Next year will be the 20th anniversary of the African Journal of Business Ethics. As a journal, our focus is, and always has been, publishing scholarly research about business ethics in Africa. In this regard, unlike many of our so-called ‘international’ counterparts, we will never reject a manuscript which presents findings from some part of Africa with the line: ‘Unfortunately, your results lack global relevance’.

This paper focuses on the issue of justice as a challenge facing business and society. I advance a simple deductive argument based on two premises. The first emerges out of theories of justice and holds that fairness, as a foundational basis for justice, demands impartiality or the avoidance of bias. The second emerges out of fiduciary law and holds that the duty of loyalty owed by managers to serve the interests of investors is fundamentally partial or biased. The conclusion is (...) the troubling fact that the fiduciary duty of loyalty owed by managers to serve the interests of investors appears to be incompatible with the demands of justice. Having presented this, I describe the impartiality tools of Rawls’ veil of ignorance and Adam Smith’s impartial spectator and discuss how these might be applied in this context. I speculate that while Smith’s impartial spectator is absolutely incommensurable with managers’ fiduciary duty of loyalty, Rawls’ veil of ignorance might be used to imagine a synthesis between this duty of loyalty and the impartiality demands of justice – in theory at least. And finally, as a parting shot, I wonder whether the real “Leadership Challenge that Matters” isn’t the gap between theory and reality. (shrink)

In his 2014 paper entitled “Reason, Rationality and Fiduciary Duty”, Lydenberg ventures into the field of the moral and political philosophy dealing with distributive justice in search of fresh perspectives on fiduciary duty. Simply by doing this, Lydenberg makes the very important contribution of drawing a little more attention to the potential that this huge field of study might have in relation to understanding socially responsible investment. There are however difficulties with Lydenberg’s paper. I describe three in particular that I (...) believe warrant critical attention. The first emerges out of Lydenberg’s treatment of the central concepts of reasonableness and rationality. The second lies in his apparent suggestion that at some earlier time fiduciary duty was somehow more generally other-considering than it is today. And finally, the third is associated with the place that impartiality occupies in Lydenberg’s storyline, and the implications of this in terms of his call for a reconciliation between reasonableness and rationality. This critical scrutiny clarifies theoretical and practical implications of the transition Lydenberg is suggesting. In doing this, it makes the realization that what Lydenberg is attempting is more than likely nothing short of resolving “The fundamental problem of ethics and politics” in the specific context of fiduciary action. (shrink)

There appears to be a growing disquiet amongst academics surrounding the ascendancy of 'responsible' investment that is egoist or self-interested in character — 'business case' responsible investment. This ascendancy has in no small measure been associated with the uptake of United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) as a de facto standard for mainstream responsible investment. This article contributes to this disquiet. It does this by examining how egoist 'responsible' investors (as endorsed by the PRI) might have behaved had they (...) been around in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s during days of the anti-apartheid socially responsible investment (SRI) movement. Armed with near perfect (hindsight grade) enhanced analytics, it is clear that the signals that such egoist ' responsible' investors would have sent to company management in terms of the apartheid issue would have been highly muddled and therefore ineffective. The net conclusion is that there is nothing inherently or inevitably ' responsible' about egoist investment and that the aversion to behaving ethically amongst institutional investors must be challenged and not swept under a carpet of rhetoric. (shrink)

