•  5
    The ethics of voluntary ethics standards
    Business and Society Review. forthcoming.
    Many nongovernmental forms of business regulation aim at reducing ethical violations in commerce. We argue that such nongovernmental ethics standards, while often laudable, raise their own ethical challenges. In particular, when such standards place burdens upon vulnerable market participants (often, though not always, SMEs), they do so without the backing of traditional legitimate political authority. We argue that this constitutes a structural analogy to wars of humanitarian intervention. More…Read more
  •  252
    Business Ethics Denial: Scale Development and Validation
    with Kristyn A. Scott
    Personality and Individual Differences 210. 2023.
    Economistic Business Ethics Denial (BED) is the belief that contemporary business has features that make it systematically incompatible with ethics. Using over 1200 participants across seven separate samples we established the substantive validity of a BED Scale, confirmed its theorized structure, psychometric properties, convergent, and discriminant validity. The results suggest that the scale assesses four correlated factors of economistic BED. The scale can be used in future research on ethic…Read more
  •  617
    A Primer on Moral Concepts and Vocabulary
    Teaching Philosophy 46 (3): 379-400. 2023.
    This article is an introduction to moral concepts. Its purpose is to introduce and explain vocabulary that can be used both in examining ethical theories, and in talking about the ethically significant aspects of concrete situations. We begin by distinguishing descriptive and normative claims, and explaining how moral claims are a special type of normative claims. We then introduce terms for the moral evaluation of actions, states of affairs, and motives. Focusing on the question ‘what should be…Read more
  •  440
    The Moral Vocabulary Approach
    Teaching Philosophy 46 (3): 367-377. 2023.
    At or near the beginning of many textbooks and syllabi in applied or professional ethics is a unit on philosophical moral theories (such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics). However, teaching such theories is of questionable value in this context. This article introduces the moral vocabulary approach. Instead of burdening students with complex ethical theories, they are introduced to the logic of elementary moral concepts. This avoids many of the drawbacks of teaching ethical theor…Read more
  •  300
    The Radical Behavioral Challenge and Wide-Scope Obligations in Business
    Journal of Business Ethics 177 (3): 507-517. 2022.
    This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature is flawed because it limits normati…Read more
  •  334
    Well-Being as Harmony
    In David Kaspar (ed.), Explorations in Ethics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 117-140. 2020.
    In this paper, I sketch out a novel theory of well-being according to which well-being is constituted by harmony between mind and world. The notion of harmony I develop has three aspects. First there is correspondence between mind and world in the sense that events in the world match the content of our mental states. Second there is positive orientation towards the world, meaning that we have pro-attitudes towards the world we find ourselves in. Third there is fitting response to the world. Take…Read more
  •  229
    Shareholder Ownership is Irrelevant for Shareholder Primacy
    Business Ethics Journal Review 8 (4): 20-26. 2020.
    Strudler rejects shareholder primacy and argues that, once contractual obligations have been fulfilled and shareholders have received a reasonable return on investment, corporate executives may use corporate wealth for the general good. He seeks to establish this claim via an argument that, contrary to the received view, shareholders do not own corporations. After raising some questions about the latter argument, this commentary goes on to argue that the question of corporate ownership is a red …Read more
  •  886
    Oxymoron: taking business ethics denial seriously
    Journal of Business Ethics Education 16 103-134. 2019.
    Business ethics denial refers to one of two claims about moral motivation in a business context: that there is no need for it, or that it is impossible. Neither of these radical claims is endorsed by serious theorists in the academic fields that study business ethics. Nevertheless, public commentators, as well as university students, often make claims that seem to imply that they subscribe to some form of business ethics denial. This paper fills a gap by making explicit both the various forms th…Read more
  •  548
    Succeeding competently: towards an anti-luck condition for achievement
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3): 394-418. 2019.
    ABSTRACTAchievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently, only if the acti…Read more
  •  390
    Theories of well-being that give an important role to satisfied pro-attitudes need to account for the fact that, intuitively, the scope of possible objects of pro-attitudes seems much wider than the scope of things, states, or events that affect our well-being. Parfit famously illustrated this with his wish that a stranger may recover from an illness: it seems implausible that the stranger’s recovery would constitute a benefit for Parfit. There is no consensus in the literature about how to rule…Read more
  •  590
    On being difficult: towards an account of the nature of difficulty
    Philosophical Studies 176 (1): 45-64. 2019.
    This paper critically assesses existing accounts of the nature of difficulty, finds them wanting, and proposes a new account. The concept of difficulty is routinely invoked in debates regarding degrees of moral responsibility, and the value of achievement. Until recently, however, there has not been any sustained attempt to provide an account of the nature of difficulty itself. This has changed with Gwen Bradford’s Achievement, which argues that difficulty is a matter of how much intense effort …Read more
  •  40
    Jones and Felps claim that social welfare would be enhanced, if corporate managers adopted the goal of directly improving the happiness of their stakeholders instead of profit maximization. I argue that their argument doesn’t establish this. They show that a utilitarian case for profit orientation cannot be made from the armchair. But neither can the case for Jones and Felps’ preferred alternative. And their defense of it relies on empirically unsubstantiated assumptions.
  •  86
    Source and Bearer: Metz on the Pure Part-Life View of Meaning
    Journal of Philosophy of Life 5 (3): 1-18. 2015.
    According to the pure part-life view the meaning in our lives is always borne by particular parts of our lives. The aim of this paper is to show that Thaddeus Metz’s rejection of this view is too quick. Given that meaning is a value that often depends on relational rather than intrinsic properties a pure part-life view can accommodate many of the intuitions that move Metz towards a mixed view. According to this mixed view some meaning is borne by parts of our lives and some by our lives as a who…Read more
  •  783
    Effort and Achievement
    Utilitas 29 (1): 27-51. 2017.
    Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this paper is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the con…Read more
  •  724
    Shareholder Primacy and Deontology
    Business and Society Review 120 (3): 465-490. 2015.
    This article argues that shareholder primacy cannot be defended on the grounds that there is something special about the position of shareholders that grounds a right to preferential treatment on part of management. The notions of property and contract, traditionally thought to ground such a right, are now widely recognized as incapable of playing that role. This leaves shareholder theorists with two options. They can either abandon the project of arguing for their view on broadly deontological …Read more
  •  730
    Professionalism, Agency, and Market Failures
    Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (4): 445-464. 2016.
    According to the Market Failures Approach to business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have a professional duty not to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, n…Read more