Seyyed Abbas Kazemi

A number of scholars exploring the morality of economic sanctions as a foreign policy instrument have adopted just war theory as their guiding moral framework. In a paper published in this journal, Elizabeth Ellis challenges this approach. She contends that economic sanctions and military warfare are fundamentally different, and that applying a moral framework designed for ethical reflection on military warfare to the case of economic sanctions is therefore unwarranted. To support this claim, Ellis presents three scenarios in which economic sanctions seem intuitively permissible but would be prohibited by just war theory principles. On this basis, she concludes that just war theory is ill-suited for the moral evaluation of economic sanctions. This paper will argue against Ellis’s conclusion. First, I will critically examine her three scenarios, demonstrating that plausible and mainstream interpretations of just war theory can in fact yield the intuitively correct judgments regarding the (im)permissibility of the sanctions in each case. Second, I will challenge her claim that sanctions and military warfare are inherently distinct, arguing that this is false for many widely deployed types of economic sanctions. I conclude that just war theory remains an essential and highly relevant moral framework for assessing the morality of the most common and consequential sanctions regimes.

According to attributionist accounts of moral responsibility, an individual is morally responsible for an action, omission, or mental state if and only if it reflects his moral orientation. One objection to this family of views argues that there are situations in which an agent is intuitively morally responsible for something, yet this responsibility cannot be attributed to a defect in his moral orientation. Unwitting omissions serve as a key example of such situations. In this paper, I will articulate the challenge that unwitting omissions pose to attributionism and evaluate some responses that attributionist theorists have offered—or could offer—to address this challenge. I will demonstrate that these responses are ultimately unsatisfactory. Following this critique, I will propose my own attributionist account of moral responsibility, which I argue, effectively rebuts the challenge posed by unwitting omissions. Finally, I will compare and contrast my account with some similar accounts in the literature, demonstrating the superiority of my account.

In his Finite and Infinite Goods, Robert Adams puts forward a theistic framework for ethics according to which finite objects of value become good through resembling God who is the infinite Good and is the source and criterion of goodness. One question that immediately arises regarding this theory is whether any resemblance to God is sufficient for goodness or not. Adams’ answer to this question is negative. He puts forward further qualifications that resemblances to God have to meet so that they can constitute goodness in finite objects of value. In his God and Moral Law, Mark Murphy objects to these qualifications as inadequate for addressing the sufficiency question and puts forward his own suggestion as to how Adams’ theory has to be amended. In this paper I will first argue that Murphy’s suggestion for fixing the goodness as Godlikeness thesis is not an alternative to Adams’ proposed qualifications on resemblances to God and is best understood as an insightful interpretation and elaboration of Adams’ proposed qualifications. I will then show that as it stands, Murphy’s suggestion is not up to this task and itself is in need of reconstruction. Drawing on Judith Thomson’s discussions of goodness and virtue in her book Normativity, I will try to reconstruct Murphy’s suggestion and come up with an interpretation of Adams’ goodness as Godlikeness thesis that is more elaborate, informative, and plausible than Adams’ original formulation.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual model to improve moral sensitivity in human resource development (HRD) to assist human resource (HR) practitioners in contending with moral challenges in HRD. The literature on the relationship between ethics and HRD suggests that the organizational and employee development discipline deals with ethical issues at three different levels: Individual, organizational and communal, and international levels. In section I, we elaborate on moral challenges facing HRD. In section II, we conceptualize moral sensitive HRD, proposing a conceptual model in virtue of some essential ethical theories and concepts that assist HRD in grappling with those problems. We will show how each theory and concept can help HRD to deal with relevant problems. In section III, we elaborate on practical approaches to implement moral sensitivity in HRD. We put forward some strategies that help HRD bring those theories and concepts to bear on the ethical problems facing this discipline. Finally, we discuss moral education through learning theories to cultivate moral concepts and ethical dimensions in HRD education.