Do Corporations Deserve Moral Consideration?

Is Hume an Internalist? CHARLOTTE BROWN INTRODUCTION Should the justification and explanation of morality be sought in the passions and sentiments of human beings? David Hume answered in the affirmative because he thought that only then can we explain how moral concepts and considerations are action-guiding, influencing choice and action. Failure to be persuaded by moral considerations is, Hume claims, not simply a matter of failing to be persuaded to acknowledge such considerations but also failing to be persuaded to act on them. The point of appealing to passions is that they provide us with interests and concerns and so are capable of moving us. Thus, Hume locates morality directly in particular feelings--the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval. I shall argue, however, that Hume fails in an important respect to show that moral concepts influence action. For I shall try to show that, at least as far as Hume construes them, the moral feelings of approval and disapproval do not by themselves move us. This paper has two parts. In the first part I describe in more detail Hume's argument to show that morality should be based in sentiments. Hume makes his case polemically. Our concern for morality can be explained either by appeal to reason or to sentiments. But Hume argues that rationalist moral theories cannot explain how moral concepts and considerations motivate. I call this the argument from motivation. I show that this argument commits Hume to producing a view which distinguishes him from his rationalist opponents on motivational grounds. That view is that the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval by themselves are capable of moving us. In the second part, I turn to the question of whether Hume in his constructive phase shows that moral concepts and considerations do motivate by themselves. I argue that he fails to do so. Before turning to Hume's argument from motivation and his views on moral motivation, we need to get clear about the phrase 'moral motivation' for it can be used to refer to three different things. The first sense has to do with the motives that lead us to acquire virtuous characteristics and traits and so [69] 7o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26: I JANUARY t988 refers to the motives that prompt us to become morally good persons. The second concerns action directly and refers to the motives that prompt us, in particular situations, to do the morally right thing. In the third sense, a motive is moral if the agent is moved by specifically moral considerations, by the thought that this is what ought to be done, rather than, for example, considerations that derive from self-interest: from an agent's appetites, likes, dislikes and so on. Consider, for example, two people who have as their purpose helping a friend in distress. One is moved by the thought that this is what morally ought to be done, whereas the other by the thought that so and so needs help. The first person is moved by a moral motive, the second by a nonmoral motive. It is important to distinguish these three senses of 'moral motive' because it need not be the case that the motives which prompt agents to acquire the virtues or to do the right thing--the first two senses--are moral motives in the third sense. Thus, for example, it is possible to hold, as Butler did, that reasonable self-love may be what prompts us to acquire the virtues, but that once we have them they are what prompt us to do the right thing.~ It is also possible to hold, as Mill did, that right action may be motivated by any motive, as long as it is a motive which moves the agent to perform an action with good consequences.~ On Mill's view, the moral rightness of an action is determined solely by its outcome judged by the utility principle. The motives which prompt agents to perform actions to which the utility principle directs them have nothing to do with whether the actions are right or wrong. I now turn to the argument from motivation and Hume's charge against rationalists that they fail...

