter not be Hasnas ?
On the question of liability, an important issue is whether it is fair to hold manufacturers responsible for harms that their products cause, when the manufacturers are not morally at fault for those harms Piker Advertisements tell us something about a product, and try to persuade us to buy it.
Both of these components can be subject to ethical evaluation. Emphasizing its informational component, some writers stress the positive value of advertising. Markets function efficiently only when certain conditions are met. One of these conditions is perfect information: minimally, consumers have to understand the features of the products for sale. While this condition will never be fully met in reality, advertising can help to ensure that it is met to a greater degree Heath Another value that can be promoted through advertising is autonomy.
People have certain needs and desires—e. Their choices are more likely to satisfy their needs and desires if they have information about what is for sale, which advertising can provide Goldman These good effects depend, of course, on advertisements producing true beliefs, or at least not producing false beliefs, in consumers.
The issue here is not whether deceptive advertising is wrong—most believe it is cf. Its advertisements were deceptive, and therefore wrong, because they appeared to make a true claim, but in fact made a false claim. But many advertisements that do not seem deceptive make false or unverifiable claims. It is common to say of these types of claims that they are not warranted as true, and so cannot deceive Carson Yet these claims may in fact deceive some people.
Advertisements are deemed deceptive when a reasonable person, not any person at all, is deceived. This makes deception in advertising a matter of results in consumers, not intentions in advertisers.
Many reasons have been offered for why deceptive advertising is wrong. One is the Kantian claim that deceiving others is disrespectful to them, a use of them as a mere means. Deceptive advertising may also lead to harm, to consumers who purchase suboptimal products, given their desires and competitors who lose out on sales. A final criticism of deceptive advertising is that it erodes trust in society Attas When people do not trust each other, they will either not engage in economic transactions, or engage in them only with costly legal protections.
The persuasive component of advertising is also a fruitful subject of ethical inquiry. Galbraith , an early critic, thinks that advertising, in general, does not inform people how to acquire what they want, but instead gives them new wants. Moreover, since we are inundated with advertising for consumer goods, we want too many of those goods and not enough public goods.
Hayek rejects this claim, arguing that few if any of our desires are independent of our environment, and that anyway, desires produced in us through advertising are no less significant than desires produced in us in other ways. Galbraith is concerned about the persuasive effects of advertisements. In contrast, recent writers focus on persuasive techniques that advertisers use.
Some of these are alleged to cross the line into manipulation. It is difficult to define manipulation precisely, though many attempts have been made see, e. Associative advertising is often held up as an example of manipulative advertising.
In associative advertising, the advertiser tries to associate a product with a positive belief, feeling, attitude, or activity which usually has little to do with the product itself. Thus many television commercials for trucks in the U. Commercials for body fragrances associate those products with sex between beautiful people. The suggestion is that if you are a certain sort of person e.
Crisp argues that this sort of advertising attempts to create desires in people by circumventing their faculty of conscious choice, and in so doing subverts their autonomy cf. How seriously we take these criticisms may depend on how effective we think associative and other forms of persuasive advertising are. Paine Paine et al. But children, she argues, do not have the capacity for making wise consumer choices see also E. Moore Other populations who may be similarly vulnerable are the senile, the ignorant, and the bereaved.
Ethics may require not a total ban on marketing to them but special care in how they are marketed to Brenkert Perhaps surprisingly, business ethicists have said little directly about sales.
But much of what is said about advertising also applies to sales. Salespeople are, in a sense, the final advertisers of products to consumers. They provide benefits to consumers in much the same way as advertisers and have the same ability to deceive or manipulate consumers.
Carson works out a detailed theory of ethics for salespeople. Carson justifies 1 — 4 by appealing to the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated.
Whether salespeople should help customers in this way may depend on how adversarial their relationship should be. The broader issue here is one of disclosure. But there is no consensus on what information is relevant to a purchasing decision, or what reasonable people want to know.
For many products bought and sold in markets, sellers offer an item at a certain price, and buyers take or leave that price. But in some cases there is negotiation over price and other aspects of the transaction. The locus classicus for this debate is Carr According to him, bluffing in negotiations is permissible because business has its own special set of rules and bluffing is permissible according to these rules.
Carson agrees that bluffing is permissible in business, though in a more limited range of cases than Carr. If you have good reason to believe that your adversary in a negotiation is misstating her bargaining position, then you are permitted to misstate yours. A requirement to tell the truth in these circumstances would put you at a significant disadvantage relative to your adversary, which you are not required to suffer.
Sellers of goods have some flexibility about how to price goods. Most business ethicists would accept that, in most cases, the prices at which products should be sold is a matter for private individuals to decide. This view has been defended on grounds of property rights.
Some claim that if I have a right to X, then I am free to transfer it to you on whatever terms that I propose and you accept Boatright It has also been defended on grounds of welfare.
Prices set by the voluntary exchanges of individuals reveal valuable information about the relative demand for and supply of goods, allowing resources to flow to their most productive uses Hayek Despite this, most business ethicists recognize some limits on prices. One issue that has received attention recently is price discrimination. This is widely regarded as wrong.
Economists tend to think that price discrimination is valuable insofar as it enables firms to increase output. But the moral status of it is less clear. When it was revealed that Staples and other online retailers were charging consumers in different zip codes different prices for the same products at the same time, consumers were outraged.
The problem may be that Staples and others engaged in this practice without disclosing it. Another issue of pricing ethics is price gouging. Price gouging can be understood as a sharp increase in the price of a necessary good in the wake of an emergency which renders that good scarce. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in , for example, many retailers charged very high prices for water and gasoline. Many jurisdictions have laws against price gouging, and it is widely regarded as unethical Snyder But some theorists defend price gouging.
While granting that sales of items in circumstances like these are exploitative, they note that they are mutually beneficial. Both the seller and buyer prefer to engage in the transaction rather than not engage in it. Moreover, when items are sold at inflated prices, this attracts more sellers into the market.
Permitting price gouging may thus be the fastest way of eliminating it Zwolinski For further discussion, see the entry on exploitation. Most contemporary scholars believe that sellers have wide, though not unlimited, discretion in how much they charge for goods and services.
Firms and workers Business ethicists have written much about the relationship between employers and employees. Most of this writing has inquired into the obligations that employers owe to employees. Another important topic in this area is privacy. For space reasons this topic will not be discussed, but see the entries on privacy and privacy and information technology.
The question of what criteria employers should not use is addressed in discussions of discrimination. Discussion has focused on two questions. First, when does the use of a certain criterion in an employment decision count as discriminatory?
Suppose that white diners prefer to be served by white waiters rather than black waiters. Another question that has received considerable attention is: What makes discrimination wrong?
For further discussion, see the entry on discrimination. According to them, employers have a duty to hire the most qualified applicant. Some justify this duty by appealing to considerations of desert D. The standard challenge to this view appeals to property rights Kershnar While we might think that excluding some ways you can dispose of your property e. Many of the same ethical issues that attend hiring also attend firing. There has been a robust discussion of the ethics of firing in the business ethics literature.
Most would say that it is wrong for an employer to terminate an employee for some reasons, e. Thus the debate is between those who think that employers should be able to terminate employees for any reason with some exceptions, and those who think that employers should be able to terminate employees only for certain reasons.
Arguments for at will employment appeal to freedom or macroeconomic effects. Since the demand for pay typically exceeds the supply, the question of how pay should be distributed is naturally analyzed as a problem of justice. Two general theories of justice in pay have attracted attention. This view is sometimes justified in terms of property rights.
Employees own their labor, and employers own their capital, and they are free, within broad limits, to dispose of it as they please Boatright According to it, the just wage for a worker is the wage that reflects her contribution to the firm. This view comes in two versions. On the absolute version, workers should receive an amount of pay that equals the value of their contributions to the firm D. On the comparative version, workers should receive an amount of pay that reflects the relative value of their contributions to the firm, given what others in the firm contribute and are paid Sternberg The contribution view strikes some as normatively basic, a view for which no further argument can be given D.
The pay of any employee in a firm can be evaluated from a moral point of view, using the two theories sketched above. But business ethicists have paid particular attention to the pay of certain groups of employees, viz. There has been a robust debate about whether CEOs are paid too much Moriarty a , with scholars falling roughly into two camps.
