Sweatshops and Free Action: The Stakes of the Actualism/Possibilism Debate for Business Ethics

Whether an action is morally right depends upon the alternative acts available to the agent. Actualists hold that what an agent would actually do determines her moral obligations. Possibilists hold that what an agent could possibly do determines her moral obligations. Both views face compelling criticisms. Despite the fact that actualist and possibilist assumptions are at the heart of seminal arguments in business ethics, there has been no explicit discussion of actualism and possibilism in the business ethics literature. This paper has two primary goals. First, it aims to rectify this omission by bringing to light the importance of the actualism/possibilism debate for business ethics through questions about the ethics of sweatshops. Second, it aims to make some progress in the sweatshop debate by examining and defending an alternative view, hybridism, and describing the moral and practical implications of hybridism for the sweatshop debate

Organizational Ethics Programs and the Need for Stakeholder Discourse

More than ever, businesses are called upon to manage organizational ethics programs. There are, as of yet, no internationally accepted guidelines for doing so. Some find in the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines a framework that fits this need (Palmer & Zakhem, 2001; Izraeli & Schwartz, 1998; Jackson, 1997). As they stand, the Guidelines offer little insight as to what constitutes “ethical conduct.” This in itself is not a problem. Indeed, the question of what business ethics demand is for the most part an “open” question and one that should be regularly revisited to better understand and properly act on changing stakeholder demands (Freeman, 2008). What does constitute a problem, however, is that the Guidelines offer no suggestions as to how an organization ought to work through, in a morally acceptable way, inevitable stakeholder conflict over what is good and right. Following Jürgen Habermas’s insights on discourse ethics, this paper states that the lack of a substantive and discursive procedural ethic threatens ethics program effectiveness. This article expands upon these claims and offers some thoughts about the mutually beneficial role that discourse ethics can and ought to play in effective ethics program management

From autonomy to authenticity: A radical account of moral praise

Philosophical discourse concerning questions of moral responsibility and praise fall in two general categories. On the one hand, an agent choosing to act in accordance with principles, reasons, or desires that are free from heteronomous influence is both morally responsible and is worthy of moral praise. Theories concerned with moral responsibility in this sense, such as Immanuel Kant and Harry Frankfurt, are theories of autonomy. On the other hand, there are increasing attempts to derive a sense of moral responsibility and praise independent of the question of whether or not an agent is free from heteronomous influence. Despite their differences. I argue that both approaches misunderstand the nature of moral responsibility and moral praise by presupposing a false dichotomy between autonomous and heteronomous influences and by failing to account for a notion of authentic resolve. The upshot is that theories of autonomy are doomed to problems of infinite regress and non-autonomous theories are unable to account for the critical difference between the special character of morally responsible actions and mere causal responsibility. Contra these views I develop a theory of authenticity based upon the early work of Martin Heidegger that resolves the aforementioned problems. Starting from Heidegger\u27s work in the History of the Concept of Time and moving into Being and Time I explain the essential characteristics of selfhood that serve to distinguish authentic from inauthentic existence and ultimately provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent to be morally praiseworthy