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311The Corporate Baby in the Bathwater: Why Proposals to Abolish Corporate Personhood Are MisguidedJournal of Business Ethics 183 (4): 983-997. 2023.The fear that business corporations have claimed unwarranted constitutional protections which have entrenched corporate power has produced a broad social movement demanding that constitutional rights be restricted to human beings and corporate personhood be abolished. We develop a critique of these proposals organized around the three salient rationales we identify in the accompanying narrative, which we argue reflect a narrow focus on large business corporations, a misunderstanding of the legal…Read more
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27Beyond market, firm, and state: Mapping the ethics of global value chainsBusiness and Society Review 124 (3): 325-343. 2019.The growth of global value chains (GVCs) and the emergence of novel forms of value chain governance pose two questions for normative business ethics. First, how should we conceptualize the relationships between members of a GVC? Second, what ethical implications follow from these relationships, both with respect to interactions between GVC members and with respect to achieving broader transnational governance goals? We address these questions by examining the emergence of transnational eco-label…Read more
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14What Sal Owes Mookie: What Do The Right Thing and Mangrove Teach us About Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics 188 (3): 419-427. 2023.The aim of this paper is to discuss popular conceptions of business ethics and their relationship to the problem of racial injustice by way of reviewing Spike Lee’s (1989) _Do the Right Thing_. Taking place on one day in late 80’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, and set against a tense decade of racial conflict in New York City, Spike Lee’s masterpiece has deeply influenced American discourse on race, capturing many of the complex interpersonal dynamics that are both constitutive and consequence of American…Read more
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12The corporation's governmental provenance and its significanceEconomics and Philosophy 35 (2): 283-306. 2019.:Corporations cannot exist, scholars rightly note, without being constituted by government. However, many take a further step, claiming that corporations are normatively distinct from other market actors because of this governmental provenance. They are mistaken. Like corporations, markets and contracts also require government for their creation. Governmental provenance does not distinguish corporations normatively because our coercive social institutions are pro tanto justified in re-arranging …Read more
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5Why’d You Have to Choose Us? On Jews and Their JokesThe Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1): 17-31. 2020.Humor, laughter, joke telling can be frivolous fun or it could act as a sword and a shield to defend and protect us against life. Humor can, at times, illuminate if not completely explain, some of the irresoluble problems and mysteries that individuals face. And, if all else fails, humor can hold off our fear of the unanswerable and the unacceptable. Historically it can be argued that during times of trial, tribulations, and suffering, Jewish communities and individuals have used humor as a way …Read more
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68Social Media Ethics and the Politics of InformationBusiness Ethics Journal Review 8 (6): 31-37. 2020.Johnson conceptualizes the social responsibilities of digital media platforms by describing two ethical approaches: one emphasizing the discursive freedom of platform-users, the other emphasizing protecting users from harmful posts. These competing concerns are on full display in the current debate over platforms’ obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Johnson argues both approaches are grounded in democracy, we argue that democratic commitments transcend the freedom/harm dichotomy. Ins…Read more
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7The Sanity of Satire: Surviving Politics One Joke at a TimeRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2020.Political humor and satire are, perhaps, as old as comedy itself, and they are crucial to our society and collective sense of self. In a poignant, pithy, but not a ponderous manner, Al Gini and Abraham Singer delve into satire’s history to rejoice in its triumphs and watch its development from ancient graffiti to the latest late night TV talk show.
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32Prioritizing Democracy: A Commentary on Smith’s Presidential Address to the Society for Business EthicsBusiness Ethics Quarterly 30 (1): 139-153. 2020.ABSTRACT:In his 2018 presidential address to the Society of Business Ethics, Jeffery Smith claimed that political approaches to business ethics must be attentive to both the distinctive nature of commercial activity and, at the same time, the degree to which such commercial activity is structured by political decisions and choices. In what we take to be a friendly extension of the argument, we claim that Smith does not go far enough with this insight. Smith’s political approach to business ethic…Read more
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19Beyond market, firm, and state: Mapping the ethics of global value chainsBusiness and Society Review 124 (3): 325-343. 2019.The growth of global value chains (GVCs) and the emergence of novel forms of value chain governance pose two questions for normative business ethics. First, how should we conceptualize the relationships between members of a GVC? Second, what ethical implications follow from these relationships, both with respect to interactions between GVC members and with respect to achieving broader transnational governance goals? We address these questions by examining the emergence of transnational eco‐label…Read more
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15The Sanity of Satire: Surviving Politics One Joke at a TimeRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2020.Political humor and satire are, perhaps, as old as comedy itself, and they are crucial to our society and collective sense of self. In a poignant, pithy, but not a ponderous manner, Al Gini and Abraham Singer delve into satire’s history to rejoice in its triumphs and watch its development from ancient graffiti to the latest late night TV talk show.
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114Justice Failure: Efficiency and Equality in Business EthicsJournal of Business Ethics 149 (1): 97-115. 2018.This paper offers the concept of “justice failure,” as a counterpart to the familiar idea of market failure, in order to better understand managers’ ethical obligations. This paper takes the “market failures approach” to business ethics as its point of departure. The success of the MFA, I argue, lies in its close proximity with economic theory, particularly in the idea that, within a larger scheme of social cooperation, markets ought to pursue efficiency and leave the pursuit of equality to the …Read more
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27Rawls Well That Ends WellBusiness Ethics Journal Review 6 (3): 11-17. 2018.Welch and Ly register three objections to my argument that the Rawlsian paradigm offers no resources for formulating a normative theory of corporate governance. In this brief response, I note that while I agree with the first of these objection, I don’t think it poses any serious trouble to my argument; the other two objections, on the other hand, I am less convinced by. I then offer two alternative strategies for bringing Rawls to bear on business ethics, which don’t involve trying to apply his…Read more
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10The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society, by Gerald Gaus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 289 pp. ISBN: 978-0-0691-15880-8 (review)Business Ethics Quarterly 27 (3): 466-469. 2017.
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36Talk Ain’t Cheap: Political CSR and the Challenges of Corporate DeliberationBusiness Ethics Quarterly 27 (2): 183-211. 2017.ABSTRACT:Deliberative democratic theory, commonly used to explore questions of “political” corporate social responsibility, has become prominent in the literature. This theory has been challenged previously for being overly sanguine about firm profit imperatives, but left unexamined is whether corporate contexts are appropriate contexts for deliberative theory in the first place. We explore this question using the case of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign to show that significant challenges ex…Read more
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61There Is No Rawlsian Theory of Corporate GovernanceBusiness Ethics Quarterly 25 (1): 65-92. 2015.ABSTRACT:The major aim of this article is to show that John Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be applied effectively to questions of business ethics and corporate governance. I begin with a reading of Rawls that emphasizes both the critical and pragmatic nature of his theory. In the second section I look more closely at the notion of society’s “basic structure” and its place within Rawls’s theory. In the third section, I argue that “the corporation” cannot be understood as part of this basic stru…Read more
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22What is the Best Way to Argue Against the Profit-Maximization Principle?Business Ethics Journal Review 76-81. 2013.
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University of Toronto, St. George CampusGraduate student
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |