Four Design Criteria for Any Future Contractarian Theory of Business Ethics

This article assesses the quality of Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) as a social contract argument. For this purpose, it embarks on a comparative analysis of the use of the social contract model as a theory of political authority and as a theory of social justice. Building on this comparison, it then develops four criteria for any future contractarian theory of business ethics (CBE). To apply the social contract model properly to the domain of business ethics, it should be: (1) self-disciplined, i.e., not aspire results beyond what the contract model can realistically establish; (2) argumentative, i.e., it should seek to provide principles that are demonstrative results of the contractarian method; (3) task-directed, i.e., it should be clear what the social contract thought-experiment is intended to model; and (4) domain-specific, i.e., the contractarian choice situation should be tailored to the defining problems of business ethics

Parliamentary sovereignty and public opinion

No description supplie

Public support for civil and political rights in Britain

Period of award - 1991 to 1993Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:3739.0605F(ESRC-R--000/23/2637) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Introduction:Reconstituting Criticism Today

The contributions to this volume locate themselves within the contemporary crisis of philosophically grounded social criticism. At the close of the millennium we find an increasingly pessimistic mood taking hold among philosophers and political theorists who pursue their intellectual projects with the critical intentions of stimulating and supporting a progressive political agenda. Theoretical self-confidence was a notable characteristic of the socialist vision that had inspired progressive social critics for several generations. The key to an emancipated future, or a just order, was to transform the structure of political economy so as to eliminate the destructive and degrading effects of capitalist markets on human relations. But, in the wake of the collapse of state socialism, and with the emergence of a new global order where the logic of the market reigns virtually unopposed, this theoretical self-confidence has all but evaporated. As Nancy Fraser has recently remarked, one of the constitutive features of the ‘postsocialist’ condition in which we now find ourselves is ‘the absence of any credible progressive vision of an alternative to the present order’.