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Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Civil Liability For Civil Disobedience, David Lefkowitz
Civil Liability For Civil Disobedience, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In January 2023, climate activists trespassed on the site of the German energy firm RWE’s Garzweiler coal mine to protest against its plans to expand operations there. The police eventually removed the protestors (including Greta Thunberg), many of whom were charged with committing criminal offenses. A few weeks after the occupation, RWE announced plans to seek compensation from the protestors for the injuries they inflicted on the firm, which included damage to vehicles and other equipment.[1] Should the law permit it to do so? More generally, should a liberal-democratic State hold civil disobedients legally liable to compensate the private …
Ethical Decision Making And Leadership: Merging Social Role And Self-Construal Perspectives, Crystal L. Hoyt, Terry L. Price
Ethical Decision Making And Leadership: Merging Social Role And Self-Construal Perspectives, Crystal L. Hoyt, Terry L. Price
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
This research extends our understanding of ethical decision making on the part of leaders by merging social role and self-construal perspectives. Interdependent self-construal is generally seen as enhancing concern for justice and moral values. Across two studies we tested the prediction that non-leading group members’ interdependent self-construal would be associated with lower levels of unethical decision making on behalf of their group but that, in contrast, this relationship would be weaker for leaders, given their social role. These predictions were experimentally tested by assigning participants to the role of leader or non-leading group member and assessing the association between their …
Ethical Decision Making And Leadership: Merging Social Role And Self-Construal Perspectives, Crystal L. Hoyt, Terry L. Price
Ethical Decision Making And Leadership: Merging Social Role And Self-Construal Perspectives, Crystal L. Hoyt, Terry L. Price
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
This research extends our understanding of ethical decision making on the part of leaders by merging social role and self-construal perspectives. Interdependent self-construal is generally seen as enhancing concern for justice and moral values. Across two studies we tested the prediction that non-leading group members’ interdependent self-construal would be associated with lower levels of unethical decision making on behalf of their group but that, in contrast, this relationship would be weaker for leaders, given their social role. These predictions were experimentally tested by assigning participants to the role of leader or non-leading group member and assessing the association between their …
Ethics Effectiveness: The Nature Of Good Leadership, Joanne B. Ciulla
Ethics Effectiveness: The Nature Of Good Leadership, Joanne B. Ciulla
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
No abstract provided.
Ethics And Critical Thinking, Jonathan B. Wight
Ethics And Critical Thinking, Jonathan B. Wight
Economics Faculty Publications
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that investigations in positive economics rely on ethical perspectives and practices, and further, that critical thinking requires a wider ethical viewpoint than normative economics generally permits. Positive economics generally relies, for example, on the unsung virtues of the investigator who demonstrates honesty and transparency in the search for truth. Ethical failures in this regard are not uncommon (DeMartino, 2011). But another unstated ethical perspective appears in the worldview from which a researcher sets out to model behavior. Modelers almost always assume that rationality requires that an economic actor undertake an action in pursuit of a …
Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Donelson R. Forsyth
Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Donelson R. Forsyth
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
A CEO bankrupts the company he is supposed to be leading. A retiree donates thousands of hours to her community. A company's leadership decides not to relocate a factory overseas, for the sake of the residents of an economically challenged town. A president of a club on a college campus encourages members to cheat on their examinations so that the group's members can earn academic honors. An elected public official arranges a tryst with a lover and abandons his duties for days on end.
These behaviors raise questions about motivation, rationality, and intent, but with a difference; these actions cannot …
Social Contracts, Fair Play, And The Justification Of Punishment, Richard Dagger
Social Contracts, Fair Play, And The Justification Of Punishment, Richard Dagger
Political Science Faculty Publications
In recent years, the counterintuitive claim that criminals consent to their own punishment has been revived by philosophers who attempt to ground the justification of punishment in some version of the social contract. In this paper, I examine three such attempts—“contractarian” essays by Christopher Morris and Claire Finkelstein and an essay by Corey Brettschneider from the rival “contractualist” camp—and I find all three unconvincing. Each attempt is plausible, I argue, but its plausibility derives not from the appeal to a social contract but from considerations of fair play. Rather than look to the social contract for a justification of punishment, …
Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight
Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight
Economics Faculty Publications
Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.
