•  10
    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
  •  930
    Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the trut…Read more
  •  22
    Pitting Virtue Ethics Against Situationism: An Empirical Argument for Virtue
    with Raymond Zaal and Ronald Jeurissen
    Ethical 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
  •  24
    Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics
    with Steffen Böhm, Michal Carrington, Nelarine Cornelius, Michelle Greenwood, Louise Hassan, Tanusree Jain, Charlotte Karam, Arno Kourula, Laurence Romani, Suhaib Riaz, and Deirdre Shaw
    Journal 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
  •  33
    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
  • Real Life Collective Epistemic Virtue and Vice
    with Barend de Rooij
    In Mark Alfano, Colin Klein & Jeroen De Ridder (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. pp. 396-423. forthcoming.
  • 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
  •  2
    Climate Change and Business Ethics
    Journal 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
  •  34
    Against Nationalism: Climate Change, Human Rights, and International Law
    Danish 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
  •  14
    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
  •  41
    The Development and Validation of the Epistemic Vice Scale
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-28. forthcoming.
    This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy…Read more
  •  34
    Financial incentives, learning, group consultation, and increased experimental control are among the experimental techniques economists have successfully used to deflect the behavioral challenge posed by research conducted by such scholars as Tversky and Kahneman. These techniques save the economic armchair to the extent that they align laypeople judgments with economic theory by increasing cognitive effort and reflection in experimental subjects. It is natural to hypothesize that a similar stra…Read more
  •  41
    Epistemic Injustice in Finance
    Topoi 40 (4): 755-763. 2019.
    This article applies philosophical work on epistemic injustice and cognate concepts to study gender and racial disparity in financial markets. Members of disadvantaged groups often receive inferior financial services. In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to provide discriminatorily disparate treatment to groups defined by gender and skin colour. Racial disparity in financial services is generally considered to be discriminatory. The standard view among most regulators is that gender disparity is…Read more
  •  29
    Stakes Sensitivity and Credit Rating: A New Challenge for Regulators
    Journal 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
  •  29
    Impermissible Self-Rationalizing Pessimism: In Defence of a Pragmatic Ethics of Belief
    with Nikolaj Nottelmann
    Erkenntnis 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.
  •  9
    Pledging Integrity: Oaths as Forms of Business Ethics Management
    Journal 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
  •  161
    Liberal and Republican Freedom
    Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (4): 418-439. 2009.
    This paper argues that liberal freedom (non-interference) is epistemologically prior to republican freedom (non-domination). I start investigate three relations between liberal and republican freedom: (i) Logical Equivalence, or the question whether republican freedom entails liberal freedom (and vice versa); (ii) Degree Supervenience, or whether changes in the degree (amount, quantity) of republican freedom are mirrored by changes in the degree of liberal freedom (and vice versa); and (iii) Epi…Read more
  •  11
    Afscheid van een Spinozaproject
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 91 159-161. 2002.
  •  318
    In this chapter, one considers finance at its very foundations, namely, at the place where assumptions are being made about the ways to measure the two key ingredients of finance: risk and return. It is well known that returns for a large class of assets display a number of stylized facts that cannot be squared with the traditional views of 1960s financial economics (normality and continuity assumptions, i.e. Brownian representation of market dynamics). Despite the empirical counterevidence, no…Read more
  •  502
    This chapter argues for deregulation of the credit-rating market. Credit-rating agencies are supposed to contribute to the informational needs of investors trading bonds. They provide ratings of debt issued by corporations and governments, as well as of structured debt instruments (e.g. mortgage-backed securities). As many academics, regulators, and commentators have pointed out, the ratings of structured instruments turned out to be highly inaccurate, and, as a result, they have argued for tigh…Read more
  •  13
    Common knowledge of payoff uncertainty in games
    Synthese 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.’
  •  11
    Media Violence and Freedom of Speech: How to Use Empirical Data
    Ethical 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
  •  10
    The Liberal Value of Privacy
    Law 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
  •  331
    Game Theory in Philosophy
    Topoi 24 (2): 197-208. 2005.
    Game theory is the mathematical study of strategy and conflict. It has wide applications in economics, political science, sociology, and, to some extent, in philosophy. Where rational choice theory or decision theory is concerned with individual agents facing games against nature, game theory deals with games in which all players have preference orderings over the possible outcomes of the game. This paper gives an informal introduction to the theory and a survey of applications in diverse branch…Read more
  •  35
    Editorial Introduction: Putting Virtues Into Practice. A Challenge for Business and Organizations (review)
    with Joan Fontrodona and Alejo José G. Sison
    Journal of Business Ethics 113 (4): 563-565. 2013.