Charlotte Franziska Unruh

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of ‘piecemeal’ conditionality on different pots of aid. This paper argues that a better response would be to adopt a more unified approach. In particular, the paper explores the social licence framework as a potential way to ‘build back better’. It is argued that the nature of the implicit social contract between society and the private sector provides the normative force underpinning demands for a social purpose for business, and that this purpose in turn can be used to specify the conditions firms must meet to legitimise their operations. The paper then considers three core elements involved in any introduction of a social licence framework, and surveys the potential benefits and challenges that might emerge in moving towards a social licence framework.

This article offers a novel account of collegial relationships and shows how it is of value to the normative assessment of work arrangements. We first argue that the literature on collegial relationships has overlooked an important form that such relationships take: next to professional relationships (Betzler and Löschke 2021) and collegial friendships (Mlonyeni 2023), there are collaborative relationships, which can produce the distinct goods of shared achievement and shared experience. We then argue that attending to collegial relationships can refine the normative assessment of work arrangements. This argument proceeds in three steps. Drawing on the example of click work, we first illustrate the possibility of collegiality gaps: work can be arranged in ways that severely restrict the opportunity to form collegial relationships (of each type). We argue that collegiality gaps are normatively relevant and that their possibility extends far beyond click work. Finally, we show how attending to collegiality gaps can help refine accounts of the non-monetary goods of work and improve ongoing debates about the desirability and permissibility of specific employment arrangements, like gig work. The article closes by briefly assessing the political upshots of collegiality gaps, distinguishing an individual and a societal perspective on the value of collegiality.

In our article “The Potential and Limitations of Artificial Colleagues”, we argue that policy makers and industry leaders ought to prioritise human collegial relationships over relationships with artificial colleagues. We call this the Principle of Strict Priority of Human Collegial Relationships (PSP). Nicholas Carroll offers an intriguing critique of PSP, claiming that it is not a plausible candidate for a governance principle because it is insufficiently action-guiding. Carroll further proposes an amended version of PSP, the Principle of Proportional Priority for Human Collegial Relationships (PPP). Here, we outline two concerns with this proposal. First, we are not convinced that PSP stands in need of an amendment. Second, we are not convinced that PPP is a compelling candidate for an amendment.

This article assesses the potential of artificial colleagues to help us realise the goods of collegial relationships and discusses its practical implications. In speaking of artificial colleagues, it refers to AI-based agential systems in the workplace. The article proceeds in three steps. First, it develops a comprehensive account of the goods of collegial relationships. It argues that, in addition to goods at the individual level, collegial relationships can provide valuable goods at the social level. Second, it argues that artificial colleagues are limited in their capacity to realise the goods of collegial relationships: at the individual level, they can at best realise some such goods, and at the social level, they can at best support their realisation. This contradicts Nyholm and Smids’ (2020) claim that robots can be good colleagues. The article traces these limitations to particular features of artificial colleagues and discusses to what extent they would hold for radically advanced systems. Third, the article examines the policy implications of these findings. It highlights how the introduction of artificial colleagues, in addition to potentially crowding out human colleagues, will likely impact relations among human colleagues. And it proposes a governance principle that gives strict priority to human collegial relationships.

Many people hold the constraint against doing harm, the view that the reason against doing harm is stronger than the reason against merely allowing harm, everything else being equal. Mogensen and MacAskill (2021) have recently argued that when considering indirect long-term consequences of our everyday behavior, the constraint against doing harm faces a problem: it has the absurd implication that we should do as little as possible in our lives. In this paper, I explore the view that, for behavior that does not increase anyone’s ex ante risk of suffering harm, the reason against doing harm is not stronger than the reason against merely allowing harm, everything else being equal. I argue that this view is plausible, show how it solves the paralysis problem, and defend it against objections.

Many people think that the moral reason against doing harm is stronger than the moral reason against allowing harm. What should these people think about doing and allowing good? I address this question by distinguishing two ways of understanding the doing/allowing distinction. The agency view implies that the moral reason for doing good is stronger than the moral reason for allowing good. The imposition view implies that the moral reason against preventing good is stronger than the moral reason against failing to do good. I defend the imposition view and explore its implications for the comparative strength of harm-based and benefit-based reasons.

ABSTRACT When does a state of affairs constitute a harm to someone? Comparative accounts say that being worse off constitutes harm. The temporal version of the comparative account is seldom taken seriously, due to apparently fatal counterexamples. I defend the temporal version against these counterexamples, and show that it is in fact more plausible than the prominent counterfactual version of the account. Non-comparative accounts say that being badly off constitutes harm. However, neither the temporal comparative account nor the non-comparative account can correctly classify all harms. I argue that we should combine them into a hybrid account of harm. The hybrid account is extensionally adequate and presents a unified view on the nature of harm.

Many people believe that we have moral duties towards those we bring into existence in the short term: our children. Many people also believe that we have moral duties towards those we bring into existence in the long term: future generations. In this article, I explore how these beliefs are connected. I argue that the present generation is morally responsible for future generations in virtue of bringing them into existence. This responsibility entails moral duties to ensure that future people have adequate life prospects. These duties are held directly towards future generations. I argue that this direct argument can overcome challenges that indirect arguments, which justify moral duties concerning future generations via moral duties towards present children, face. The upshot is that considerations from procreative ethics help to illustrate that the present generation stands in a morally relevant special relationship to future generations, a fact that is often overlooked in intergenerational ethics.

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of ‘piecemeal’ conditionality on different pots of aid. This paper argues that a better response would be to adopt a more unified approach. In particular, the paper explores the social licence framework as a potential way to ‘build back better’. It is argued that the nature of the implicit social contract between society and the private sector provides the normative force underpinning demands for a social purpose for business, and that this purpose in turn can be used to specify the conditions firms must meet to legitimise their operations. The paper then considers three core elements involved in any introduction of a social licence framework, and surveys the potential benefits and challenges that might emerge in moving towards a social licence framework.

Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged.

Many people believe that we have a moral reason to benefit others. However, this reason is commonly thought to be weaker than the reason against harming others. This might explain why relatively little attention has been paid to the morality of benefiting in non-identity cases. My aim is to convince you, in the next few paragraphs, that this is a decisive oversight. The non-identity problem arises in cases of harming and in cases of benefiting alike. It is therefore broader in scope than is often acknowledged. The most promising solutions of the non-identity problem are harm-based, but such solutions will need to provide suitable accounts of both harming and benefiting.

In this paper, I defend the view that within a rights-based ethical framework, the moral status of future generations is best understood as that of present rightsholders. I argue that in this way it can be justified that we have obligations towards future generations. This justification in turn is of great relevance for many issues in moral theory and applied ethics. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the fact that future persons will have rights in the future cannot fully account for present obligations. The missing link in this argument cannot be provided by approaches that infer those obligations mediately. In the second part of the paper, I argue that existing is not a necessary condition for being a rightsholder. First, our own future selves should be said to have rights even though they do not exist at present. Second, even at present, uncertainty challenges the relationship between rightsholders and obligation bearers: often enough, obligations depend on presuppositions or suspicions about other persons’ existence. In light of these cases, we should conceive of rightsholders as place holders, that is, sets of (actual) individuals whose existence or identity can be unknown or indetermined, with specific properties. Therefore, future generations can coherently be said to have rights now that correspond to our present obligations towards them.