תקציר בעברית: תקציר בעברית: האם יש מקום לשקול שיקולי מוסר במסגרת דיני הקניין הרוחני? אסופת מאמרים קצרים זו בוחנת את השאלה בקשר לכמה מענפי הקניין תוך השוואה בין הענפים השונים. בחלקם יש התייחסות מפורשת לסוגיות של מוסר, למשל סעיף 11 לפקודת סימני מסחר [נוסח חדש], התשלב-1972, שמגדיר סימנים שאינם כשרים לרישום בשל סיבות מוסריות. בענפים אחרים, יש מגבלות-תוכן מסוימות, שניתן להסבירן תוך פנייה לשיקולי מוסר. כך, ההוראה שבסעיף 7(1) לחוק הפטנטים, התשכז-1967, שמחריגה ממערכת הפטנטים המצאות שהן תהליך לטיפול רפואי באדם. מנגד, ישנם ענפים, כמו דיני זכות יוצרים, בהן החוק שותק ואינו שולל הגנה משפטית ליצירות בשל תוכנן, מתוך תפישת מוסר או תקנת הציבור. כיצד ניתן להסביר את השוני המשפטי הזה? האם שתיקת המחוקק בהקשרים מסוימים, כמו בדיני זכות יוצרים, פירושה כי חל הסדר שלילי, כלומר שהמחוקק סבר שאין מקום לשקול שיקולים מוסריים שכאלה? האם רשאי הרשם או בית המשפט לשקול שיקולים כאלה? תפישה לפיה אכן מדובר בהסדר שלילי מובילה לחשש כי המשפט—גם אם בשתיקה—מכשיר תוכן בלתי מוסרי ואף מעניק הגנה קניינית בגינו. המאמרים באסופה זו בוחנים היבטים שונים בממשק שבין ענפי קניין רוחני מסוימים לבין סוגיות מוסריות, ובין היתר, יצירות בלתי-חוקיות במסגרת זכויות יוצרים; הזכות המוסרית לשלמות היצירה; שיקולי מוסר בחוק העיצובים, התשעז-2017; שיקולי מוסר ותקנת הציבור ברישום סימני מסחר; הגבולות המוסריים של סודות מסחר; שיקולי מוסר בהליך רישום פטנטים; סוגיות מוסריות העולות בהקשר נגישות לתרופות מוגנות פטנט; ניתוח של מערכת הפטנטים כגורם סמוי להסדרת מוסר. המאמרים מבוססים ברובם על שולחן עגול שכותרתו הגבול המוסרי של הקניין הרוחני, שהתקיים בנובמבר 2017 על ידי מכון ש. הורוביץ לקניין רוחני לזכר דר אמנון גולדנברג, בפקולטה למשפטים באוניברסיטת תל אביב. עורכי האסופה הם מיכאל בירנהק ואור כהן-ששון. English Abstract: Should moral considerations be integrated into intellectual property (IP) law? This collection of short papers (in Hebrew) examines this question regarding several IP fields. Some IP branches explicitly refer to such considerations, e.g., section 11 of Israeli Trademarks Ordinance [New Version], 1972 specifies categories of marks ineligible for registration due to moral reasons. Other IP branches contain softer limitations which can be explained as stemming from a moral perspective, e.g., section 7(1) of the Israeli Patents Act, 1967, which restricts granting a patent for methods of medical treatment of the human body. On the other hand, in some IP fields, such as copyright, the law does not engage in moral issues, and hence, does not exclude certain contents from IP protection. How can we explain this differential treatment of morality in IP law? Does the law’s silence imply that the legislature deliberately excluded such considerations? May courts and the IP registrar apply moral considerations in their decisions? Contending that IP must not address moral issues leads to the conclusion that law acknowledges immoral subject matter as valid, legitimate content. This collection addresses the interplay between specific IP fields and moral issues, discussing unlawful creative works in the Israeli copyright law; The moral right of integrity in copyright law; Moral considerations under the Designs Act, 2017; Moral and public policy considerations in trademark law; The moral boundaries in trade secrets; Moral considerations in patent examination; Moral issues that arise due to limited access to patent-protected drugs; Analysis of the patent system as a covert factor of regulating morality. The edited collection is based on a round-table held in November 2017, organized by the S. Horowitz Institute for Intellectual Property in memory of Dr. Amnon Goldenberg (SHIIP), at the Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University. The collection's editors are Michael Birnhack and Or Cohen-Sasson.

Motivating sustainability through morality: A daily diary study on the link between moral self-control and clothing consumption

Stupidity consists in wanting to draw conclusions. Gustav Flaubert I've been to the movies. I saw a very long picture about a dog–the moral of which is that a dog is man's best fri...

As a slew of recent work in epistemology has brought out, there are a range of cases where there's a strong temptation to say that prudential and (especially) moral considerations affect what we ought to believe. There are two distinct models of how this can happen. On the first, “reasons pragmatist” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations constitute distinctively practical reasons for (or against) belief. On the second, “pragmatic encroachment” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations affect what one is epistemically justified in believing. The pragmatic encroachment model appears to have several advantages over reasons pragmatism, and this has led many recent philosophers to endorse the former. However, in this paper we argue that a version of reasons pragmatism can be (at least largely) saved from these purported disadvantages once paired with an independently plausible permissivism about epistemically justified outright belief. This hybrid view—“permissivist pragmatism”—holds that when there is more than one epistemically permitted doxastic attitude, practical (including moral) considerations can determine which epistemically permitted doxastic attitude one all-things-considered ought to have. This view avoids both the problems faced by simple versions of reasons pragmatism, and those that distinctively attend pragmatic encroachment, while preserving the advantages of each view.

The use of the concept of moral status is commonplace today in debates about the moral consideration of entities lacking certain special capacities, such as nonhuman animals. This concept has been typically used to defend the view that adult human beings have a status higher than all those entities. However, even those who disagree with this claim have often accepted the idea of moral status as if it were part of an undisputed received way of thinking in ethics. This paper argues that the use of this concept, however common, distorts our understanding of how to behave towards different individuals in different circumstances. When moral status is identified with the interest in living or the capacity for well-being, it becomes an arbitrary and irrelevant criterion. When it is used as a synonym of moral consideration or considerability, in a way that is compatible with the principle of equal consideration, it becomes trivial and confusing. When used, instead, to defend the unequal moral consideration of interests of equal weight, it has several implausible implications. In particular, the claim that unequal status is justified because of the value (either final or intrinsic, or instrumental) of cognitive capacities implausibly entails that our exercising those capacities should have priority over the promotion of our wellbeing. The idea of full moral status is also problematic as it implies the possibility of status monsters. In addition, its use is based in a misconceived way of what it would really entail to have a full status by virtue of having rational capacities. The paper concludes that we have strong reasons to abandon the concept of moral status altogether.

Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations

The term moral considerability refers to the question of whether a being or set of beings is worthy of moral consideration. Moral considerability is most readily afforded to those beings that demonstrate the clearest relationship to rational humans, though many have also argued for and against the moral considerability of species, ecosystems, and “lesser” animals. Among these arguments there are at least two positions: “environmentalist” positions that tend to emphasize the systemic relations between species, and “liberationist” positions that tend to emphasize the attributes or welfare of a particular individual organism. Already, this classic conflict provides for some challenging theoretical clashes between environmentalists and animal liberationists. The question of moral considerability is complicated, however, by recent developments in genetic engineering. Some animals, like pigs and fish, have been genetically modified by humans to grow organs that can then be transplanted into humans. If environmental arguments for the moral consideration of species are correct, then we are released from our obligations to morally consider those animals that we have genetically modified, since they are by their nature always an “invader species.” If, instead, the welfare of the animal is of penultimate importance, then there is a case for strengthening the moral considerability of GM animals over “naturally-occurring” animals, since they bear a closer relationship to humans. This would appear to be an intractable problem, a “bad marriage,” as Mark Sagoff once proposed. This paper argues that the case of invasive transgenic animals exposes weaknesses in this classic conflict, and particularly, in the framing of this conflict. To remedy this framing problem, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of the term “moral considerability,” instead urging a strong distinction between moral considerability, moral relevance, and moral significance.

There are many versions of legal positivism; perhaps as many as there are legal positivists around. All the versions of legal positivism, however, subscribe to the so-called Separation Thesis. This thesis basically maintains that detenriining what the law is, does not necessarily, or conceptually, depend on moral or other evaluative considerations about what it ought to be in the relevant circumstances. Legal positivists differ, however, and quite substantially, over the appropriate interpretation of this thesis. The so-called ‘strong’, or ‘exclusive’ version of legal positivism maintains that moral considerations never determine the legal validity of norms. ‘Soft’ positivists, on the other hand, do maintain that there is a close relation between legal validity and morality, but they hold that this relation is, at best, a contingent matter; it does not derive from the nature of law or legal reasoning as such. Soft-positivists claim that moral considerations determine legal validity only in certain cases, namely, in those cases which follow from the rules of recognition that happen to prevail in a given legal system.

The ability to negotiate and resolve socioscientific issues has been posited as integral components of scientific literacy. Although philosophers and science educators have argued that socioscientific issues inherently involve moral and ethical considerations, the ultimate arbiters of morality are individual decision‐makers. This study explored the extent to which college students construe genetic engineering issues as moral problems. Twenty college students participated in interviews designed to elicit their ideas, reactions, and feelings regarding a series of gene therapy and cloning scenarios. Qualitative analyses revealed that moral considerations were significant influences on decision‐making, indicating a tendency for students to construe genetic engineering issues as moral problems. Students engaged in moral reasoning based on utilitarian analyses of consequences as well as the application of principles. Issue construal was also influenced by affective features such as emotion and intuition. In addition to moral considerations, a series of other factors emerged as important dimensions of socioscientific decision‐making. These factors included personal experiences, family biases, background knowledge, and the impact of popular culture. The implications for classroom science instruction and future research are discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 88:4–27, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/.sce10101

Moral Considerability: Deontological, not Metaphysical

Predicting the moral consideration of artificial intelligences

The ethical debate on the moral consideration of non-human animals (hereafter animals) is currently centred on the evidence of sentience in these individuals. Legal protection for vertebrates and cephalopods (and decapods in the UK) has resulted from the recognition of sentience in these animals. Although one should celebrate the significant advances in the legal protection of animals in recent decades, current animal legislation is modulated by an instrumental viewpoint, remaining speciesist and anthropocentric. A sentient being is here understood as one who has the phenomenological experience of awareness, which is the most basic sense of phenomenal consciousness that implies the existence of a subject who is not indifferent to what happens to itself. This paper demonstrates, with reasonable assumptions, that this concept of sentience would apply to many invertebrate species, thus deeming them worthy of increased moral consideration and legal protection. In cases in which sentience cannot be demonstrated clearly, one should assume the precautionary principle and consider the intrinsic value of each animal to designate moral consideration. In considering sentience as the primary condition for moral consideration, science must expand who is recognized as sentient rather than being reductionist. Animal ethics must review to whom the moral consideration should be given. Animal legislation must include legislative innovations and invertebrates in its protective scope. Thereby, a significant improvement in the current political and legislative decisions would be rooted in animal ethics. Opening the ethical perception and broadening the debate are urgent, as moral consideration should be given to all animals.

Can business humanize its stakeholders? And if so, how does this relate to moral consideration for stakeholders? In this paper we compare two business orientations that are relevant for current business theory and practice: a stakeholder orientation and a profit orientation. We empirically investigate the causal relationships between business orientation, humanization, and moral consideration. We report the results of six experiments, making use of different operationalizations of a stakeholder and profit orientation, different stakeholders (employees, suppliers, labor unions), and different participant samples. Our findings support the prediction that individual stakeholders observing a stakeholder-oriented firm see the firm’s other stakeholders as more human than individual stakeholders observing a profit-oriented firm. This humanization, in turn, increases individual stakeholders’ moral consideration for the firm’s other stakeholders. Our findings underscore the importance of humanization for stakeholders’ moral consideration for each other. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the firm as a moral community of stakeholders. Specifically, we move away from a focus on managers, and how they can make business more moral. Instead we direct attention to (other) stakeholders, and how business can make these stakeholders more moral.

It is relatively uncontroversial that (at least some) non-human animals are morally considerable in their own right. While recognizing moral obligations to animals, many also hold that humans, but not other animals, pass a distinct, higher, threshold for moral consideration, implying that when choices must be made, serious human concerns always trump those of non-human animals. For example, Carl Cohen argues that “If biomedical investigators abandon the effective pursuit of their professional objectives because they are convinced that they may not do to animals what the service of humans requires, they will fail, objectively, to do their duty.” However, defenders of such views face what Jeff McMahan has called the “separation problem”—the challenge of explaining why members of the human species as such have special moral privilege. It is difficult to find a basis for separating the moral status of humans from that of non-human animals. Whatever criterion is used (language, sufferer, subject of a life, user of tools, cooperator, builder and so on), it seems that any attributes possessed by all humans are manifest also by some non-human animals, to an extent that matches or surpasses the accomplishment of some humans such as infants or those with extreme cognitive disability. Even ethical capacities are arguably possessed by some non-human animals. If being entitled to moral consideration or being owed moral obligation is based on possession of some inherent property, then any being or creature that manifests this property should qualify for that consideration, whichever biological category it belongs to. And unless there is a further argument for inclusion, then those beings or creatures that lack the morally salient property turn out not to be morally considerable in precisely this way, although they might be morally considerable for some other reason. Hence separationists, those who insist that certain special moral claims attach to all and only humans have been accused of “speciesism”—a moral privilege based on species membership parallel to the (rationally and morally) problematic phenomena of sexism, racism and the like. Those who oppose separationism argue that moral considerations, protections, rights, or benefits are independent of species membership. Belonging to a biological species or “looking like us” seem to be improper standards for moral salience. The separation argument needs a fact about the nature of all humans that does not include any other species. Inherent properties are not promising, but argu-