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42The Business of Liberty: Freedom and Information in Ethics, Politics, and LawOxford University Press. 2022.What makes political freedom valuable to us? Two well-known arguments are that freedom contributes to our desire satisfaction and to our personal responsibility. Here, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that freedom is valuable when it is accompanied by knowledge. He offers an original and systematic account of the relationship between freedom and knowledge and defends two original normative ideals of known freedom and acknowledged freedom. By combining psychological perspectives on choice and philosophi…Read more
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40Against Nationalism: Climate Change, Human Rights, and International LawDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 55 (2): 173-198. 2022.Climate change threatens humanity more than anything else. If we talk of nationalism, we ought therefore consider its pros and cons in light of the climate emergency. Anatol Lieven believes that civic nationalism along the lines of Chaim Gans, David Miller, and Yuli Tamir helps combat global warming. He thinks that when nationalists recognize that climate change is just as threatening to the survival of their nation-state as wars, they will make the sacrifices necessary to avert the threat. In t…Read more
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39Moral Responsibility for Large‐Scale Events: The Difference between Climate Change and Economic CrisesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 42 (1): 191-212. 2018.
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38Pledging Integrity: Oaths as Forms of Business Ethics ManagementJournal of Business Ethics 136 (1): 23-42. 2016.The global financial crisis has led to a surprising interest in professional oaths in business. Examples are the MBA Oath, the Economist’s Oath and the Dutch Banker’s Oath, which senior executives in the financial services industry in the Netherlands have been obliged to swear since 2010. This paper is among the first to consider oaths from the perspective of business ethics. A framework is presented for analysing oaths in terms of their form, their content and the specific contribution they mak…Read more
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35Stakes Sensitivity and Credit Rating: A New Challenge for RegulatorsJournal of Business Ethics 169 (1): 169-179. 2019.The ethical practices of credit rating agencies, particularly following the 2008 financial crisis, have been subject to extensive analysis by economists, ethicists, and policymakers. We raise a novel issue facing CRAs that has to do with a problem concerning the transmission of epistemic status of ratings from CRAs to the beneficiaries of the ratings, and use it to provide a new challenge for regulators. Building on recent work in philosophy, we argue that since CRAs have different stakes than t…Read more
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35Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics 180 (3): 835-861. 2022.To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in recent years, t…Read more
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34Pitting Virtue Ethics Against Situationism: An Empirical Argument for VirtueEthical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (3): 463-479. 2023.Situationists maintain that psychological evidence (e.g., the well-known Good Samaritan experiment) challenges a key assumption of virtue ethics, namely that virtuous people display cross-situational consistency of behavior. This situationist critique is frequently thought to pose a serious threat to virtue ethics. Virtue ethicists have so far mainly put forward conceptual rather than empirical arguments against situationism. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a plausible empirical ar…Read more
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33Impermissible Self-Rationalizing Pessimism: In Defence of a Pragmatic Ethics of BeliefErkenntnis 86 (2): 257-274. 2019.We present an argument against a standard evidentialist position on the ethics of belief. We argue that sometimes a person merits criticism for holding a belief even when that belief is well supported by her evidence in any relevant sense. We show how our argument advances the case for anti-evidentialism in the light of other arguments presented in the recent literature, and respond to a set of possible evidentialist rejoinders.
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33Alcohol in the Media and Young People: What Do We Need for Liberal Policy-making?Public Health Ethics 7 (1): 35-46. 2014.There is evidence to the effect that exposing children to alcohol consumption in the media increases the chances that they will consume alcohol as minors or as adults, and since alcohol consumption is associated with numerous public health issues, calls for stricter regulation can be heard from many quarters. This article argues that with the available research we cannot conclude that exposure to portrayals of alcohol consumption plays a genuine causal role in bringing about the things with whic…Read more
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26Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse Than GreedCambridge University Press. 2015.In this topical book, Boudewijn de Bruin examines the ethical 'blind spots' that lay at the heart of the global financial crisis. He argues that the most important moral problem in finance is not the 'greed is good' culture, but rather the epistemic shortcomings of bankers, clients, rating agencies and regulators. Drawing on insights from economics, psychology and philosophy, de Bruin develops a novel theory of epistemic virtue and applies it to racist and sexist lending practices, subprime mort…Read more
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26On Glazer and Rubinstein on persuasionIn Krzysztof R. Apt & Robert van Rooij (eds.), New Perspectives on Games and Interactions, Amsterdam University Press. 2008.Jacob Glazer and Ariel Rubinstein proffer an exciting new approach to analyze persuasion, using formal tools from economics to address questions that argumentation theorists, logicians, and cognitive and social psychologists have been interested in since Aristotle's Rhetoric. In this note I examine to what extent their approach is successful, and show ways to extend it.
