Questions about the social responsibilities of corporations or businesses are regarded by many as the most fundamental issues for business ethicists to solve. In the business ethics literature, debate has been starkly divided between stakeholder theory and stockholder theory, which at its most basic level means choosing either for or against the very idea of corporate social responsibility. This chapter gives a comprehensive and systematic overview of this extensive literature. In response to it, we develop a more nuanced view in line with our moral leeway approach. We argue that the justification of corporate social responsibility depends on a broad range of factors, including the urgency of the problem, the company’s ability to provide assistance, the cost of doing so, the importance of business as usual, and the availability of alternatives.

Chapter 2 has three main sections. First it draws on the philosophy of technology literature, more specifically post-phenomenology, to interrogate the meaning of human–technology relations. Can visitors to a website be considered users of machine translation even if they are unaware that a machine translation tool is in use? What is the meaning of ‘use’ exactly? When a police officer uses machine translation to speak to a driver, what type of relationship does the driver have with the machine translation tool? These are some of the questions initially addressed in this chapter. The chapter then examines technologies’ influencing properties. Convenience is persuasive and machine translation tools are designed to be convenient. They reflect specific social and economic values which research on their use needs to consider. Lastly, the chapter discusses the complex decision-making that uses of machine translation call for in the sectors under analysis. A case is made for the notion of virtue as an apt framework for engaging with the dilemmas posed by risky but potentially beneficial uses of machine translation.

In this chapter I argue that the norm against intentional killing is a moral absolute, identifying an action never to be done. On this ground, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other allied bombings in World War II, are shown to have been morally unjustified.

I open Chapter 1 by outlining ‘agathic pluralism’, namely the view that (ultimate intrinsic) goodness is univocally definable yet also irreducibly plural at the metaphysical level. This is my view, but I do not embark immediately on its defence. Rather, Chapter 1 clears the way for such a view by showing how none of the ‘big three’ ethical theories – namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics – manages to capture goodness as I understand it. Consequentialism tries, yet fails, to reduce goodness to a single property; deontology tries to sideline or do without goodness altogether; and virtue ethics substantially mislocates goodness, finding it in our moral dispositions. In order to argue for this, I tackle (first) consequentialism’s failed proxies for goodness, namely pleasure and desire- or preference-satisfaction; and I canvas J. J. Thomson’s a priori semantic argument for the incoherence of consequentialism. Second, I look at deontologists’ paradigm examples of promising, lying and retributive punishment. And third, I look at the Stoics’ and Michael Slote’s strong over-estimation of virtue as the only, or at least primary, good.

This chapter surveys behavioural models across decisions and games that rationalise deviations from money maximisation and shows that, despite variety, they share a single foundation: economic consequentialism. It reviews bounded-rationality accounts (satisficing/aspiration dynamics, quantal response equilibria) and departures from expected utility (prospect theory) and from exponential discounting in intertemporal decisions (hyperbolic discounting), then introduces social-preference formulations (altruism à la Ledyard/Levine, inequity aversion a la Fehr–Schmidt and Bolton–Ockenfels, and models by Andreoni–Miller and Charness–Rabin). Finally, the chapter formalises the ‘economic representation’ of action profiles and defines economic consequentialism – utility as a function only of payoffs, probabilities, and timing for all parties – while noting limits that motivate alternative approaches.

In the eighteenth century, the practice of law was not a self-governing profession in the modern sense. Many lawyers and judges lacked specialized knowledge and formal training, and only a few were subject to regulation or oversight. This chapter examines how Henry Fielding grapples with the consequences of this undisciplined, undereducated, and ethically unmoored legal culture in Tom Jones (1749). Fielding derides the inadequacies of the period’s legal order by featuring magistrates and attorneys whose primary characteristics are intellectual incompetence, poor judgment, and moral corruption. Yet he also proposes a remedy to the law’s limitations. Drawing from moral philosophies circulating in the mid eighteenth century, Fielding implicitly advocates for a professional system that fosters its representatives’ innate moral virtues and enforces a stable but flexible code of ethics. His proposal has relevance for today’s legal profession, which is likewise susceptible to charges of ineffectiveness, injustice, and unfairness.

This chapter examines the theoretical foundations of intellectual property law in the United States, setting the stage for understanding the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. The chapter focuses on utilitarianism as the dominant theoretical framework for US IP law, contrasting it with non-consequentialist theories. It provides a brief overview of the four major IP regimes:

Patent patent and copyright, which are explicitly grounded in the Constitution’s mandate to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"; Trademark, which aims to reduce consumer search costs and ensure fair competition by protecting source identifiers; and Trade secret, which has a more convoluted history but has increasingly focused on promoting innovation and protecting confidential business information. The chapter emphasizes that US IP law prioritizes practical, societal outcomes over moral or philosophical considerations. It sets the stage for subsequent chapters that explore how AI’s emergence challenges these traditional theoretical underpinnings and the practical functioning of each IP regime.

