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170The ethics of insider tradingJournal of Business Ethics 8 (11). 1989.Despite the fact that a number of economists and philosophers of late defend insider trading both as a viable and useful practice in a free market and as not immoral, I shall question the value of insider trading both from a moral and an economic point of view. I shall argue that insider trading both in its present illegal form and as a legalized market mechanism undermines the efficient and proper functioning of a free market, thereby bringing into question its own raison d'etre. It does so and…Read more
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163Mental Models, Moral Imagination and System Thinking in the Age of GlobalizationJournal of Business Ethics 78 (3): 463-474. 2008.After experiments with various economic systems, we appear to have conceded, to misquote Winston Churchill that "free enterprise is the worst economic system, except all the others that have been tried." Affirming that conclusion, I shall argue that in today's expanding global economy, we need to revisit our mind-sets about corporate governance and leadership to fit what will be new kinds of free enterprise. The aim is to develop a values-based model for corporate governance in this age of globa…Read more
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154Business ethics and the origins of contemporary capitalism: Economics and ethics in the work of Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer (review)Journal of Business Ethics 24 (3). 1991.Both Adam Smith and Herbert spencer, albeit in quite different ways, have been enormously influential in what we today take to be philosophies of modern capitalism. Surprisingly it is Spencer, not Smith, who is the individualist, perhaps an egoist, and supports a "night watchman" theory of the state. Smith's concept of political economy is a notion that needs to be revisited, and Spencer's theory of democratic workplace management offers a refreshing twist on contemporary libertarianism.
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149Engineers and management: The challenge of the Challenger incident (review)Journal of Business Ethics 10 (8). 1991.The Challenger incident was a result of at least four kinds of difficulties: differing perceptions and priorities of the engineers and management at Thiokol and at NASA, a preoccupation with roles and role responsibilities on the part of engineers and managers, contrasting corporate cultures at Thiokol and its parent, Morton, and a failure both by engineers and by managers to exercise individual moral responsibility. I shall argue that in the Challenger case organizational structure, corporate c…Read more
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130Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making in ManagementThe Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics 1 75-98. 1998.
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129Some paradoxes in Kripke's interpretation of WittgensteinSynthese 73 (2). 1987.Kripke's skeptical interpretation of Wittgenstein's project in the Philosophical Investigations attributes to Wittgenstein a radical skepticism about the objectivity of rules and thus the meanings of words and the existence of language as well as a skepticism about the truth conditions underlying our alleged facts about the world. Kripke then contends that Wittgenstein solves this skeptical paradox by committing himself to what I shall call a Communitarian View of language. There are a number of…Read more
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120Two ethical issues in mergers and acquisitionsJournal of Business Ethics 7 (1-2). 1988.With the recent rash of mergers and friendly and unfriendly takeovers, two important issues have not received sufficient attention as questionable ethical practices. One has to do with the rights of employees affected in mergers and acquisitions and the second concerns the responsibilities of shareholders during these activities. Although employees are drastically affected by a merger or an acquisition because in almost every case a number of jobs are shifted or even eliminated, employees at all…Read more
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118The indefensibility of insider tradingJournal of Business Ethics 10 (9). 1991.The article, Inside Trading Revisited, has taken the stance that insider trading is neither unethical nor economically inefficient. Attacking my arguments to the contrary developed in an earlier article, The Ethics of Inside Trading (Journal of Business Ethics, 1989) this article constructs careful arguments and even appeals to Adam Smith to justify its conclusions. In my response to this article I shall clarify my position as well as that of Smith to support my counter-contention that insider t…Read more
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115Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future Directions for EmploymentBusiness Ethics Quarterly 13 (2): 113-130. 2003.Abstract:During recent years, the principle and practice of employment-at-will have been under attack. While progress has been made in eroding the practice, the principle still governs the philosophical assumptions underlying employment practices in the United States, and, indeed, EAW has been promulgated as one of the ways to address economic ills in other countries. This paper will briefly review the major critiques of EAW. Given the failure of these arguments to erode the underpinnings of EAW…Read more
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113Moral imagination and systems thinkingJournal of Business Ethics 38 (1-2). 2002.Taking the lead from Susan Wolf's and Linda Emanuel's work on systems thinking, and developing ideas from Moberg's, Seabright's and my work on mental models and moral imagination, in this paper I shall argue that what is often missing in management decision-making is a systems approach. Systems thinking requires conceiving of management dilemmas as arising from within a system with interdependent elements, subsystems, and networks of relationships and patterns of interaction. Taking a systems ap…Read more
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105Moral Motivation across Ethical Theories: What Can We Learn for Designing Corporate Ethics Programs?Journal of Business Ethics 81 (4). 2008.In this article we discuss what are the implications for improving the design of corporate ethics programs, if we focus on the moral motivation accounts offered by main ethical theories. Virtue ethics, deontological ethics and utilitarianism offer different criteria of judgment to face moral dilemmas: Aristotle's virtues of character, Kant's categorical imperative, and Mill's greatest happiness principle are, respectively, their criteria to answer the question "What is the right thing to do?" We…Read more
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104Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach (edited book)Pearson/Prentice Hall. 2002."Keeping pace with recent developments, almost a third of the Eighth Edition is new. Ethical Issues in Business offers a mix of case studies - nine of which are new to this edition - and theoretical articles - ten of which are new to this edition. The articles range from classics in moral theory and economics, to modern commentaries by business executives."--BOOK JACKET.
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102A Place for Philosophers in Applied Ethics and the Role of Moral Reasoning in Moral Imagination: A Response to Richard RortyBusiness Ethics Quarterly 16 (3): 401-408. 2006.This article presents a response to Richard Rorty's paper "Is Philosophy Relevant to Business Ethics?" The author questions Rorty's views on the depreciation of the role of philosophy in applied ethics, and outlines four reasons why philosophy retains its relevance. The author addresses the role of moral reasoning in the development of the moral imagination. The author also concludes that humans have the means necessary to make moral progress and are capable of moral reasoning, and need only to …Read more
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82The Role of Self-interest in Adam Smith's Wealth of NationsJournal of Philosophy 86 (11): 669-680. 1989.
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78Business Ethics, Stakeholder Theory, and the Ethics of Healthcare OrganizationsCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 9 (2): 169-181. 2000.Until recently, business issues in healthcare organizations were relatively insulated from clinical issues, for several reasons. The hospital at earlier stages of its development operated on a combination of charitable and equitable premises, allowing for providing care to be separated from financial support. Physicians, who were primarily responsible for clinical care, constituted an independent power nexus within the hospital and were governed by their own professional codes of ethics. In exch…Read more
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69Organization Ethics in HealthcareCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 9 (2): 145-146. 2000.Bioethics, clinical ethics, and professional ethics are mature, well-developed fields of applied ethics that focus on medical research, patient autonomy and patient care, patient–healthcare professional relationships, and issues that arise in clinical and other medical settings. However, despite these developments, little attention has been paid to the organizational aspects of healthcare in these fields. This is surprising, because in the last 30 years healthcare has become more and more instit…Read more
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62Wittgenstein and moral realismJournal of Value Inquiry 26 (3): 381-393. 1992.I argue, contra Sabina Lovibond, that one cannot defend a viable form of moral realism from the perspective of linguistic conventionalism. Appealing to the later Wittgenstein, I argue that Wittgenstein's alleged linguistic conventionalism rests on the objective ground of the notion of a rule. While Wittgenstein acknowledges that the subjective and social context out of which we operate precludes getting at reality independent of a perspective, neither is he an anti-realist nor does he replace tr…Read more
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59Moral imagination, trading zones, and the role of the ethicist in nanotechnologyNanoEthics 3 (3): 185-195. 2009.The societal and ethical impacts of emerging technological and business systems cannot entirely be foreseen; therefore, management of these innovations will require at least some ethicists to work closely with researchers. This is particularly critical in the development of new systems because the maximum degrees of freedom for changing technological direction occurs at or just after the point of breakthrough; that is also the point where the long-term implications are hardest to visualize. Rece…Read more
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59Exporting Mental ModelsBusiness Ethics Quarterly 10 (1): 353-362. 2000.The most serious ethical challenge facing multinational corporations in the next century is their exportation of the mental model of Western-style capitalism. This model promises that industrialized free enterprise in a free trade global economy, where businesses and entrepreneurs can pursue their interests competitively without undue regulations or labor restrictions, will produce growth and well-being, i.e., economic good, in every country or community where this phenomenon is allowed to opera…Read more
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57A Modular Approach to Business Ethics Integration: At the Intersection of the Stand-Alone and the Integrated ApproachesJournal of Business Ethics 90 (S3). 2009.While no one seems to believe that business schools or their faculties bear entire responsibility for the ethical decision-making processes of their students, these same institutions do have some burden of accountability for educating students surrounding these skills. To that end, the standards promulgated by the Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business, their global accrediting body, require that students learn ethics as part of a business degree. However, since the AACSB does not …Read more
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56The Normative/Descriptive Distinction in Methodologies of Business EthicsBusiness Ethics Quarterly 4 (2): 175-180. 1994.Abstract:Most papers in this issue carefully analyze normative and empirical methodologies. I shall argue that (a) there is no purely empirical nor purely normative methodology; (b) some terms escape the division of the normative and descriptive. (c) Most importantly, dialogues such as this one point to a form of integration that allows us to reflect on what it is that each approach presupposes in its study of business ethics. Thus we have made progress in recognizing the importance of each meth…Read more
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54Formal organizations, economic freedom and moral agencyJournal of Value Inquiry 14 (1): 43-50. 1980.
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53The Inexorable Sociality of Commerce: The Individual and Others in Adam SmithJournal of Business Ethics 127 (2): 327-335. 2015.In this paper we reconsider Adam Smith’s ethics, what he means by self-interest and the role this plays in the famous “invisible hand.” Our efforts focus in part on the misreading of “the invisible hand” by certain economists with a view to legitimizing their neoclassical economic paradigm. Through exegesis and by reference to notions that are developed in Smith’s two major works, we deconstruct Smith’s ideas of conscience, justice, self-interest, and the invisible hand. We amplify Smith’s insis…Read more
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |