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27When Are Norms Prescriptive? Understanding and Clarifying the Role of Norms in Behavioral Ethics ResearchBusiness Ethics Quarterly 34 (2): 331-364. 2024.Research on ethical norms has grown in recent years, but imprecise language has made it unclear when these norms prescribe “what ought to be” and when they merely describe behaviors or perceptions (“what is”). Studies of ethical norms, moreover, tend not to investigate whether participants were influenced by the prescriptive aspect of the norm; the studies primarily demonstrate, rather, that people will mimic the behaviors or perceptions of others, which provides evidence for the already well-su…Read more
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5This is business ethics: an introductionWiley-Blackwell. 2018.Discusses problems in business ethics, tools to solve them, contemporary case studies, and the future of business ethics.
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25Contractualism and risk preferencesEconomics and Philosophy 37 (2): 260-283. 2021.I evaluate two contractualist approaches to the ethics of risk: mutual constraint and the probabilistic, ex ante approach. After explaining how these approaches address problems in earlier interpretations of contractualism, I object that they fail to respond to diverse risk preferences in populations. Some people could reasonably reject the risk thresholds associated with these approaches. A strategy for addressing this objection is considering individual risk preferences, similar to those Bucha…Read more
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75Don’t Just Trust Your Gut: The Importance of Normative Deliberation to Ethical Decision-Making at WorkJournal of Business Ethics 1-21. forthcoming.While deliberation has traditionally played a central role in philosophical and behavioral accounts of ethical decision-making, several recent studies challenge the value of deliberation. These studies find that deliberative thinking, such as considering divergent views or different perspectives, leads to less ethical decisions. We observe, however, that these studies do not address normative deliberation, in which decision-makers consider or apply a normative standard. We predict that normative…Read more
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23Must a Currency Be Centrally Regulated to Be Ethical?Business Ethics Journal Review 10 (4): 21-26. 2022.Scharding argues that Bitcoin is unethical on Fichte’s view because its instability makes it unable to guarantee that users can afford what they need to live. She contrasts Bitcoin with currencies controlled by central authorities that can guarantee their stability. Allison objects that not all centrally controlled currencies are stable and not all non-centrally controlled currencies are unstable. I clarify that both stability and a means of securing stability are necessary, but not sufficient, …Read more
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32When Workplace Norms Conflict: Using Intersubjective Reflection to Guide Ethical Decision-MakingBusiness Ethics Quarterly 33 (2): 352-380. 2023.We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to whether parties to a workplace practice have intersubjectively valid grounds to veto the practice. …Read more
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27Recognize Everyone’s Interests: An Algorithm for Ethical Decision-Making about Trade-Off ProblemsBusiness Ethics Quarterly 31 (3): 450-473. 2021.This article addresses a dilemma about autonomous vehicles: how to respond to trade-off scenarios in which all possible responses involve the loss of life but there is a choice about whose life or lives are lost. I consider four options: kill fewer people, protect passengers, equal concern for survival, and recognize everyone’s interests. I solve this dilemma via what I call the new trolley problem, which seeks a rationale for the intuition that it is unethical to kill a smaller number of people…Read more
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90National currency, world currency, cryptocurrency: A Fichtean approach to the Ethics of BitcoinBusiness and Society Review 124 (2): 219-238. 2019.I investigate ethical questions concerning a novel cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, using a Fichtean account of the ethics of currency. Fichte holds that currencies should fulfill an ethical purpose: providing access, in perpetuity, to the material welfare that underwrites citizens' basic rights. In his nineteenth‐century context, Fichte argues that currencies fulfill this purpose better when nations control them (i.e., when they are “national currencies”) than when foreigners freely trade them (as “wor…Read more
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30Structured Finance and the Social Contract: How Tranching Challenges Contractualist Approaches to Financial RiskBusiness Ethics Quarterly 29 (1): 1-24. 2019.
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21The Moral Responsibility of Firms, edited by Eric W. Orts and N. Craig Smith. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0198738534 (review)Business Ethics Quarterly 28 (4): 506-508. 2018.
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30Individual Actions and Corporate Moral Responsibility: A (Reconstituted) Kantian ApproachJournal of Business Ethics 154 (4): 929-942. 2019.This paper examines the resources of Kantian ethics to establish corporate moral responsibility. I defend Matthew Altman’s claim that Kantian ethics cannot hold corporations morally responsible for corporate malfeasance. Rather than following Altman in interpreting this inability as a reason not to use Kantian ethics, however, I argue that the Kantian framework is correct: business ethicists should not seek to hold corporations morally responsible. Instead, they should use Kantian resources to c…Read more
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73Imprudence and Immorality: A Kantian Approach to the Ethics of Financial RiskBusiness Ethics Quarterly 25 (2): 243-265. 2015.This paper takes up recent challenges to consequentialist forms of ethically evaluating risks and explores how a non-consequentialist form of deliberation, Kantian ethics, can address questions about risk. I examine two cases concerning ethically- questionable financial risks: investing in abstruse financial instruments and investing while relying on a bailout. After challenging consequentialist evaluations of these cases, I use Kant’s distinction between morals and prudence to evaluate when the…Read more
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23Individually Allocating Principles and Market RisksPublic Affairs Quarterly 30 (3): 259-279. 2016.This paper investigates one of Anderson’s (2007) objections to individually-allocating principles of distributive justice: that they are incompatible with the free market. I argue that Anderson’s objection applies only to the specific principle she discusses, associated with luck egalitarianism, and not to individually-allocating principles generally. I then discuss different individually-allocating principles, the precepts of justice, broached by Rawls (1971,1999) but never developed by him. Th…Read more
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79Crafting MaximsTeaching Ethics 16 (1): 37-53. 2016.To use Kantian ethics in an applied context, decision makers typically try to determine whether the “maxim” of their possible action conforms to Kant’s supreme principle of morality: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (4:402). The action’s maxim is a way of expressing the decision maker’s (a) putative action and (b) conditions that prompt the action in a (c) preposition of a form that will allow her to perform (d) tests,…Read more
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27Income Inequalities in a Context of Political Equality: Guaranteed Basic Income, No Guaranteed Income, or Guaranteed Work OpportunitiesSocial Theory and Practice 40 (1): 99-122. 2014.This paper investigates individual differences-based income entitlements in a context of political equality. Three regimes for distributing income are considered: guaranteed basic income, no guaranteed income, and guaranteed work opportunities. Whereas GBI attends to equality while remaining silent on difference and NGI attends to difference while de-emphasizing equality, GWO attends to both difference and equality. Balancing individual differences and political equality is a plausible goal for …Read more
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |