A critical issue for the future growth and impact of socially responsible investment (SRI) is whether institutional investors are legally permitted to engage in it – in particular whether it is compatible with the fiduciary duties of trustees. An ambitious report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), commonly referred to as the ‘Freshfields report’, has recently given rise to considerable optimism on this issue among proponents of SRI. The present article puts the arguments of the (...) Freshfields report into some further both empirical and critical perspective, however, and suggests that its findings do not call for very much optimism. The general argument is that while the understanding of fiduciary duty outlined by the Freshfields report seems to allow institutional investors to at least sometimes take some social or environmental considerations into account, the support it gives for SRI is notably contingent and, furthermore, it rules out exactly the kind of SRI which proponents of social responsibility and environmental sustainability should hold in highest regard – proactive cases and socially effective investment strategies. If SRI is to become an important force for corporate social responsibility through its adoption by institutional investors, then, it is suggested that legal reform is needed. (shrink)

This article explores areas of law loosely within English equity and trusts law that have not conventionally been subject to feminist debate, and within the context of a discussion about feminist method. The particular areas examined are whistleblowing and trustees’ powers of investment, each of which calls for consideration of decision-making processes which have an ethical content. These sites are chosen because they take debate outside the all too familiar locations of woman or ‘the body of woman’, including the family (...) home, where feminist analysis in relation to equity and trusts tends to stray. In exploring these chosen fields, Hobby’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 219–255) critique of gender dimensions in relation to whistleblowing and Dunn’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 179–196) account of women trustees’ investment decisions are evaluated and developed. The debate within feminist legal criticism of the possibility of integrating an ‘ethics of care’ and an ‘ethics of rights’ is acknowledged. Whilst acknowledging of the difficulty of adopting an approach that recognises ‘mixed logics’, it is concluded that women (and men) do integrate the ethics of care and the ethics of rights in their decision-making. It is argued that the effort should be made to trace the specific weave in particular circumstances, thereby paying suspicious attention to the values that underlie courts’ analyses of ethical choices. (shrink)

Parents resemble trustees, conservators, and other fiduciaries; they exercise broad discretion while making choices for vulnerable people. Like other fiduciaries, parents can be tempted to neglect their duties or pursue self-interest at the expense of those they should protect. This article argues against treating parents as fiduciaries for three reasons. First, the scope of parental fiduciary duties cannot be narrowed enough to make them tolerable. Arguments limiting fiduciary duties to cases where parents exercise delegated powers or act (...) within parenting roles fail. Most parental decisions involve dual powers or roles. Efforts to address these dual-role cases produce principles that are unduly demanding, complex, arbitrary, and morally unappealing. Second, we could limit parental fiduciary duties by designing parental roles to benefit children. Since children need devoted, happy, well-rounded parents, the principle of designing parental roles to benefit children would produce rules that leave room for parents to flourish. However, this principle does not justify specific legal or moral fiduciary norms. Third, we could redefine fiduciary duties so parents can balance their interests against children’s interests, making fiduciary duties less burdensome. However, expanding the definition of fiduciary threatens to encompass many duties within the fiduciary category, rendering the description almost meaningless. (shrink)

With assets of over US$1.0 trillion and growing, public pension funds in the United States have become a major force in the private sector through their holding of equity positions in large publicly traded corporations. More recently, these funds have been expanding their investment strategy by considering a corporation's long-term risks on issues such as environmental protection, sustainability, and good corporate citizenship, and how these factors impact a company's long-term performance. Conventional wisdom argues that the fiduciary responsibility of the pension (...) funds' trustees must be solely focused on their beneficiaries and, therefore, their investment criteria must be based strictly on narrowly defined financial measures. It is also asserted that well-established financial measurements of corporate performance already include long-term risk assessment through discounted present value of future flow of earnings. Consequently, all other criteria are contrary to the best interest of the pension funds' beneficiaries. In this paper, we assert that, contrary to conventional wisdom, pension funds, and for that matter other mutual funds, must be concerned with the long-term survival and growth of corporations. These measures are generally referred to "socially responsible investing" and when applied to corporations, it is termed "socially responsible corporate conduct." We demonstrate that current measurement of future risk assessment invariably understates, and quite often completely overlooks, these long-term risks because of the inherent bias towards short-run on the part of financial intermediaries whose compensation depends greatly on short-term results. Furthermore, there is ample evidence to suggest that these intermediaries have been engaging in self-serving practices and thus failing in their duties to serve their clients', i.e. pension funds', best interests. Because of their large holdings in the total market as well as individual companies, these funds cannot easily divest from poorly performing companies without destabilizing the companies' stock and overall markets. Hence, they must opt for a strategy of emphasizing investment criteria that encourage companies to take into account long-term aspects of their operations in terms of their impact on environment, sustainability, and community welfare, to name a few. We argue that an exclusionary, and even a primary, focus on short-term financial criteria is no longer a viable option. It also calls for the pension funds to encourage greater transparency and accountability of the entire corporate sector through improved corporate governance. Thus socially responsible investing practices are not merely discretionary and desirable activities; they are a necessary imperative, which both the corporations and public pension funds, and other large institutional holders, will ignore at serious peril to themselves. Finally, the paper considers some of the recent developments where corporations have been responding to these challenges and how their actions might be strengthened through greater disclosure and transparency of corporate activities. It also makes recommendations for the pension funds to support further research in creating new measurement standards that further refine the concept of socially responsible investing as a necessary ingredient of long-term corporate survival and growth in the context of a changing economic, environmental and socio-political dynamic. (shrink)

