Michael Thompson

This paper is designed to respond to the conference theme of making business ethical specifically within a marketing context. Ethical marketing challenges marketers to move away from illusory and deceptive brand promises to make way for a form of marketing which serves the consumer with creative and truthful messages. The paper markets virtue to marketers whilst exploring existing marketing deontologies and the problem of the depersonalised relationship between marketer and consumer. ‘Marketing virtue’ is approached within an ontology that begins with the marketer as a moral agent. Six virtues–based principles are proposed as a creative resource to improve the ethical performance of contemporary marketing. True prosperity for both marketer and consumer is seen within the Aristotelian concept of ευδαιμονια (eudaimonia).

Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is among the most beautiful and moving works of moral philosophy yet produced in the analytic tradition. It is so much an integral whole that it will seem barbaric to do as I propose briefly to do, and put it to the scalpel. But Natural Goodness propounds a complex theory with many levels or strata, some of which even the author fails completely to distinguish. I will distinguish three strata, each depending logically on the one that comes before. I will call them respectively logical Footianism, local Footianism and substantive Footianism. My purpose in making these distinctions is simply to advance discussion: I believe that objections to Natural Goodness generally confuse these different dimensions of the doctrine, and that the author to some extent aids this confusion

This volume collects the principal works of the late Warren Quinn. The papers cover a broad range of topics and may, for present purposes, be divided three ways, as variously concerning problems of metaethics, of the rationality of morality, and of substantive or practical ethics. I will not discuss Quinn’s great papers on abortion, punishment, double effect, and the distinction between killing and letting die—except to remark that they are united by an underlying anticonsequentialist program. They are, I think, his best-known works.

My immediate aim in this lecture is to contribute something to the apt characterization of our representation and knowledge of the specifically human life form, as I will put it - and, to some extent, of things ‘human’ more generally. In particular I want to argue against an exaggerated empiricism about such cognition. Meditation on these themes might be pursued as having a kind of interest of its own, an epistemological and in the end metaphysical interest, but my own purpose in the matter is practical-philosophical. I want to employ my theses to make room for a certain range of doctrines in ethical theory and the theory of practical rationality - doctrines, namely, of natural normativity or natural goodness, as we may call them. I am not proposing to attempt a positive argument for any such ‘neo-Aristotelian’ position, but merely to defend such views against certain familiar lines of objection; and even here my aims will be limited, as will be seen.