Corporate citizenship is a prominent international issue as contemporary corporations are no longer expected to perform financially, but are also expected to have an ethical relationship of responsibility between the corporate itself and the society in which it operates and performs it business activities. Provides an up-to-date theoretical content pertaining to corporate citizenship, providing local and global examples and case studies.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch gibt aktuelle interdisziplinäre Forschungseinblicke rund um das Fab City-Konzept. Ein Ansatz, der beschreibt, wie Produktions- und Konsumptionsweisen gestaltet werden können, sodass einerseits globale Kollaboration in und durch Communities von der Ideengenerierung bis zur Produktentwicklung physischer Güter mittels quelloffener Technologien (Open Source Software und Hardware) ermöglicht wird und andererseits die Produktion dieser Güter lokal und somit möglichst nahe am Ort des Bedarfs sowie dezentral im Sinne einer verteilten Produktion erfolgen kann, beispielsweise in Fab(rication) Labs. Ziel ist die Schaffung einer (...) möglichst nachhaltigen Produktion bzw. Wertschöpfung. Ökologisch nachhaltig, indem lange Transportwege vermieden und auf Grundlage von Kreislaufprinzipien lokale Stoffkreisläufe geschlossen werden. Ökonomisch nachhaltig, indem durch quelloffene Technologien Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen und durch föderierte Ansätze Abhängigkeiten vermieden werden. Sozial nachhaltig durch ein partizipatives Wertschöpfungssystem, in dem der Zugang zu Wissen und Knowhow sowie zu Produktionsmitteln unbeschränkt ist. Über den gesamten Produktentstehungsprozess und -lebenszyklus enthält das vorliegende, bilinguale Werk in deutscher und englischer Sprache Beiträge aus den Bereichen Citizen & Collaborative Innovation and Design, Circular Design & Economy, Open-Source-Software-Tools für die Entwicklung von Open Source Hardware, Digital Product Passport, föderierte (Open-Source-) Systeme, die Verbreitung von Open Source Hardware sowie technical literacy und economic governance. Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, and Chairman of the board of The Fab Foundation: "For many years the growth of cities has been an inexorable trend, with cities acting as regional magnets and engines; the resources enabling a Fab City can also help expand opportunity beyond cities. There is now an opportunity and need for labs that can develop, deploy, and measure the frontiers of Fab City technologies. This book provides a much-needed snapshot of the current state of that challenge." Tomas Diez, Executive Director of the Fab City Foundation: "This book is an invitation for large-scale collaboration to build distributed system that can support the development of alternative modes of production, in line with the social and ecological needs of our time.". (shrink)

Some philosophers have criticized the use of psychopharmaceuticals on the grounds that even if these drugs enhance the person using them, they threaten their authenticity. Others have replied by pointing out that the conception of authenticity upon which this argument rests is contestable; on a rival conception, psychopharmaceuticals might be used to enhance our authenticity. Since, however, it is difficult to decide between these competing conceptions of authenticity, the debate seems to end in a stalemate. I suggest that we need (...) not resolve this debate to end the stalemate. New technologies which alter the self can be understood within the framework of the first conception of authenticity, I suggest, not as threatening the authentic self, but rather as bringing the outward appearance of the self into line with its deepest essence. Since psychopharmaceutical use can plausibly be understood on this model, it can be seen as enhancing our authenticity on either conception. (shrink)

Abstract The typical explanation of an event or process which attracts the label ‘conspiracy theory’ is an explanation that conflicts with the account advanced by the relevant epistemic authorities. I argue that both for the layperson and for the intellectual, it is almost never rational to accept such a conspiracy theory. Knowledge is not merely shallowly social, in the manner recognized by social epistemology, it is also constitutively social: many kinds of knowledge only become accessible thanks to the agent's embedding (...) in an environment that includes other epistemic agents. Moreover, advances in knowledge typically require ongoing immersion in this social environment. But the intellectual who embraces a conspiracy theory risks cutting herself off from this environment, and therefore epistemically disabling herself. Embracing a conspiracy theory therefore places at risk the ability to engage in genuine enquiry, including the enquiry needed properly to evaluate the conspiracy theory. (shrink)

The conflict between agency and stakeholder theories of the firm has long been entrenched in organizational and management literature. At the core of this debate are two competing views of the firm in which assumptions and process contrast each other so sharply that agency and stakeholder views of the firm are often described as polar opposites. The purpose of this paper is to show how agency theory can be subsumed within a general stakeholder model of the firm. By analytically deconstructing (...) the assumptions of agency theory, it is argued that agency theory: (1) must include a recognition of stakeholders; (2) requires a moral minimum to be upheld, which places four moral principles above the interests of any stakeholders, including shareholders; (3) consists of contradictory assumptions about human nature and which give rise to the equally valid assumptions of trust, honesty and loyalty to be infused into the agency relationship. In this way, stakeholder theory is argued to be the logical conclusion of agency theory. Empirical hypotheses are presented as a means to substantiate this claim. (shrink)

Narratives are an integral part of human expression. In the graphic form, they range from cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the Bayeux Tapestry to modern day comic books (Kunzle, 1973; McCloud, 1993). Yet not much research has addressed the structure and comprehension of narrative images, for example, how do people create meaning out of sequential images? This piece helps fill the gap by presenting a theory of Narrative Grammar. We describe the basic narrative categories and their relationship to a (...) canonical narrative arc, followed by a discussion of complex structures that extend beyond the canonical schema. This demands that the canonical arc be reconsidered as a generative schema whereby any narrative category can be expanded into a node in a tree structure. Narrative “pacing” is interpreted as a reflection of various patterns of this embedding: conjunction, left-branching trees, center-embedded constituencies, and others. Following this, diagnostic methods are proposed for testing narrative categories and constituency. Finally, we outline the applicability of this theory beyond sequential images, such as to film and verbal discourse, and compare this theory with previous approaches to narrative and discourse. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the common practice of employing moral predicates as explaining phrases can be accommodated on an expressivist account of moral practice. This account does not treat moral explanations as in any way second-rate or derivative, since it subsumes moral explanations under the general theory of program explanations (as defended by Jackson and Pettit). It follows that the phenomenon of moral explanations cannot be used to adjudicate the debate between expressivism and its rivals.

Among the various methods of deceit, lying is often thought to be a special affront on the grounds that it invites the victim’s trust. Such an explanation is incomplete without an account of the moral significance of trust. This article distinguishes two morally problematic relations to trust, betrayals and abuses, and, appealing to the idea that we should be grateful to be trusted, attempts to explain these wrongs as violations of distinct demands of gratitude for trust. Only the wrong of (...) abuse, not betrayal, is useful for distinguishing methods of deceit. Although lying commits an abuse of trust, it turns out that it is really the broader category of deceit by means of communication that is special in this way. -/- . (shrink)

Abstract : Libet’s famous experiments, showing that apparently we become aware of our intention to act only after we have unconsciously formed it, have widely been taken to show that there is no such thing as free will. If we are not conscious of the formation of our intentions, many people think, we do not exercise the right kind of control over them. I argue that the claim this view presupposes, that only consciously initiated actions could be free, places a (...) condition upon freedom of action which it is in principle impossible to fulfil, for reasons that are conceptual and not merely contingent. Exercising this kind of control would require that we control our control system, which would simply cause the same problem to arise at a higher-level or initiate an infinite regress of controllings. If the unconscious initiation of actions, as well as the takings of decisions, is incompatible with control over them, then free will is impossible on conceptual grounds. Thus, Libet’s experiments do not constitute a separate, empirical, challenge to our freedom. (shrink)

Gareth Evans has argued influentially against vague identities. David Lewis and Theodore Sider have argued against vague parthood. Much of the distaste among philosophers for metaphysical vagueness is sourced in these arguments. I argue that even if the considerations adduced by Evans, Lewis and Sider are conclusive, metaphysical boundary vagueness remains possible.

We examine the arguments on both sides of the recent debate (Hale and Wright v. Field) on the existence, and modal status, of the natural numbers. We formulate precisely, with proper attention to denotational commitments, the analytic conditionals that link talk of numbers with talk of numerosity and with counting. These provide conceptual controls on the concept of number. We argue, against Field, that there is a serious disanalogy between the existence of God and the existence of numbers. We give (...) stronger reasons than those advanced by Wright for resisting Field's analogy. We argue that the rules governing the basic numerical notions commit us to the natural numbers as necessary existents. We also show that the latest twist in the debate involving 'surdons' leaves both sides in a stalemate. (shrink)

Ned Block has influentially distinguished two kinds of consciousness, access and phenomenal consciousness. He argues that these two kinds of consciousness can dissociate, and therefore we cannot rely upon subjective report in constructing a science of consciousness. I argue that none of Block's evidence better supports his claim than the rival view, that access and phenomenal consciousness are perfectly correlated. Since Block's view is counterintuitive, and has wildly implausible implications, the fact that there is no evidence that better supports it (...) than the rival view should lead us to reject it. (shrink)

Tacit knowledge is the form of implicit knowledge that we rely on for learning. It is invoked in a wide range of intellectual inquiries, from traditional academic subjects to more pragmatically orientated investigations into the nature and transmission of skills and expertise. Notwithstanding its apparent pervasiveness, the notion of tacit knowledge is a complex and puzzling one. What is its status as knowledge? What is its relation to explicit knowledge? What does it mean to say that knowledge is tacit? Can (...) it be measured? Recent years have seen a growing interest from philosophers in understanding the nature of tacit knowledge. Philosophers of science have discussed its role in scientific problem-solving; philosophers of language have been concerned with the speaker's relation to grammatical theories; and phenomenologists have attempted to describe the relation of explicit theoretical knowledge to a background understanding of matters that are taken for granted. This book seeks to bring a unity to these diverse philosophical discussions by clarifying their conceptual underpinnings. In addition the book advances a specific account of tacit knowledge that elucidates the importance of the concept for understanding the character of human cognition, and demonstrates the relevance of the recommended account to those concerned with the communication of expertise. The book will be of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, cognitive psychologists and students of theoretical linguistics. (shrink)

Supervaluational treatments of vagueness are currently quite popular among those who regard vagueness as a thoroughly semantic phenomenon. Peter Unger's 'problem of the many' may be regarded as arising from the vagueness of our ordinary physical-object terms, so it is not surprising that supervaluational solutions to Unger's problem have been offered. I argue that supervaluations do not afford an adequate solution to the problem of the many. Moreover, the considerations I raise against the supervaluational solution tell also against the solution (...) to the problem of the many which is suggested by adherents of the epistemic theory of vagueness. (shrink)

Power theorists are divided on the question of whether individual powers are single-track (for a single manifestation type) or are multi-track (capable of producing distinct manifestation types for distinct stimuli). EJ Lowe has recently defended single-tracking, arguing that the multi-tracker can provide no adequate reason for treating powers as capable of having multiple manifestation types, and claiming that putative instances of multi-track powers are either single-track powers in need of unifying descriptions or are merely several single-track powers. I respond to (...) Lowe on behalf of the multi-tracker, first by arguing that he overlooks the extra-empirical features of the debate, then by posing a dilemma for any single-track account of powers concerning the single-tracker’s ability to appropriately deal with fine-grained manifestation types. Finally I provide the aforementioned reason for thinking that there are multi-track powers. (shrink)

It is by now well established that the fact that an action or aconsequence was inevitable does not excuse the agent from responsibilityfor it, so long as the counterfactual intervention which ensures thatthe act will take place is not actualized. However, in this paper I demonstrate that there is one exception to this principle: when theagent is aware of the counterfactual intervener and the role she wouldplay in some alternative scenario, she might be excused, despite the fact that in the (...) actual scenario she acts, as we say, of her own freewill. I illustrate this contention by way of a critique of Fischer andRavizza''s well-known account of responsibility for consequences. (shrink)

Is there a ‘constitutional moment’in contemporary Europe? What if anything is the constitution of the European Union; what kind of polity is the Union? The suggestion offered is that there is a legally constituted order, and that a suitable term to apply to it is a ‘commonwealth’, comprising a commonwealth of ‘post-sovereign’ states. Is it a democratic commonwealth, and can it be? Is there sufficiently a demos or ‘people’ for democracy to be possible? If not democratic, what is it? Monarchy, (...) oligarchy, or democracy, or a ‘mixed constitution’? Argued: there is a mixed constitution containing a reasonable element of democratic rule. The value of democracy is then explored in terms of individualistic versus holistic evaluation and instrumental versus intrinsic value. Subsidiarity can be considered in a similar light, suggestively in terms of forms of democracy appropriate to different levels of self-government. The conclusion is that there is no absolute democratic deficit in the European commonwealth. (shrink)

The aim here is to describe how to complete the constructive logicist program, in the author’s book Anti-Realism and Logic, of deriving all the Peano-Dedekind postulates for arithmetic within a theory of natural numbers that also accounts for their applicability in counting finite collections of objects. The axioms still to be derived are those for addition and multiplication. Frege did not derive them in a fully explicit, conceptually illuminating way. Nor has any neo-Fregean done so.

Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive of discourses that express propositions. If there is nothing more to a mental state being a belief than it being characteristically expressed by sentences that are propositionally clothed then the version of expressivism which accepts that moral discourse is propositionally clothed (‘quasi-realism’) (...) is self-refuting. Fortunately for quasi-realists, this view of belief, which I label ‘minimalism’, is false. I present three arguments against it and dismiss two possible defences (the first drawn from the work of Wright, the second given by Harcourt). The conclusion is that the issue between expressivists and their opponents cannot be settled by the mere fact that moral discourse wears propositional clothing. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms has studied the evolutionary dynamics of a simple bargaining game. Fair-dealing is the strategy 'demand 1/2', competing with the more modest strategy 'demand 1/3' and the greedier strategy 'demand 2/3'. Individuals leave offspring in proportion to their accumulated payoffs. The rules for payoffs from encounters penalize low- and high-demanders. The result is a significant basin of attraction for fair-dealing as an evolutionarily stable strategy. From these considerations Skyrms concludes that a disposition to fair-dealing could have evolved. A very (...) different picture emerges, however, when one considers genetic bases for the dispositions involved. A simple two-allele sexual model produces very different stable equilibria in the distribution of behavioral phenotypes. The equilibria for Skyrms's purely phenotypic selection process will not in general be attainable once one enters some simple genetic considerations. (shrink)

Naïve realism is a theory of perception with great explanatory ambitions. It has been influentially argued that, in order to realize these explanatory ambitions, the naïve realist should say that any perception belongs to just one fundamental kind. I think, however, that adopting this commitment does not particularly help the naïve realist to realize her explanatory ambitions, and so is not warranted. This result is significant because once this commitment about fundamental kinds is relinquished, we see that it is possible (...) to develop some new and surprising forms of naïve realism—most notably, what I call pluralist naïve realism. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is an important distinction between the notion of consciousness as it is applied to creatures and, on the other hand, the notion of consciousness as it applies to mental states. McBride has recently argued in this journal that whilst there may be a grammatical distinction between state consciousness and creature consciousness, there is no parallel ontological distinction. It is argued here that whilst state consciousness and creature consciousness are indeed related, they are distinct properties. (...) Conscious creatures can have, at one time, both conscious and unconscious mental states. This raises the question of what distinguishes the conscious from unconscious mental states of a subject: a question about what state consciousness consists in. Whilst the state/creature distinction may not be of use in explaining every aspect of a subject's consciousness, it does provide a key part of the explanandum for theories of consciousness and mind. The state/creature consciousness distinction is a real one and should not be dropped from our psychological taxonomy. (shrink)

I argue that Frank Jackson's knowledge argument cannot succeed in showing that qualia are epiphenomenal. The reason for this is that there is, given the structure of the argument, an irreconcilable tension between his support for the claim that qualia are non-physical and his conclusion that they are epiphenomenal. The source of the tension is that his argument for the non-physical character of qualia is plausible only on the assumption that they have causal efficacy, while his argument for the epiphenomenal (...) character of qualia is plausible only on the assumption that they are non-physical. Since these two arguments cannot be combined coherently, the most Jackson's argument can establish is that qualia are non-physical. (shrink)

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice." (Martin Luther King) -/- A moral explanation is an explanation of a particular or type of event (or fact or state of affairs) that features moral terms in the explaining phrase. Here are some examples. First, one way of the above quote is as the claim that, in the broad sweep of history, societies tend toward more just institutions, and that they do so precisely because these institutions (...) are just. This is a moral explanation of social development. Second, historians might claim that “The injustice of slavery contributed to its demise”: this is a moral explanation of a historical event. Third, I might say that “I believe that Hitler was morally depraved because he was morally depraved”: this is a moral explanation of a moral belief. Finally, philosophers sometimes say things like “In the original Trolley case, it is morally right to flick the switch, because this will lead to the morally best outcome”: this is a moral explanation of a particular moral fact. -/- The issue of the availability of moral explanations of these types is relevant to both normative ethics and metaethics. In normative ethics the availability of moral explanations is bound up with the possibility of general normative theories. In metaethics the issue of moral explanations is closely tied to the doctrine of moral realism. In what follows I first trace the relevance of moral explanations to normative ethics and metaethics, before considering some examples in detail. (shrink)

Dans un article publié dans ce numéro, Ishtiyaque Haji soutient que la difficulté posée par la chance au compatibilisme n’est pas nouvelle, mais qu’elle est en fait identique au problème inhérent aux cas de manipulation, auquel les compatibilistes ont déjà répondu. Dans cet article, je distingue deux problèmes que la chance pose au compatibilisme. Si l’un des deux est bien celui que l’on trouve dans les cas de manipulation, celui identifié par Haji est cependant différent. La difficulté soulevée par la (...) chance est donc bien originale, et les solutions au problème des cas de manipulation échouent à y répondre. (shrink)