In this paper I look at attempts to develop forms of consequentialism which do not have a feature considered problematic in Direct Consequentialist theories (that is, those consequentialist theories that apply the criterion of rightness directly in the evaluation of any set of options). The problematic feature in question (which I refer to as ‘evaluative conflict’) is the possibility that, for example, a right motive might lead an agent to perform a wrong act. Theories aiming to avoid this phenomenon (...) must argue that causal relationship entails motives and acts (for example) having the same moral status. I argue that attempts to ensure such ‘evaluative consistency’ are themselves deeply problematic, and that we must therefore accept evaluative conflict. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social (...) identity. The ways in which metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way diverge in character from metalinguistic negotiations are described, as are several consequences of the existence of metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kantians face a little discussed problem in accounting for how actions that fulfill imperfect duties can be morally motivated. It is widely agreed that actions that are performed from the motive of duty are performed through a recognition of the objective necessity of the action. It is also generally held that the objective necessity of an action consists in its rational non-optionality. Many actions that fulfill imperfect duties, however, are rationally optional. Given these constraints, it (...) is impossible that such rationally optional actions could be performed from the motive of duty. After presenting the problem as one that Kantians should find genuinely pressing, this paper offers a solution by advancing an alternative to the conception of rational necessity widely shared by Kantians. On the alternative view presented here, an action is rationally necessary if and only if the justifying reasons that speak in favor of performing the action do not depend on any empirical and therefore contingent motivational source on the part of an agent. Such actions may well be rationally optional. Moral motivation is therefore possible even in the case of rationally optional actions. Abbreviations: The following abbreviations are used for Kant’s works. All translations are from Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor. Citations are given by the abbreviation, the volume, and the page number from Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. G.Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten.KpVKritik der praktischen Vernunft.MSDie Metaphysik der Sitten. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this article, we review and build on intergenerational and behavioral ethics research to consider how the motive to build a lasting legacy can impact ethical behavior in intergenerational decision making. We discuss how people can utilize their relationships to organizations to craft their legacies. Further, we elucidate how the legacy motive can enhance business ethics, incorporating theory and empirical findings from research on intergenerational decision making, generativity, and terror management theory to develop the legacy construct and to (...) outline the psychological underpinnings of motivations to leave a positive legacy. We discuss the ways in which legacies can provide a link between life-meaning and pro-social motivation, and we consider the ways in which individuals’ social environments can moderate the intensity of the legacy motive and can impact legacy-building behavior by determining the types of legacies that are valued. Finally, we highlight the implications of these ideas for ethical behavior and sustainable decision making in business contexts. (shrink)

Hume argues that respect for property (“justice”) is a convention-dependent (“artificial”) virtue. He does so by appeal to a principle, derived from his virtue-based approach to ethics, which requires that, for any kind of virtuous action, there be a “first virtuous motive” that is other than a sense of moral duty. It has been objected, however, that in the case of justice (and also in a parallel argument concerning promise-keeping) Hume (i) does not, (ii) should not, and (iii) cannot (...) recognize such a motive. This paper defends Hume’s argument against these three objections. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of the Aristotelian notion of civic friendship to contemporary political discussion by arguing that it can function as a social good. Contrary to some dominant interpretations of the ancient conception of friendship according to which it can only be understood as an obligatory reciprocity, I argue that friendship between fellow citizens is important because it contributes to the unity of both state and community by transmitting feelings of intimacy and solidarity. (...) In that sense, it can be understood as an important relationship predicated on affection and generosity, virtues lacking from both contemporary politics and society that seem to be merely dominated by Post-Enlightenment ideals. For Aristotle, friendship is important for society because it generates concord, articulating thus a basis for social unity and political agreement. (shrink)

Kant held that an agent can perform her moral duty only if she acts from a special incentive or motive, the sense of duty. Philosophers have objected to this, arguing that motives, intentions, and reasons are relevant in determining whether she acted well or evilly, virtuously or viciously, but not in determining whether she did her duty. Note that these arguments, if successful, would show not only that pace Kant, an agent can do her duty without acting from a (...) sense of duty, but more strongly, that she can do it even though her action was wickedly motivated or done with evil intentions. This stronger conclusion is, I think, false and in this essay I want to examine and criticize several arguments put forward in defense of the view that duty and virtue are so divorced from each other that one can discharge one’s moral duty and do what is morally right with a vicious action. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the objections against hate crimes defined as separate offenses and in terms of group animus are misguided and are based upon a mistaken view of human action that does...

Corporate social responsibility functions as a positive signal to stakeholders that a firm is a responsible corporate citizen. However, CSR is increasingly becoming an ambiguous signal of organizational goodwill because many companies engage in CSR purely out of self-interest, rather than genuine altruism. In this paper, we integrate attribution theory with signaling theory to explore how stakeholders react when they receive additional signals that contradict the company’s intended positive CSR signal. Specifically, we argue that morally questionable CEO ethics in the (...) media negatively influences stakeholders’ CSR motive attributions, which in turn results in increased cynicism that ultimately impacts CSR support intentions and behaviors. We find support for our hypotheses in a quasi-experimental study of stakeholder media exposure to different types of CEOs. Our findings demonstrate that stakeholders consider CEO ethics an important signal of CSR motives, and will shun the CSR initiatives of morally questionable CEOs. (shrink)

The business case constitutes an important instrumental motive for corporate social responsibility (CSR), but its relationship with other moral and relational motives remains controversial. In this article, we examine the articulation of motives for CSR among different stakeholders in Germany historically. On the basis of reports of German business associations, state agencies, unions, and nongovernmental organizations from 1970 to 2014, we show how the business case came to be a dominant motive for CSR by acting as a coalition (...) magnet: the vocabulary was used strategically by key policy entrepreneurs, while being ambiguous for flexible interpretations by different stakeholders, and thereby growing in attractiveness. As a resulting discourse coalition emerged among business, state, and civil society actors, the moral and relational motives for CSR became increasingly marginalized. The article offers a new approach to studying motives and contributes to understanding the complementary or competing nature of different motives for CSR. (shrink)

The concepts of right action and virtuous motivation are clearly connected, in that we expect people with virtuous motives to at least often act rightly. Two well-known views explain this connection by defining one of the concepts in terms of the other. Instrumentalists about virtue identify virtuous motives as those that lead to right acts; virtue-ethicists identify right acts as those that are or would be done from virtuous motives. This paper outlines a rival explanation, based on the “higher-level” account (...) of virtue defended in the author’s Virtue, Vice, and Value and by earlier philosophers such as Rashdall, Moore, and Ross. On this account rightness and virtue go together because each is defined by a (different) relation to some other, more basic moral concept. Their frequent coincidence is therefore like a correlation between A and B based not on either’s causing the other but on their being joint effects of a single common cause C. (shrink)

In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy-in the sense of a mistake in reasoning-constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the "worst-motive fallacy," and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1, participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists' worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the protagonist to pursue a worse course of (...) action than they would prefer themselves. Experiment 2 was a preregistered attempted replication of Experiment 1, including a bigger range of vignettes; the first effect was not replicated for the new vignettes tested but was for the original set. Also, we once again found that participants expected protagonists to be more likely than they were themselves to pursue courses of action that they considered morally bad. We discuss the worst-motive fallacy's relation to other well-known biases as well as its possible evolutionary origins and its ethical consequences. (shrink)

Religion und Vervollkommnung – des Einzelnen wie der Kirche bzw. der Christenheit – sind eng miteinander verwoben und gründen auf der Überzeugung, den Einzelnen für das Reich Gottes vorbereiten zu müssen bzw. dieses als Kirche in der Welt zu repräsentieren. Nicht zuletzt ist die asketische Tradition des Christentums im Dienst dieses Zieles zu sehen, die durch eine methodische Lebensführung den Wandel der Seele zum Guten erreichen wollte. Gnadentheologisch war dies umstritten, weil die Möglichkeit des Menschen dazu beizutragen – je nach (...) theologischer Position – unterschiedlich gewertet wurde. Je optimistischer man hinsichtlich des menschlichen Beitrags war, umso generativer waren diese Konzepte in pädagogischer Hinsicht. Die 1909 gegründete katholische Jugendbewegung Quickborn, in der Schüler/innen höherer Schulen aktiv waren, stellt ein gutes Beispiel dafür dar, wie Religion zum Mittel sittlich-religiöser Vervollkommnung wurde. Um angesichts einer rasanten Modernisierung für gebildete junge Katholiken weiterhin relevant zu bleiben, musste an aktuellen Strömungen wie dem Abstinenzideal angeknüpft werden. Dieses war in der Reformpädagogik sowie in der Lebens- und Sozialreform um 1900 im Kaiserreich sehr präsent und konnte offenbar in Verbindung mit dem Jugendmotiv neuen religiösen Enthusiasmus wecken. Der Beitrag untersucht die Motive einer Sakralisierung der Abstinenz, ihrer pädagogischen Ziele und erwarteten Wirkungen z.B. auf Körper, Seele oder Volk sowie die verschiedenen Praktiken der Selbsterziehung und fragt schließlich danach, ob in der Verbindung von Religion und Perfektion nicht Transzendenz, konkrete Humanität (H. R. Schlette), Gnade (Kontingenz) und Fragment als doch immerhin zentrale Dimensionen biblischen Christentums ausgeblendet wurden. (shrink)