Chapter 2 introduces the normative theory on which the book relies. Principles of natural law are guides for practical human action. The principles are “natural” because they are knowable through human reason and valid guides to action whether they have been accepted in any community’s laws. They are “law” in that they supply reasons or justifications for action. Natural law theory focuses human action on survival and on flourishing understood rationally. Natural law justifies reasoning with interests, understood as distinct components of a person’s well-being. Natural law also justifies reasoning with rights, understood as entitlements to act and be free from interference backed by claims against others. Natural rights focus social and political life on desirable, low, and uncontroversial goals like survival and freedom. Natural rights also help specialize – around distinct fields of human activity organized around people’s bodies, their capacities to make livings, their capacities to associate, and their capacities to use property.

Constitutions set out fundamental principles of political morality that bind institutional action and assign strong political rights to individuals. At surface level, the principle of proportionality is a methodological device. It operates as a doctrinal heading under which courts scrutinize state interference with individual liberty and assess the scope of their own authority. According to the orthodox understanding of proportionality, this scrutiny takes the form of balancing rights against public interest, which raises questions about the legitimacy of judicial review. This chapter argues that, contrary to the orthodox view, proportionality is primarily about the normative foundations of constitutional rights and the duty of courts to pursue, through principled legal reasoning, the moral truth about individual rights. On this rival account of proportionality, rights are equality-based moral norms constraining state action and no actual balancing takes place by courts. If we are to take seriously both the idea of fundamental rights and the principle of proportionality, we must abandon the misleading metaphor of balancing and the problems of incommensurability and judicial scepticism to which it leads.

A rights-based theory of property relies heavily on practical reason. “Practical reason” is the domain in which people apply fundamental principles of moral reasoning to practice. This chapter contrasts practical reason with theoretical reason. It introduces specification (reasoning from broad moral rights to specific entitlements between right- and duty-holders), determination (the implementation of moral directives in law and other social conventions), and reasoning with core cases. This chapter’s argument dispels the “copy view” of morality, in which theories of morality must recommend in practice rules and institutions that follow closely from what they recommend in principle. This chapter also shows how practical reason considers the consequences of different proposed rights and policies, without becoming consequentialist or prioritizing social welfare over individual rights. This chapter shows how practical reason applies with speed limits and customary rights in snow-covered parking spaces.

Normative ethics is divided between ethical theory and practical ethics. Three families of ethical theories are consequentialism, virtue ethics, and Kantianism. Consequentialism is the view that consequences determine what we ought to do. Virtue ethics is the view that right actions should be understood in terms of virtuous agents and their character. Kantianism’s central concern is with how rational agents ought to relate to themselves and to each other. Ethical theory is difficult to disentangle from practical ethics, which is concerned with what we ought to do in particular situations, which – along with the question “How should I live?” – is the most important topic in ethics and perhaps all of philosophy.

Gottlob August Tittel (1739–1816) was a professor at a Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and is best known as an early critic of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. This chapter contains selections from his On Herr Kant’s Reform of Moral Science (1786), the first book-length commentary on the Groundwork. In this text, Tittel makes several important objections to the Groundwork, many of which have since become classic, such as: that the categorical imperative is empty, that the motive of duty for duty’s sake is impotent in human nature, and that Kant is a covert consequentialist. Tittel’s most famous objection, however, is that the categorical imperative is not a new principle of morality, but merely a new formula of a principle philosophers have known for a long time. Kant was aware of the Reform, and he responds to Tittel in a footnote in the Preface to the second Critique (see 5:8.28–37n).

Pistorius’ review of the Groundwork was without a doubt the most important early review, at least with respect to its influence on the second Critique. Pistorius raises several important objections in the review, many of which are now regarded as classic responses to Kant’s moral theory in the literature. These include: the empty formalism objection, the claim that Kant is a covert consequentialist, that only hypothetical imperatives can bind human beings, and that there is a distinction to be made between happiness through instinct and happiness through reason. Kant was aware of the review and responds to Pistorius explicitly in the second Critique, such as in the second chapter of the Analytic, where he replies to a “certain reviewer,” i.e., Pistorius, who claimed against the Groundwork that “the concept of the good was not established before the moral principle.” (5:8.27–9.2)

This chapter explores the philosophical implications of a slowly ending world -- a place where humanity faces unavoidable and imminent (but not immediate) extinction. Section 1 introduces this new thought experiment. Section 2 asks why we should think about unavoidable, imminent, non-immediate human extinction. I argue that my slowly ending world is both an interesting thought experiment and a credible possible future. Sections 3 to 5 explore three topics in detail from the perspective of this slowly ending world: philosophical pessimism, procreative ethics, and multigenerational optimism. The goal of the chapter is not to defend any particular conclusions about the philosophy of the ending world, but simply to motivate its exploration.