Why “Good” Followers Go “Bad”: The Power of Moral Disengagement

Moral disengagement answers the question of why “good” followers (those with high personal standards) go “bad” (engage in unethical and illegal activities). In moral disengagement, actors set aside the self-condemnation they would normally experience in order to engage in immoral activities with a clear conscience. Moral disengagement mechanisms encourage individuals to justify harmful behavior, to minimize personal responsibility for harm, and to devalue victims. The follower role makes individuals more vulnerable to moral disengagement. While all followers are susceptible to moral disengagement, some are more vulnerable than others due to such personal antecedents as lack of empathy, rigid and authoritarian beliefs, low self-esteem, and fear and anxiety. Retaining a sense of moral agency is the key to resisting moral disengagement. Exercise of moral agency can be encouraged by recognizing personal vulnerability; by never losing sight of the fact that “I” am at the center of any action, and by the on-going practice of self-questioning, such as modeled by the Quakers (Society of Friends)

Professionalism, Agency, and Market Failures

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, namely the competitive market. This answer is inadequate, however, for it is the hierarchical firm, rather than the competitive market, that defines the role of corporate managers and shapes their professional obligations. Thus, if the obligations that the market failures approach generates are to apply to managers, they must do so in an indirect way. I suggest that the obligations the market failures approach generates directly apply to shareholders. Managers, in turn, inherit these obligations as part of their duties as loyal agents

The Health Impact Fund and the Right to Participate in the Advancement of Science

Taking into consideration the extremely harsh public health conditions faced by the majority of the world population, the Health Impact Fund (HIF) proposal seeks to make the intellectual property regimes more in line with human rights obligations. While prioritizing access to medicines and research on neglected diseases, the HIF makes many compromises in order to be conceived as politically feasible and to retain a compensation character that makes its implementation justified solely on basis of negative duties. Despite that current global health realities make such steps reasonable, the paper looks up the negative effects on one overlooked human right: the right to participate in scientific advancement

Heidegger’s Black Noteboooks: National Socialism. Antisemitism, and the History of Being

This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period

Ecological Disaster & Jacques Ellul’s Theological Vision

This paper will focus Jacques Ellul’s insights onto the manner in which our modern technological society is deeply ingrained in the subordination of both humanity and nature to efficient use. Ellul maintains that our way of life is characterised by structural instrumentalism, which is in turn underpinned by a distorted theological outlook. The paper asserts that these aforementioned factors together form the key drivers that propel us towards environmental desolation. This paper asserts that no adequate fine tuning of our present way of life will be possible to address issues such as climate change. What is needed instead is the comprehensive sociological and theological conversion of our society. This paper will conclude by tentatively exploring ways in which the church might proclaim and embody a prophetic message of repentance and conversion in this and other socio-cultural matters

Ecological Disaster & Jacques Ellul’s Theological Vision

This paper will focus Jacques Ellul’s insights onto the manner in which our modern technological society is deeply ingrained in the subordination of both humanity and nature to efficient use. Ellul maintains that our way of life is characterised by structural instrumentalism, which is in turn underpinned by a distorted theological outlook. The paper asserts that these aforementioned factors together form the key drivers that propel us towards environmental desolation. This paper asserts that no adequate fine tuning of our present way of life will be possible to address issues such as climate change. What is needed instead is the comprehensive sociological and theological conversion of our society. This paper will conclude by tentatively exploring ways in which the church might proclaim and embody a prophetic message of repentance and conversion in this and other socio-cultural matters

The Jurisprudential Turn in Legal Ethics

When legal ethics developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1970s, its theoretical roots were in moral philosophy. The early theorists in legal ethics were moral philosophers by training, and they explored legal ethics as a branch of moral philosophy. From the vantage point of moral philosophy, lawyers’ professional duties comprised a system of moral duties that governed lawyers in their professional lives, a “role-morality” for lawyers that competed with ordinary moral duties. In defining this “role-morality,” the moral philosophers accepted the premise that “good lawyers” are professionally obligated to pursue the interests of their clients all the way to the arguable limits of the law, even when doing so would harm third persons or undermine the public good. More recent scholarship in legal ethics has rejected the moral philosophers’ premise that lawyers’ ethical duties demand instrumentalist partisan interpretation of the “bounds of the law.” In what I call the “jurisprudential turn” in legal ethics, legal scholars are now increasingly looking to jurisprudential and political theory to explore the interpretive stance that it is appropriate for lawyers to take with respect to the “bounds of the law” that limit their partisan advocacy. Just as jurisprudential theories of adjudication ground judges’ duties of legal interpretation in the role of judges in a democratic society, jurisprudential theories of lawyering ground lawyers’ interpretive duties in analysis of the role lawyers play in a democratic system of government. This Article critically examines the emerging uses of jurisprudential theory in legal ethics. It argues that jurisprudential theory presents an attractive alternative to moral theory in legal ethics because it provides a rubric for limiting lawyers’ no-holds-barred partisan manipulation of law that springs directly from the lawyer’s professional duties rather than competing with them. It critiques the two major schools of thought in the “jurisprudence of lawyering” based on Dworkian and positivist jurisprudence. And it questions the common framework within each jurisprudential school, which assigns lawyers a role as case-by-case lawmakers, suggesting that this framework imposes an inappropriately lawyer-centered focus on assessments of the legitimacy of law that more properly belong to clients

Surviving Homophobia: Overcoming Evil Environments

Thinking of the evils of homophobia and what is needed to survive them requires acknowledging a new category of evil besides the evils of individual deeds, social practices and social structures. That further category is evil social environments. Building on the work of Jeremy Waldron on the harm in hate speech, this chapter extends that account to certain hate crimes that, like the written word, send a lingering social message. The cases of four women survivors of homophobia are then examined in relation to such harm. Two who wrote memoirs had been targeted for murder, one in an evil environment, the other in a more positively responsive environment. The remaining two survival stories are less dramatic. But they are important in how they illustrate ordinary challenges faced successfully by lesbians and gay men in emotionally toxic environments, and how, in this sense, those not directly threatened with murder might still be justly regarded as survivors. The chapter concludes with reflections on the meanings of survival and some of the costs of surviving an evil homophobic environment