Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

Uri And Its Students: A Contract For The Provision Of A Safe Environment, Danielle Joan Beatrice

Senior Honors Projects

DANIELLE BEATRICE (English; Philosophy; Business) URI and Its Students: A Contract for the Provision of a Safe Environment

Sponsor: Judith Swift (Communication Studies, Coastal Institute)

When students begin to attend college, they expect to be consumed with busy schedules, heavy workloads, and an exciting social life. Students do not anticipate being in dangerous situations. However, this does not mean that such situations do not occur. Therefore, it is essential to teach students to be active participants in educating themselves and their peers regarding prevention and response to emergency situations. My Honors Project aims to increase the awareness of safety-related issues …

What's In A Wage? A New Approach To The Justification Of Pay, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this address, I distinguish and explore three conceptions of wages. A wage is a reward, given in recognition of the performance of a valued task. It is also an incentive: a way to entice workers to take and keep jobs, and to motivate them to work hard. Finally, a wage is a price of labor, and like all prices, conveys valuable information about relative scarcity. I show that each conception of wages has its own normative logic, or appropriate justification, and these logics can come apart. This explains some of the debate about wages and makes the project of …

On The Origin, Content, And Relevance Of The Market Failures Approach, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The view of business ethics that Christopher McMahon calls the “implicit morality of the market” and Joseph Heath calls the “market failures approach” has received a significant amount of recent attention. The idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the “point” of market activity, and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized. While this view has been much-discussed, it is still not well-understood. This paper seeks to remedy this problem. I begin by showing, against some recent commentators, that McMahon’s view and …

Towards Quantifiable Metrics Warranting Industry-Wide Corporate Death Penalties, Joshua M. Pearce

Department of Materials Science and Engineering Publications

In the singular search for profits, some corporations inadvertently kill humans. If this routinely occurs throughout an industry, it may no longer serve a net positive social purpose for society and should be eliminated. This article provides a path to an objective quantifiable metric for determining when an entire industry warrants the corporate death penalty. First, a theoretical foundation is developed with minimum assumptions necessary to provide evidence for corporate public purposes. This is formed into an objective quantifiable metric with publicly-available data and applied to two case studies in the U.S.: the tobacco and coal mining industries. The results …

Simplicity And Sustainability: Pointers From Ethics And Science, Mehrdad Massoudi, Ashwin Vaidya

Department of Mathematics Facuty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper, we explore the notion of simplicity. We use definitions of simplicity proposed by philosophers, scientists, and economists. In an age when the rapidly growing human population faces an equally rapidly declining energy/material resources, there is an urgent need to consider various notions of simplicity, collective and individual, which we believe to be a sensible path to restore our planet to a reasonable state of health. Following the logic of mathematicians and physicists, we suggest that simplicity can be related to sustainability. Our efforts must therefore not be spent so much in pursuit of growth but in achieving …

Preparing Millennials As Digital Citizens And Socially And Environmentally Responsible Business Professionals In A Socially Irresponsible Climate, Barbara Burgess-Wilkerson, Clovia Hamilton, Chlotia Garrison, Keith Robbins

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.