The Ethical Lacunae In Friedman's Concept Of The Manager, Jonathan B. Wight, Martin Calkins
The Ethical Lacunae In Friedman's Concept Of The Manager, Jonathan B. Wight, Martin Calkins
Economics Faculty Publications
This article challenges along two lines Milton Friedman's injunction that the sole role of the business manager is to maximize profits for shareholders using all legal and ethical means. First, it shows how Friedman overly narrows the manager's moral duties to consequentialist profit maximization and thereby fails to account for a wide range of values and virtues necessary for good management. Second, it illustrates how more oblique approaches to management as well as Adam Smith's virtue-based model better capture the moral imagination and relational aspects of leadership that are critical to good management today. In the end, this article suggests …
[Introduction To] Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight, John S. Morton
[Introduction To] Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight, John S. Morton
Bookshelf
Teaching the Ethical Foundations of Economics contains 10 lessons that reintroduce an ethical dimension to economics in the tradition of Adam Smith, who believed ethical considerations were central to life. Utilizing these innovative instructional materials your students will learn about the important role ethics and character play in a market economy and how, in turn, markets influence ethical behavior.
The lessons do more than illustrate how ethical conduct improves an economy. They actively involve the students through simulations, group decision making, problem solving, classroom demonstrations and role playing. The lessons encourage students to think critically about ethical dilemmas.
Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight
Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics: The Principles Course, Jonathan B. Wight
Economics Faculty Publications
When we analyze the source of humor, one ingredient is surely incongruity, the juxtaposition of opposites. So when Tom Lehrer, the consummate Harvard mathematician, openly calls for plagiarism, this is funny because it is exactly the opposite of what we expect - it is absurd. And yet, from the viewpoint of modern economics, is plagiarism really so absurd? We teach our students to maximize short-term profits (in a moral vacuum). We drill them that producers minimize private costs of production (without reference to ethical codes of conduct). We expect economic agents to operate with atomistic selfishness, assuring them that this …
Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight
Adam Smith And Greed, Jonathan B. Wight
Economics Faculty Publications
The virtues of greed have been widely promoted by some economists in the 20th century. Allegedly it is Adam Smith who provides this new dignity to greed (Lerner, 1937, ix). Kenneth Arrow and Frank Hahn in the General Equilibrium Analysis (1971), for example, implicitly assume that Adam Smith's self-interest is the greed that promotes economic efficiency (quoted in Evensky, 1993, 203). Walter Williams (1999), a devoted follower of Smith, writes in his column that, "Free markets, private property rights, voluntary exchange, and greed produce preferable outcomes most times and under most conditions." These pronouncements have become part of the cultural …
[Introduction To] The Quest For Moral Leaders: Essays On Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, Susan E. Murphy
[Introduction To] The Quest For Moral Leaders: Essays On Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Terry L. Price, Susan E. Murphy
Bookshelf
The quest for moral leaders is both a personal quest that takes place in the hearts and minds of leaders and a pursuit by individuals, groups, organizations, communities and societies for leaders who are both ethical and effective. The contributors to this volume, all top scholars in leadership studies and ethics, provide a nuanced discussion of the complex ethical relationships that lie at the core of leadership.
Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla
Integrating Leadership With Ethics: Is Good Leadership Contrary To Human Nature?, Joanne B. Ciulla
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
What is it about human nature that makes ethical leadership in any context or culture difficult? This chapter examines leadership in terms of the basic philosophic question concerning human nature. To what extent does free will shape our lives and to what extent are our lives determined by our genes and by fate?
Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight
Teaching The Ethical Foundations Of Economics, Jonathan B. Wight
Economics Faculty Publications
Some economists consider their discipline a science, and thereby divorced from messy ethical details, the normative passions of right and wrong. They teach in a moral vacuum, perhaps even advocating economic agents' operating independently and avariciously, asserting that this magically produces the greatest good for society.
Play Fair With Punishment, Richard Dagger
Play Fair With Punishment, Richard Dagger
Political Science Faculty Publications
If we want to provide a justification for legal punishment, then, we must answer two distinct questions: (1) What justifies punishment as a social practice? and (2) What justifies punishing particular persons? The principle of fair play is an especially attractive theory of punishment, I shall agree, because it offers plausible and compelling answers to both these questions. I shall also suggest that there is a third question - How should we punish those who commit crimes? - that fair play cannot answer without help from other sources.