David William Ardagh

For over twenty centuries, from ancient Greece the ideal of natural law has been appealed to in Western moral and legal philosophy as a grounding for ethics and jurisprudence, centered on capacities of a common human nature. From the early medieval advent of Christendom, it was embedded within theistic and religious systems for over a millennium, during which time it was treated as incomplete and part of an enveloping divine law of ethics. Modern agnosticism in theology, religion, and metaphysics then saw natural law unhitched from these associations, but it is still suspect due to its lingering ties with these disciplines and practices. It endured through its meta-ethical capacity to integrate changes in science with ethics via its central notion of wellbeing as the perfection of human nature, via access to the highest good, however variously understood. Today, nature and human natures wellbeing, are both endangered. Ecological destruction arising from unbridled growth, industrial pollution, nuclear weapons and mass population displacement though poverty and wars threaten humanity. But in terms of the meta-ethics of wellbeing, both the humanist normative ethics of natural law, and some of its enveloping theistic and religious divine law addenda, can be invoked to address such evils. The book aims to reinvigorate natural law as a unifying ethical organon for this purpose, showing that it can dialogue with its enveloping divine law overlays constructively, uncovering its points of essential unity with them, and generating some unified solutions to the global threats mentioned, like poverty. These are largely due to global injustices like tax evasion, the arms trade, and political corruption, which are better prevented by cooperatively agreed and enforced global ideals, norms, and laws, based on natural and divine law, grounding international laws rather than appealing to national norms and laws alone.

The project : naturalist, theistic, and religious approaches to natural law -- Neo-Aristotelian naturalist ontology and anthropology and element 3) -- NAVE element 2) Anthropology and 3) the wish for wellbeing and its ingredients -- Element 4) Principles, precepts, and virtues -- Element 5) of NAVE -the method of determination in moral reasoning -- Physicalism is not proven -- Bringing back God and religion -- Select applications : organisational agency and ethics : states, churches, corporations -- Applying natural law to violence : the NAVE and DGE positions -- Global poverty : the moral obligations of persons, organisations, and states to relieve poverty -- Natural law applications : sexuality and marriage -- Concepts of justice, benevolence and agape -- Justice and Satygraha/Agape Caritas : the rationality of unconditional non-violence (Ahisma).

Moral people (i) have good goals in acting in a challenging situation; and (ii) use their rightly disposed intellectual and voluntary capacities (virtues) and resources to choose a good action in that situation. This requires (iii) sound ethical deliberation and decision-procedures for realising practically the abstract values and principles relevant in the concrete situation. After deliberation about sub-goals and means, they (iv) choose to execute the best particular action plan. They will have canvassed possible outcomes of the intended act, which, when executed, will have a particular result and (v) consequent outcomes for themselves, and for others; and (vi) it will show respect for the wellbeing of the community or wider society, represented by the state, and reflected in state law. A comprehensive third-party moral judgement on the act will encompass the intention and execution of the act in the situation.Part 1, Sections I-IV of this paper argue that organisations can be said to be quasi-persons, personal and moral. As artificial organisational quasi-persons, with a similar structure to natural persons, they can also have analogues of the moral features of natural persons’ moral acts: i)-vi): good goals, rightly disposed capacities and resources, ethical decision procedures, good acts or activities, with good outcomes for others, and respect for society’s norms represented in state law. An ethical acronym, GREAOS, capturing the six dominant features shared with natural persons, is suggested.In Part 2, an application of GREAOS is then made to assess a concrete organisational case, Mondragon Corporation, in order to show how if the analogy between persons and organisations is sound in principle, the acronym’s application can be made to ethically unpack a case. The acronym gives Mondragon Corporation at least a pass on ethics. Although a work in progress, its success in realising ideals of economic democracy can be an exemplar of stakeholder capitalism, an alternative to an unbridled shareholder capitalism, which has had its day.

Organisational Ethics could be more effectively taught if organisational agency could be better distinguished from activity in other group entities, and defended against criticisms. Some criticisms come from the side of what is called “methodological individualism”. These critics argue that, strictly speaking, only individuals really exist and act, and organisations are not individuals, real things, or agents. Other criticisms come from fear of the possible use of alleged “corporate personhood” to argue for a possible radical expansion of corporate rights e.g. to claim a right to vote. Others say that if corporate businesses were persons, and judged as such, they would be sociopaths (Bakan 2004). Large corporate businesses are one kind of organisation, and if organisations were allowed to claim to be full persons, this would mean that the latter criticisms were valid. The proposed account goes between the horns of the above dilemma: impersonal aggregates or full persons. It avoids both the reductive individualism and expansive, full personhood account. It gives grounds for attributing and distributing praise and blame to organisations as whole complex entities, and to their parts. Primarily, responsibility belongs to Board incumbents within them, on the basis of their goals; their direction of the acts of the other main internal role incumbents, managers and staff, and enablers, in the role structure; their own ethical decision methods; the impact of their acts on external stakeholders like end-users, other players in the practice or local community, and on the state. These factors are picked out on the basis of a theory of meaning Aristotle’s theory of analogy of attribution, some architectonic features of his Philosophical Anthropology; and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (NAVE). The paper expounds a quasi-person model of organisations, (QPM), previously described in this journal (Ardagh 2011, 2012, 2013). This model identifies functional similarities at three levels, between capacities within natural persons (NPs) on the one hand and the roles/ incumbents within the structure of organisational artificial/quasi-persons (APs on the other). In each entity, we find an architectonic direction, sub-ordered operational entities, and enablers (a DOE structure) in a communicative structure or reporting chain of authority. The common elements between natural persons (NP) and artificial persons (AP) and their ethically relevant attributes are captured in an acronym –GRAEOS. Both persons and organisations have a “top” entity capable of having/choosing worthwhile ethically permissible goals, G; of architectonically directing the use of capacities/repertoires or incumbents in designed architectonic roles, R, within a DOE-type structure, well or badly; of using ethical decision making procedures, E; of execution of good choices for the person or organisation in action, A, with good or bad impacts on others, or with others, O, in the context practice or domain; and of having good relations with the law and the state, S. Application to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, and public sector organisations, is briefly discussed to illustrate the potential to deal with short or long case study narratives.