Industrial Organization Commons^™

Optimality Conditions For Distributive Justice, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

This paper uses optimization theory to address a fundamental question of ethics: how to divide resources justly among individuals, groups, or organizations. It formulates utilitarian and Rawlsian criteria for distributive justice as optimization problems. The formulations recognize that some recipients are more productive than others, so that an inequitable distribution may create greater overall utility. Conditions are derived under which a distribution of resources is utility maximizing, and under which it achieves a lexicographic maximum, which we take as formulating the difference principle of John Rawls. It is found that utility maximization requires at least as much inequality as results …

Why Business Ethics?, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

Everyone agrees that business managers must understand finance and marketing. But is it necessary for them to study ethics?

Kant And Cultural Relativism, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

We live an age of cultural relativism that asks how universal moral obligation can be justified. Immanuel Kant took up this challenge. His arguments can be reconstructed in a way that makes sense today

Toward Professional Ethics In Business, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

Before a code of professional ethics can be formulated for business managers, it must be understood why management should be considered a profession and what should be its central mission. This paper proposes answers to these questions

A Postmodern Critique Of Artificial Intelligence, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

I argue that the "postmodern" understanding of language that has developed over the last few decades in Anglo-American philosophy provides the basis for a useful critique of artificial intelligence. This postmodern view corrects an error in the traditional Western conception of language that has led many researchers in AI and cognitive science into taking a rule-based or information-processing approach. Wittgenstein's view that language does not receive its meaning through definition, and Quine's view that neither words nor sentences but only discourse as a whole is the proper unit of meaning, argue against an attempt to formulate rules for understanding language, …

Professional Ethics: Does It Matter Which Hat We Wear?, John N. Hooker

John Hooker

Can two professions impose contradictory obligations? If so, how can both be right? What is professional ethics, anyway, as distinguished from ethics in general?

Some Business-Related Ethical Issues In Engineering, John Hooker

John Hooker

Engineering has always been related to business, but now more than ever. Engineers are increasingly involved in startup companies in which they make business decisions as well as engineering decisions. Even in large firms, highly integrated product development cycles bring engineers into closer contact with marketing and other business people than in years past. Engineers must now think about ethical issues that were once the province of business managers. In addition, the rapid growth of biotechnology and e-commerce has created a new ethical landscape in which engineers must operate.

The aim here is to examine a few of the issues …