Reiff There has also been a robust debate about whether workers in sweatshops are paid too little. They say that sweatshops wages, while low by our standards, are not low by the standards of the countries in which the sweatshops are located. This explains why people choose to work in a sweatshop: it is the best offer they have. Efforts to increase artificially the wages of sweatshop workers, according to these writers, is misguided on two counts.
First, it is an interference with the autonomous choices of employers and workers. Second, it is likely to make workers worse off, since employers will respond by either moving operations to a new location or employing fewer workers in that location.
Other writers challenge these claims. While granting that workers choose to work in sweatshops, they deny that their choices are voluntary D. Given their very low wages, this suggests that sweatshop workers are exploited. Moreover, some argue, appealing to a Kantian duty of beneficence, that firms can and should do more for sweatshop workers Snyder To use his example: if one worker performs all of the tasks required to make a pin himself, he can make just a few pins per day.
But there is human cost, according to Smith, to the detailed division of labor. This argument assumes, of course, that workers have the financial ability to trade wages for meaningfulness. The above argument treats meaningful work as a matter of preference: as a job amenity that employers can decline to offer or that workers can trade away.
Others resist this understanding. According to Schwartz , employers are required to offer employees meaningful work, and employees are required to perform it, out of respect for autonomy. A difficulty for this argument is that respect for autonomy does not seem to require that we make all choices for ourselves. A person might, it seems, autonomously choose to allow important decisions to be made for her in certain spheres of her life, e. Arnold In addition to Smith, Marx [] was clearly concerned about the effects of work on human flourishing.
Formative arguments face two difficulties. One is establishing the connection between meaningless work and autonomous choice or another intellectual faculty. They assume that it is better for people to have fully developed faculties of autonomous choice etc. Both assumptions may be challenged. Neutralists in political philosophy think that the state should not promote the good, at least when there is reasonable disagreement about what is good see, e.
While different theorists give different definitions of whistleblowing see, e. This debate assumes that whistleblowing requires justification, or is wrong, other things equal. Many business ethicists make this assumption on the grounds that employees have a pro tanto duty of loyalty to their firms see, e.
Against this, some argue that the relationship between the firm and the employee is purely transactional—an exchange of money for labor Duska —and so is not normatively robust enough to ground a duty of loyalty.
For a discussion of this issue, see the entry on loyalty. One prominent justification of whistleblowing is due to DeGeorge According to him, it is permissible for an employee to blow the whistle when his doing so will prevent harm to society.
In a similar account, Brenkert [] says that the duty to blow the whistle derives from a duty to prevent wrongdoing. The duty to prevent harm has more weight than the duty of loyalty. To determine whether whistleblowing is not simply permissible but required, DeGeorge says, we must take into account the likely success of the whistleblowing and its effects on the whistleblower himself.
Humans are tribal creatures, and whistleblowers are often treated badly by their colleagues. So if whistleblowing is unlikely to succeed, then it need not be attempted. Another account of whistleblowing is given by Davis Like Brenkert and unlike DeGeorge , Davis focuses on the wrongdoing that the firm engages in not the harm it causes.
Whistleblowing picks out a real and important phenomenon. But it does not seem morally distinctive, in the sense that the values and duties involved in it are familiar. Loyalty to an individual or group may require that we give preference to her or their interests, to an extent. And yet, in general, we should avoid complicity in immoral behavior, and should also make an effort to prevent harm and wrongdoing, especially when our efforts are likely to succeed and are not personally very costly.
On the accounts given above, whistleblowing is simply the attempt to act in accordance with these values, and discharge these duties, in the context of the workplace. The firm in society Businesses as a whole command enormous resources, and as a result can have an enormous impact on society. One way that businesses impact society, of course, is by producing goods and services and by providing jobs.
In the late s, Merck was developing a drug to treat parasites in livestock, and it was discovered that a version of the drug might be used treat River Blindness, a disease that causes debilitating itching, pain, and eventually blindness. In the end, Merck decided to develop the drug. As expected, it was effective in treating River Blindness, but Merck made no money from it.
As of this writing in , Merck, now in concert with several nongovernmental organizations, continues to manufacture and distribute the drug for free throughout the developing world. The scholarly literature on CSR is dominated by social scientists. Author : Nickolas Pappas File Size : Author : Roger Gomm File Size : Author : Troy Williamson File Size : A Syncretistic Theory of Depiction A.
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