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23Knowledge attribution, socioeconomic status, and education: new results using the Great British Class SurveySynthese 199 (3-4): 7615-7657. 2021.This paper presents new evidence on the impact of socioeconomic status and education on knowledge attribution. I examine a variety of cases, including vignettes where agents have been Gettiered, have false beliefs, and possess knowledge. Early work investigated whether SES might be associated with knowledge attribution :429–460, 2001; Seyedsayamdost in Episteme 12:95–116, 2014). But these studies used college education as a dummy variable for SES. I use the recently developed Great British Class…Read more
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19Over de wetenschappelijkheid van de rechtswetenschapNetherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy 38 (3): 236-243. 2009.This article provides an outsider perspective on the scientificity of legal studies. First, I argue that the presence of controversies does not mean that legal studies lack the status of a genuine science. Astronomy, mathematics, and economics have their controversies, too. Second, I show that non-empirical, non-normative research is no less scientific than empirical research. This is illustrated by work in mathematical logic. Third, I demonstrate the same claim for non-empirical, normative rese…Read more
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18Ranking philosophy journals: a meta-ranking and a new survey rankingSynthese 202 (6): 1-31. 2023.This paper presents a meta-ranking of philosophy journals based on existing rankings, and a new ranking of philosophy journals developed through a survey involving a thousand authors (351 respondents, data collection May 2022) of articles from the most recent issues of 40 general philosophy journals. In addition to assessing journal quality, data were gathered on various variables such as gender, age, years in academia, number of refereed publications, area of specialization, and journal affilia…Read more
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16The Liberal Value of PrivacyLaw and Philosophy 29 (5): 505-534. 2010.This paper presents an argument for the value of privacy that is based on a purely negative concept of freedom only. I show that privacy invasions may decrease a person’s negative freedom as well as a person’s knowledge about the negative freedom she possesses. I argue that not only invasions that lead to actual interference, but also invasions that lead to potential interference (many cases of identity theft) constitute actual harm to the invadee’s liberty interests, and I critically examine th…Read more
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15Common knowledge of payoff uncertainty in gamesSynthese 163 (1): 79-97. 2007.Using epistemic logic, we provide a non-probabilistic way to formalise payoff uncertainty, that is, statements such as ‘player i has approximate knowledge about the utility functions of player j.’ We show that on the basis of this formalisation common knowledge of payoff uncertainty and rationality (in the sense of excluding weakly dominated strategies, due to Dekel and Fudenberg (1990)) characterises a new solution concept we have called ‘mixed iterated strict weak dominance.’
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15Media Violence and Freedom of Speech: How to Use Empirical DataEthical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (5): 493-505. 2008.Susan Hurley has argued against a well known argument for freedom of speech, the argument from autonomy, on the basis of two hypotheses about violence in the media and aggressive behaviour. The first hypothesis says that exposure to media violence causes aggressive behaviour; the second, that humans have an innate tendency to copy behaviour in ways that bypass conscious deliberation. I argue, first, that Hurley is not successful in setting aside the argument from autonomy. Second, I show that th…Read more
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13Pledging Integrity: Oaths as Forms of Business Ethics ManagementJournal of Business Ethics 136 (1): 23-42. 2016.The global financial crisis has led to a surprising interest in professional oaths in business. Examples are the MBA Oath, the Economist’s Oath and the Dutch Banker’s Oath, which senior executives in the financial services industry in the Netherlands have been obliged to swear since 2010. This paper is among the first to consider oaths from the perspective of business ethics. A framework is presented for analysing oaths in terms of their form, their content and the specific contribution they mak…Read more
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13Afscheid van een SpinozaprojectAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 91 159-161. 2002.
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2Climate Change and Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics. forthcoming.This article sketches ways in which business ethics should contribute to addressing the climate emergency. I consider some ways in which normative contributions to the debate on climate change and global warming have been defended, and how international thinking about environmental issues has moved from consequentialist to justice- and rights-based thinking. A recent case that came before the Hague District Court between a Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth, Milieudefensie, and Royal Dutch She…Read more
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Reflexive Law and Climate Change: The EU Sustainable Finance Action PlanIn Joakim Sandberg & Lisa Warenski (eds.), The Philosophy of Money and Finance, Oxford University Press. 2024.This Chapter studies legislative initiatives around sustainable finance deriving from the Action Plan: Financing Sustainable Growth (also called ‘Sustainable Finance Action Plan’, ‘Action Plan’ henceforth), published by the European Commission (‘Commission’) in 2018 (Communication 2018/97). I evaluate various instruments proposed in the Action Plan, using a reflexive law approach coupled with insights from business ethics and epistemology (De Bruin, 2013, 2015). I point to the challenges such an…Read more
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Real Life Collective Epistemic Virtue and ViceIn Mark Alfano, Colin Klein & Jeroen De Ridder (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. pp. 396-423. forthcoming.
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Freedom in finance: the importance of epistemic virtues and interlucent communicationIn Christopher Cowton & James Dempsey (eds.), Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis: Lessons From the Crash, Routledge. 2019.
Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Financial Ethics |
Sustainability |
Climate Change |
Areas of Interest
Business Ethics |
Liberalism |
Virtue Epistemology |
Philosophy of Law |