This study adds to business ethics research by investigating how employees’ exposure to despotic leadership might influence their peer-rated workplace status, along with a mediating role of ingratiatory behavior targeted at supervisors and a moderating role of their power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. Multisource, three-wave data from employees and their peers in Pakistani organizations reveal that exposure to despotic leaders spurs employees’ upward ingratiatory behavior, and this behavior in turn can help them attain higher status in the organization. (...) The mediating role of upward ingratiatory behavior also is more prominent among employees with higher levels of power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. For business ethics scholars, this study thus pinpoints a potentially dangerous pathway—featuring employees’ deliberate efforts to impress self-centered, destructive supervisors—by which despotic leadership can generate beneficial outcomes for employees but not for the organization, as well as how this process varies due to key personal characteristics. (shrink)

This article deals with the notion of honor and its relation to the willingness to make sacrifices. There is a widely shared feeling, especially in Western countries, that the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good has been on a reverse trend for quite a while both on the individual and the societal levels, and that this is increasingly problematic to the military. First of all, an outline of what honor is will be given. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, (...) stating that honor is a necessary incentive for courageous behavior and that it is something worth dying for, is contrasted with today's ruling view in the West, which sees honor as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive for courageous behavior. The article then addresses the way honor continues to have a role in today's military, despite its diminishing role in Western society at large. (shrink)

In Traditionen leben oder verlorene Traditionen wiederzugewinnen setzt voraus, zu erfassen, wie Traditionsbildung geschieht und wie Traditionen zu bearbeiten sind. Dazu bedarf es entsprechender Theoriebildung und methodologischer Arbeit. Das Phänomen "Tradition" ist überdies so vielseitig und vielschichtig, das die Arbeit an Traditionstheorien nur interdisziplinär erfolgen kann. Der vorliegende Band bietet Zugänge aus Philosophie, Soziologie, Sprachtheorie, Philologie und Biogenetik. Die Studien zielen darauf, die verschiedenen Perspektiven in einer Traditionstheorie zusammenzuführen, die dann mit weiteren Perspektiven versehen werden kann. Das betrifft nicht zuletzt (...) die Traditionsbildung im Christentum. Ein Teil der Autoren sind Theologen, die diese Thematik in dieser interdisziplinären Reichweite so auch für die Theologie erschließen. (shrink)

Scandals in companies such as Enron have been a source of great concern in the last decade. The events that led to a global financial crisis in 2008 have heightened this concern. How does one account for executive behaviors that led to such a crisis? This article argues that a conjunction of motive, means, and opportunity creates ‘an ethical hazard’ making questionable executive decisions more probable. It then suggests that corporate unethical behavior can be minimized by creating a process (...) to identify and remove such ethical hazards, and by appointing an ‘ethical hazards marshal.’. (shrink)

We experimentally investigate whether donation motive attribution influences individual investors' judgments of the donating firm's future earnings prospects and whether individual moral orientation, that is, perceived importance of social goodwill (PISG), moderates this effect. We find that investors forecast higher future earnings per share (EPS) when the donation motive is believed to be altruistic or win–win rather than egoistic; the EPS forecasts for altruistic and win–win motives are not different. However, this motive attribution effect holds only for (...) higher-PISG investors. A further examination finds that when the donation motive is believed to be egoistic and/or when investors have lower PISG, doing good is no better than doing nothing, but no backfire effect occurs. Our findings indicate that the positive effect of corporate donation on investors' judgments is generated only when higher-PISG investors believe that the donation motive is not purely egoistic; corporate donation will not generate negative effects on investors' judgments even under less favorable conditions. (shrink)

Although the literature on organizational justice enactment is becoming richer, our understanding of the role of the deontic justice motive remains limited. In this article, we review and discuss theoretical approaches to and evidence of the deontic justice motive and deontic justice enactment. While the prevalent understanding of deontic justice enactment focuses on compliance, we argue that this conceptualization is insufficient to explain behaviors that go beyond the call of duty. We thus consider two further forms of deontic (...) behavior: humanistic and supererogatory behavior. Drawing on the concepts of situation strength and person strength, we further argue that the reduced variance in behavior across morally challenging situations makes deontic justice enactment visible. We thus observe deontic justice enactment when an actor’s deontic justice motive collides with strong situational cues or constraints that guide the actor to behave differently. We formulate propositions and develop a theoretical model that links the deontic justice motive to moral maturation and deontic justice enactment. (shrink)

Hume's economic arguments, While grounded in the thought of his mercantilist contemporaries, Were none the less novel. They helped change the conception of work and the worker during the eighteenth century. Hume's psychological egalitarianism and his assumption of an 'achievement motive' amongst the laboring classes attacked the traditional view of the poor as unmoved by economic incentives to work. His arguments opened the way for a reconsideration of public policy when they were incorporated by adam smith into a highly (...) articulated vision of social life in an achieving community of psychic equals. (shrink)