Is parental control over children best understood in terms of trusteeship or similar fiduciary obligations? This essay contemplates the elements of legal trusts and fiduciarity as they might relate to the moral relationship between children and parents. Though many accounts of upbringing advocate parent-child relationship models with structural resemblance to trust-like relationships, it is unclear who grants moral trusts, how trustees are actually selected, or how to identify proper beneficiaries. By considering these and other classical elements of relationships of trust, (...) this essay seeks to clarify and explore the trust model’s role, if any, in understanding children’s rights. Such exploration raises the possibility that another element of common law, the duty to rescue, may serve to enhance the trust model of children’s rights. (shrink)

The paper discusses the normative grounds for recognizing a watchdog role to the news media as concerns the dissemination of information about an institutional failure menacing a well-ordered society. This is, for example, the case of the news media’s role in the diffusion of whistleblowers’ disclosures. We argue that many popular justifications for the watchdog role of the news media (as a ‘fourth estate’; a trustee of the people’s right to know; expert communicator) fail to ground that role in some (...) unique feature that makes the news media special as concerns the performance of the role. We offer an alternative argument that shows how the watchdog role of the news media shares a justificatory ground with the role that any member of a well-ordered society has in terms of a general duty of answerability in the face of institutional failures. Although this duty does not bear only on the news media, we concede that in some contingent circumstances the news media might be better positioned to discharge it and, therefore, to initiate corrective actions of institutional failures effectively and conscientiously. However, the establishment of the news media’s responsibility in this sense is an empirical, not a conceptual or a normative matter. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is two-fold. It is, first, to reconstruct Kant's argument against self-murder, and, second, to analyze the function of the principle of self-preservation of reason with regard to the prohibition of self-murder. I argue that self-murder is contrary to the principle of self-preservation of reason and violates the trustee-relationship between the homo phaenomenon and the homo noumenon. The analysis shows that moral self-preservation in Kant is a rational principle which serves to secure the possibility of moral (...) faith and self-perfection. ;In the first part of the dissertation, I provide a comprehensive analysis of Kant's argument against self-murder by examining all of the relevant statements in his works, the Nachlass, as well as the lectures recorded by Herder, Powalski, Collins, and Vigilantius. Since self-murder violates a perfect duty to oneself, key-topics of the analysis are: the dual status of the duty of self-preservation as both inner duty of right and duty of virtue, the right and end of humanity, as well as Kant's model of self-possession in terms of proprietas. The analysis makes clear that self-murder destroys the moral self and must be distinguished from sacrificing one's life in order to preserve one's moral integrity. ;In the second part of the dissertation, I interpret the duty of self-preservation and the prohibition of self-murder in the context of Kant's doctrine of the faith of reason and the principle of self-preservation of reason. I first provide an overview of the debate on self-preservation and its implications for an understanding of modern rationality and summarize the different meanings of -preservation in Kant. I then argue that the "principle of self-preservation of reason" consists in what Kant calls "the maxim of healthy reason" and that it grounds the faith and the unity of reason. Against the background of this analysis, I interpret the trustee-relationship between the homo phaenomenon and the homo noumenon as a model of moral self-obligation. Entrusting the homo phaenomenon to the homo noumenon, I contend, means to entrust life to practical reason and to subject oneself to the moral law. (shrink)

Democratic societies are rife with talk of trust in institutions such as governments, banks, news agencies, medical practitioners, nuclear power plants, weather forecasters and social network sites. These institutions are anonymous in the sense that citizens tend to know very little about them. Philosophers have argued that trust in the absence of sufficient evidence may fit a child who trusts its parents but is inappropriate for the vigilant citizens of a democratic society. In this article, I defend the appropriateness of (...) trusting anonymous institutions against its critics. To this end, I develop two principles of appropriateness that apply to a wide range of trusting attitudes. First, the principle of epistemic duties according to which the truster should not be culpably ignorant about the trustee, where, what constitutes culpable ignorance will depend on the relationship of trust. Second, the principle of appropriate normative expectations according to which a truster should have normative expectations that fit the relationship with the trustee and the valued outcome at stake in the trust relation. I then show that it is often appropriate to trust anonymous institutions. In fact, the evidential requirements on trust are sometimes so low as to allow citizens to trust institutions which they know literally nothing about. (shrink)

Hājjī Bayrām Walī’s religious guidance activities that he took over from Somuncu Baba (Ḥamīd al-Dīn Aqsarāyī) were not limited with Ankara and nearby it. These activities continued by expanding with Bayrāmī tekke lodges and zāwiyas which were established by khalīfas trained by him. As a result of this expanding, Shaykh Luṭfullah, one of the khalīfas, led to establishment of waqf and works related to it such as mosque, madrasah and zāwiya in Balıkesir and nearby it. There has not been any (...) detailed study about life of Shaykh Luṭfullah and his services. In this article, the waqf established by Shaykh is analyzed in terms of its trustees, sources of income, in charges, repairs and inspection of zāwiya. Documents analyzed for this article present that Shaykh Luṭfullah contributed to taking shape of religious and cultural structure of Balıkesir and nearby it in the 15th century. His services were not only on spritual bases under the roof of the mosque but he also had an effect on the economic, social and educational life of the region. Thus, Shaykh Luṭfullah and his zāwiya set an important example of the active and dynamic aspect of Anatolian wisdom (irfān) involved in life.Summary: Hājjī Bayrām Walī’s religious guidance activities that he took over from Somuncu Baba (Ḥamīd al-Dīn Aqsarāyī) were not limited with Ankara and nearby it. These activities continued by expanding with Bayrāmī tekke lodges and zāwiyas which were established by khalīfas trained by him. Hājjī Bayrām Walīwas one of the leading sufis who contributed to the formation of sufistic educational tradition. He played a role as an important attraction center in the middle of Anatolia and provided guidance for significant individuals such as Aq Shams al-Dīn (d. 863/1459), Yazıcızāde Muḥammad Bīcān (d. 855/1451) and Eşrefoghlu Rūmī (d. 874/1469-70?). One of such individuals, who completed his spiritual journey under the guidance of Hājjī Bayrām Walīwas Shaykh Luṭfullah from Balıkesir. He became khalīfa at the end of his duty with Hājjī Bayrām Walī. Luṭfullah Efendi descended from Isfendiyarids ancestry. He had left his job, in which he held a high position, and attended to the sect and settled in Balıkesir city. There is limited information about him, but it is known that he went to Ankara in order to help to establish Turkish bath upon the request of some significant figures of the time and there he met his mentor Hājjī Bayrām Walī. As a result of their conversations, the two became close to each other.Shaykh Luṭfullahinvited Hājjī Bayrām Walīto Balıkesir where their relation continued and increased. Luṭfullah Efendi established a beautiful house for his Shaykh Hājjī Bayrām Walīwho stayed in Balıkesir for a while. When he left for Ankara, the Shaykh charged Luṭfullah Efendi with the duty of spreading Bayrāmiyyateachings in Balıkesir and its neighborhood by entitling him as ‘Khalīfa’. Besides the fact that the exact date of his death is not known, it is recorded that Luṭfullah Efendi died at the beginning of the period of Meḥmed II’s (1451-1481) reign. His tomb is located in ahazire(an Ottoman word used for burial area reserved for special people especially in mosques or sufi lodges) in the Mosque called with his name after his death. It is known that Shaykh Luṭfullah had a son named Bahā’ al-Dīn (d. 895/1489-90)and a grandson named Shaykh Muḥyīal-dīn Meḥmed (d. 952/1545-46). Shaykh Luṭfullah carried out significant services in the mosque and zāwiya, which he built with his own budget and he contributed to various important and permanent services that continued throughout centuries. However, as much as we could determine, there is no study about the waqfor service fields of his buildings. In this article, the goal is to analyze some of the tangible surviving heritages of Shaykh Luṭfullah. The analysis is based on the documents in the related archives. In this context, mosque/waqfestablished by Shaykh Luṭfullah Efendi is analyzed under the subtitles of “administrator, resources of income/real properties, his servicemen, renovations-expenses of the mosque and inspection of the zāwiya”. Based on the relevant archive documents, it is understood that after the death of Shaykh, in order to be able to continue the services of the mosque and zāwiya, the authority of ruling his waqfpassed to his son, MawlānāBahā’ al-Dīn. It is known that Bahā’ al-Dīnwas very careful about the distribution of his father’s waqfincomes among the ones in need. He also established a sūfī-hāne building in Balıkesir. After Bahā’ al-Dīn, his son Muḥyīal-dīn Meḥmed (the grandson of Shaykh Luṭfullah) took the charge of the waqf. After his period, this duty continued to be spread among his ancestry until the beginning of the last century. The waqfcontinued to the services through the income obtained from the real estates. Based on the analyzed documents, it is determined that income-expense calculations of the waqfwas inspected from time to time, and the services of zāwiya was controlled occasionally in order to see if they continue to do so. Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque, one of the most important historical artifacts in Balıkesir, has served Muslims for almost five hundred years and it went through various kinds of repairs. It is deemed suitable to analyze reparations, expansions and renovations in two different groups: Before Balıkesir earthquake in 29 January 1898 and after the earthquake. It is important to know that almost fifty percent of houses and buildings in Balıkesir city center was completely destroyed, many people died or seriously injured in the earthquake. Shaykh LuṭfullahMosque was completely demolished as well. It should be mentioned that the mosque had already been in bad condition before the earthquake. According to a document written one week before the earthquake, the mosque was very old and it could not meet the demands of the community any more as it was so small. After the devastating earthquake, ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd II ordered its renovation. Upon this order, the mosque was rebuilt and expanded. The name of ‘Umar ‘ᾹlīBey, Mutasarrıf(governor of an Ottoman province) of Qarasīis mentioned in the documents about the renovation of various buildings including Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque after the 1898 Balıkesir earthquake. It is seen that various services in different positions were provided in Shaykh Luṭfullah Mosque where the mosque workers were the ones who mainly carried out these services. These duties were: “Imamate, oratory, muezzin-tutor, ministry and nāsih, children’s teacher, ferrāş, tabbākh and supervision”. These duties show that besides religious services, Shaykh Luṭfullah waqfused to provide educational services as well. On the other hand, based on the analyzed documents, we can assume that the needy could eat in this center, which used to serve like a social aid and solidarity waqf. In this article, specific detailed information is presented about some workers served in the waqf. Information about the name, date and salary of these workers is also included. When the waqfand services of Shaykh Luṭfullah are analyzed, it can be seen that he was a significant figure, carried out important missions just like his mentor Hājjī Bayrām Walī. It should be noted that Luṭfullah Efendi used to conduct sufistic conservations in the mosque he established but did not make religious ceremonies in his zāwiya in Mihaliç (Karacabey); he preferred to transform it into a center in which the needy can be fed and provided for their needs. In this respect, the Zāwiya of ShaykhLuṭfullah sets a significant example, which duly presents the active and dynamic aspect of Anatolian wisdom. (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

This article considers the recent Court of Appeal decision of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (Overseas) Ltd v Akindele. In this case, the Court of Appeal was required to consider a claim that the defendant should be held liable as a constructive trustee for dishonestly assisting in breaches of fiduciary duty, or knowingly receiving property traceable to a breach of fiduciary duty. The decision is important as the Court of Appeal proposed a new liability test for the claim of (...) knowing receipt. It was held that the test should no longer be based on knowledge. Instead, the court should now determine the claim on the basis of whether the defendant received the property unconscientiously. This article reviews the law, and suggests that the test of unconscientious receipt is preferable to the test of knowledge, as it has a flexibility which was not available under the knowledge‐based test. But, the notion of unconscientiousness, or unconscionability, is too subjective and requires some structure. In the article, economic analysis is used to give the concept of unconscionability the necessary structure. (shrink)

We explore two special challenges indigenous peoples pose to the idea of sovereigns as trustees for humanity. The first challenge is rooted in a colonial history during which a trusteeship model of sovereignty served as an enabler of paternalistic colonial policies. The challenge is to show that the trusteeship model is not irreparably colonial in nature. The second challenge, which emerges from the first, is to specify the scope and nature of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty within the trusteeship model. Whereas the (...) interaction between states and foreign nationals is the locus of cosmopolitan law, the relationship between states and indigenous peoples is distinctive. In the ordinary cosmopolitan case, foreign nationals do not purport to possess legal authority. Indigenous peoples often do make such a claim, pitting their claim to authority against the state’s. We discuss how international law has attempted to come to grips with indigenous sovereignty by requiring states to include indigenous peoples in decision-making processes that affect their historical lands and rights. A crucial fault line in the jurisprudence, however, separates a duty to consult indigenous peoples from a duty to acquire their free, prior and informed consent. The latter but not the former recognizes that indigenous peoples possess a veto over state projects on their lands, in effect recognizing in them a limited co-legislative power. We focus on recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and consider whether either the duty to consult or FPIC are enough to dispel the shadow of the trusteeship model’s colonial past. We suggest that they are a move in the right direction, and that implicitly they represent international law’s recognition that states are no longer the sole bearers of sovereignty at international law. In limited circumstances, international law recognizes indigenous peoples as sovereign actors. (shrink)

Religion, as a phenomenon that is as old as humanity, has continued to exist in one way or another wherever humans exist. At the core of religion are the principles of faith consisting of divinity, belief in the afterlife and belief in prophethood. When we look at the History of Religions, in almost all religions, when religion first emerged, there was no need for any institution to maintain religious life in a healthy way, but in later periods, protecting religion against (...) attacks from outside, responding to new demands, 'socialization', which are important tasks in social life. The need for institutional organization has emerged for reasons such as being able to fulfill issues such as 'distributing justice' and 'managing religious rites' in a regular and orderly manner, meeting the need to resolve disputes between people through religious means, increasing its followers and encountering different cultures by spreading over wide geographies. All religions have established some institutions to meet these needs. In today's Turkey, in order to respond to the religious needs of the Muslim community and to ensure continuity in religious services without creating any institutional gaps, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, today known as the Presidency of Religious Affairs, was established within the budget of the Prime Ministry and affiliated to the Prime Ministry, with Law No. 429. The Presidency of Religious Affairs has been fulfilling its duties related to the principles of worship, morality and belief, which are the three basic components of the Islamic religion, in line with the objectives specified in the law, without interruption since the day it was established. In the history of Islamic thought, sects are evaluated in two categories: fiqh-practical and religious-political. Firstly, sects whose religious aspects came to the fore were formed. The beginning of the formation of sects such as Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi and Hanbali, which are called fiqh sects and talk about the rules and principles of worship and how to perform worship, coincides with the second century of Hijri and later periods. It is extremely important that religious officials who provide religious services to people of all ages and strata have a reasonable level of knowledge on theological issues as well as their knowledge of practical/fiqh sects. Religious officials, affiliated with DIB, provide multi-dimensional religious services in many different areas, especially mosques and Quran courses. In Turkish society, the most important source of information about religious issues for a large segment of the population is either the imam hatip or muezzin trustee in the neighborhood mosque, the Quran course instructor in the Quran course, or the preachers they reach through different channels such as 190 alo. In line with the information they receive, their religious perceptions are shaped and they continue their religious lives. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the basic views of religious sects and their knowledge levels of religious officials, who have a very important impact on shaping the religious lives of large masses of people. The study group of the research consists of religious officials working in the religious services class working under the Malatya provincial mufti between September 2020 and February 2021. The sample group of the research consists of 401 religious officials working as preachers, Quran course instructors, imam hatip and muezzin trustees under the Malatya provincial mufti's office. The method used in the research was simple random sampling, where each officer had an equal chance. The main purpose of simple random sampling is; The aim is to obtain more objective data by including each individual in the universe with an equal chance in the sample group. In the study, data was obtained with a two-part survey form prepared by the researcher by paying attention to all necessary stages. Both content analysis and descriptive analysis were used to analyze the data obtained. The data was collected by sending a survey link to the participants via Google form due to force majeure conditions arising from the pandemic. Additionally, official permissions were received from the Presidency of Religious Affairs. The collected data was transferred to the SPSS program and interpreted by subjecting it to various tests and was presented visually through tables. As a result of the study, the findings were interpreted by comparing them with similar and opposing studies, and at the end, some suggestions were given for both researchers and practitioners. At the end of the research, it was understood that the level of knowledge of the religious officials who participated in the research regarding the basic views of the theological sects, even if it was at an acceptable level for some sects, was generally not at the expected level and that they did not have sufficient bookish knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Message from the EditorPiers H.G. Stephens, EditorIt is now six years since this journal’s founding editor Victoria Davion sadly succumbed to premature fatal illness and I took over her editorial duties under the most unfortunate of circumstances. I stated publicly then that Vicky’s vision for the character and purpose of the journal would remain unchanged under my watch, and in keeping with that pledge, I am now (...) pleased to announce a major expansion of our editorial board to further promote that vision.Over the past two decades, the size of our board had declined significantly as a result of retirements and mortality, and so a restoration of the previous scale of editorial support was significantly overdue. In doing this, I have sought to protect and expand our international and interdisciplinary coverage in a way that honors the focus that Vicky gave the journal from the beginning, giving space to voices from the wider communities of concern impacted by ecological destruction and incorporating a broad and inclusive but critically engaged approach to the philosophical issues involved. Our new board includes members from a wider range of nations and disciplines, which should help us expand the journal’s reach while both manifesting and remaining faithful to the original mission that our founding editor set for it. In the process, we are welcoming a combination of new rising stars and well-established respected figures in environmental thought, and aiming to expand our sphere of influence well beyond our main subscriber base in North America. Our hope is that our new scholarly supporters will enable the journal to grow in tackling the newer and ever more complex issues and problems raised by climate change, biodiversity loss, and other ongoing ecological crises, while at the same time still remaining true to the spirit with which Vicky founded it.Readers, please join me in welcoming our new board members, who are listed in the front matter of this issue. We thank them immensely for their service and hope that their efforts will enable and support increased success for Ethics and the Environment. [End Page 1]Copyright © 2023 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that contractualism, even when it is actually used to construe our moral duties towards non-human animals, does not do so naturally. We can infer from our experiences with companion animals that we owe moral duties to them because of special relationships we are in with them. We can further abstract that we owe general moral duties to non-human animals because they are the kinds of beings that we can have relationships with, and (...) because of the capacities that make possible this relational capacity. This type of approach better explains our duties to non-human animals and other non-rational beings than does the trustee account that Scanlon leaves room for in his contractualism. (shrink)

Inter‐personal morals should be understood and described in the language of duties, not rights. Rights are self‐centred, duties other‐centred. Whereas duties are primarily a moral construct, rights are primarily a legal construct. There is an important distinction between the language appropriate for inter‐personal morals, and the language appropriate for the morals of the State. The first principle of the morals of the State is that the State holds its power as trustee for the people; otherwise we would (...) face arbitrary and capricious rule. In this setting it is natural and proper to speak of rights—the rights of the citizen beneficiaries against their trustee, the State. However, inter‐personal morals and the morality of the State are inter‐dependent. Without a duty‐based personal morality, the laws which the State makes will tend more and more to be oppressive and contemptuous. And the laws of the State must themselves leave room for personal moral commitment, freely entered into, to flourish. (shrink)

My Article seeks to explore a few antecedents of the idea that sovereignty may be encumbered with some obligations and duties vis-à-vis non-sovereigns and even strangers. Theories about limitations on sovereignty and obligations on the part of sovereigns often arose out of the fertile conceptual ground of Roman private law, in particular rules of property law governing usufruct and rules of contract law, such as those governing mandate. Early modern thinkers, especially Hugo Grotius, built on these ideas and, in (...) addition, developed an account of moral and legal obligations arising, independently of God’s will, from a universal human nature. Building on Cicero, Grotius was among the first early-modern thinkers to elaborate the distinction between “perfect” duties of justice and “imperfect” duties of beneficence, an important idea that had wide influence through the work of Emer de Vattel. The Article closes by offering a few observations on the trajectories within which Professor Benvenisti’s concept of “sovereigns as trustees of humanity” could be situated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William Joseph Gavin, 1943–2021James Campbellit is my task briefly to memorialize the life of William Joseph Gavin. This is a sad task, as are all memorials, but it is also an important one. Bill was a beloved and respected colleague, and it is the duty of the Society to note his passing.The basic facts of Bill’s life are easy to recount. Born in New York City on 16 December (...) 1943, he was educated at Fordham from ninth grade on. He earned his BA in 1965, with a major in Russian language and Soviet-area studies. He completed his doctorate in 1970 with a dissertation entitled “An Aesthetic Approach to the Philosophy of William James.” Bill taught at the University of Southern Maine—with occasional periods in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Japan and China—from 1968 until his retirement in 2014. He was the author, co-author, or editor of seven books, and wrote well over a hundred articles and reviews. Bill was an active member of SAAP forever. Long before we had T-shirts or posters, before there were prizes or even banquets, he was participating in our meetings and speaking on such figures as James and Dewey. A not irrelevant aspect in Bill’s life was that he was married to the same woman, Catherine Kerley Gavin, for over fifty years, and together they shared a life of travel, sailing, and dancing. Bill died in Maine on 25 April 2021.In addition to his work in American philosophy with which we are most familiar, Bill’s overall interests encompassed the sub-fields of ethics and aesthetics, medical ethics, Russian philosophy, and Existentialism. In his writings, these diverse aspects of his thought were seamlessly integrated and presented with a teacher’s eye on the larger mission of philosophy: to try to answer such questions as these: “Why do we do what we do?” “What should we value?” “What should we believe?” “How should we live?” [End Page 106]Running like a dark thread through Bill’s writings are the themes of finitude and death. He emphasized that our beliefs in the secure and the permanent—our delusional expectations of control, our excessive demands for clarity, our hopeless quest for certainty—are all misguided. In his wonderfully clear volume, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, Bill writes: “[M]ost philosophers, and indeed most people... have pursued certainty, objectivity, and some form of universal truth” and “have assumed that such truth can be captured in language, that is, that a complete linguistic description of reality is at least possible and certainly desirable” (Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague, Temple UP, 1992, p. 1). By means of his work, Bill shows us that all of this is delusional. He helps us to grasp what it is to live our lives without an adequate understanding of what we are doing, and to face the tragedy of having to endure when our choices prove mistaken. His view of life, and his approach to philosophy, are thus existential in the deepest sense.Philosophy for him was not some gussied-up academic pastime by means of which we polish and update the thoughts of others. Rather, philosophy lives only in a broader cultural context that also includes hunger and illness, yet has room for both poetry and dance. In the vital niche that Bill’s work occupies between Pragmatism and Existentialism, he returned again and again to the diversity of our problematic contexts, and to the vague and tentative understandings that we cobble together to address our situation. [End Page 107]James CampbellUniversity of ToledoCopyright © 2023 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 353-356 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Metaphysical Club The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand; xii & 546 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, $27.00. "They didn't just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place" (p. 440). So much for the most prominent contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, who remains unmentioned except in the acknowledgments. (...) That better place is participatory democracy (a phrase that does not appear in the book), which "means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out" (p. 441). The true name of the game is skeptical tolerance. There are no unquestionable duties or inalienable rights, no immutable natural laws, no absolute moral rules, no highest principles, no inherent virtues, no absolute standards, no stasis, no absolutely certain truth. There are no individual destinies, because the social comes before the individual, and the individual is embedded within and cannot exist without society. Scientific knowledge is always probabilistic, not necessarily because nature is indeterministic, but because we can never know enough to calculate its regularities if they exist. To wit, there are no Platonic Ideas or unchanging universals. All is change, nothing that happens is ever repeated, our general ideas and laws of nature are merely tools for getting along in the world. Above all, ideas do not refer to things, only to other ideas. What expedites our thinking is true. What expedites our acting is right. Whenever we act according to principle, rule, or law, we are making a bet that events will turn out the way [End Page 353] we think they will. If we keep this always in mind, we will never succumb to violence or war in the name of belief or principle. Whatever we believe, it could be otherwise. Such is a general summary of pragmatism as it has filtered down to the textbooks. It is (again befittingly) more or less accurate. The can-do American seeks out cash value in practical life.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, and John Dewey crafted the only indigenous philosophy that has so far been produced in America. Its roots are in Laplacean probability theory, Darwinian evolutionism, and Chauncey Wright's indeterminism. While James hoped to save a place for religion (if it works, go with it) and Pierce a place for God (he thought there had to be a designing intelligence to account for order), the pragmatic result is profoundly skeptical and secular. Neither Holmes nor Dewey thought that individuals imbedded in societies had any need of absolutes. Holmes said that people first decide on the basis of experience, then they deduce. Dewey said that people first behave commonsensically, then they rationalize.There is nothing as condensed as the above in Louis Menand's beautiful book on the ideas, personalities, and influence of Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey. I know of no clearer exposition of their ideas, and few biographers have made them come so alive. In particular, Menand's coverage of peripheral (but by no means insignificant) figures is very rich. He describes the development of graduate universities in America in detail from their autocratic beginnings to the institution of academic freedom as we know it today. University presidents, trustees, and administrators are presented luxuriously as the villains, and the professors gloriously as the heroes. Menand remarks with slight amazement that society bought the concept that professors were beholden to the public at large and not to the state or private university owners. He could have commented further on the fact that the concept of academic freedom has become virtually irrelevant in today's corporate research universities."It is a remarkable fact about the United States," Menand begins his book, "that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in its form of government" (p. ix). This is a breathtaking fact, and I don't suppose Menand had any intent to explain it. "The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual... (shrink)

The managers of colleges and universities have to make decisions on a wide range of issues with regard to goals and how they may be pursued. “Managers” refers to such positions as the president, provost, vice president dean, and director of a university. This paper lays out the theoretical basis for the right answer for these decisions. It does so by setting out the fundamental function of an academic institution, linking this function to a duty, and explaining how to satisfy (...) this duty in hard cases. This article’s thesis is that university managers have a duty to shareholders alone. Shareholders are those who own the university. This duty is satisfied when managers satisfy the fundamental project shareholders assign to a university. My overall argument supports two theses: the shareholder theory is true and university managers’ duty is to satisfy the fundamental function shareholders assign to a university. The argument for the first thesis rested on the notion that a university needs a fundamental function if managers are to have a defensible criterion by which to make decisions and that the shareholder theory best accounts for that function. Along the way, the stakeholder theory were found to be inadequate. The second thesis applies the first thesis. The article then considered some objections. With regard to the shareholder theory, one objection is that the shareholder theory suggests that a manager owes duties to a university’s owner, and not its students, and this is distasteful. A second is that on the shareholder theory, a university can have as a fundamental function something like maximizing the endowment associated with the university, maximizing profits, or promoting a Christian lifestyle, rather than focusing on creating or distributing knowledge. A third is that a university manager has role-based duties. None of these objections is fatal to shareholder theory. (shrink)

This article argues that congregations should be seen as grassroots public moral agents, on the ground working to bring what they discern as God's preferred future into being. Deliberations among congregations of all social backgrounds are a way of doing ethics "polycentrically," without a dominant center. Because cultural and social boundaries are permeable and people in various social groups can imaginatively enter the worlds of people unlike themselves, they can engage those perspectives morally on an equal footing. The essay addresses (...) ethicists' participation in congregations' moral deliberation and action, and concludes with a plea for theological ethicists to consider congregations in their work. (shrink)

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

When we say that ‘the government should be ashamed’, can we be taken literally? I argue that we can: organisations have duties over their emotions. Emotions have both functional and felt components. Often, emotions’ moral value derives from their functional components: from what they cause and what causes them. In these cases, organisations can have emotional duties in the same way that they can have duties to act. However, emotions’ value partly derives from their felt components. Organisations (...) lack feelings, but can have duties to increase the likelihood that their members have relevant emotions (with the right felt components), in virtue of and in accordance with their role in the organisation. To systematise these conclusions, I provide a taxonomy of organisations’ – and individuals’ organisationally situated – emotional duties. This taxonomy will enable scholars of electoral politics, international politics and public policy to systematically integrate emotions into the study of organisations. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his eleven-year tenure, (...) he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. In Volume 1, he considers the role of ethical societies and discusses a range of questions in politics, social equality and morality. (shrink)

In this essay I will argue that, preconceptions notwithstanding, Immanuel Kant does have an environmental ethics which uniquely contributes to two current debates in the field. First, he transcends the controversy between individualistic and holistic approaches to nature with a theory that considers humanity in terms of the autonomy of moral individuals and nature in terms of the integrity of functional wholes. Second, he diminishes the gulf between Conservationism and Preservationism. He does this by constructing an ideal-regarding conception of the (...) former that values nature not as "merely" a thing to be used by human preferences and translated by markets, but as an essential component and prerequisite to the intrinsic autonomy of human beings. Simultaneously, he argues for a definition of preservation which places responsibility on humanity to harmonize moral agency with the functional integrity of natural systems. Here humanity and nature become the two unique and equally important components of what we might call the greater " Kantian ecosystem." In addition to the theoretical contributions of Kant's approach to our appreciation of the duties we owe to our natural environment, I will also suggest that Kantian Conservationism and Kantian Preservationism provide a sound moral basis for public policy arguments that wish to take the intrinsic value of humanity and nature into account. By requiring decision makers to consider citizens as ethical ends and nature as a functional end-in-itself, public choice becomes a process of restricting the use of the "kingdom of nature" to the essential requirements of the "kingdom of ends.". (shrink)

Informal political representation can be a political lifeline, particularly for oppressed and marginalized groups. Such representation can give these groups some say, however mediate, partial, and imperfect, in how things go for them. Coeval with the political goods such representation offers these groups are its particular dangers to them. Mindful of these dangers, skeptics challenge the practice for being, inter alia, unaccountable, unauthorized, inegalitarian, and oppressive. These challenges provide strong pro tanto reasons to think the practice morally impermissible. This paper (...) considers the question: On what conditions is the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups permissible? By responding to skeptics’ challenges, I develop a systematic account of moral constraints that, if adopted, would make such representation permissible. The account that emerges shows that informal political representatives (IPRs) must aim to fulfill two sets of sometimes conflicting duties to the represented: democracy within duties, which concern how the representative treats and relates to the represented, and justice without duties, which concern how the representative’s actions advance the aims of the representation. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Increasingly secret, complex, and inscrutable computational systems are being used to intensify existing power relations and to create new ones; in particular, they are being used to govern. To be all-things-considered morally permissible new, or newly intense, power relations must meet standards of procedural legitimacy and proper authority. This is necessary for them to protect and realise democratic values of individual liberty, relational equality, and collective self-determination. For governing power in particular to be legitimate and have proper authority, it must (...) meet a publicity requirement: reasonably competent members of the governed community must be able to determine that they are being governed legitimately and with proper authority. The publicity requirement can be satisfied only if the powerful can explain their decision-making to members of their political community. At least some duties of explanation are therefore democratic duties. This chapter first sets out the foregoing argument, then applies it to opaque computational systems, and clarifies precisely what kinds of explanations are necessary to fulfil these democratic values. (shrink)

Corporations wield power in today’s economies, and political theories of the corporation argue about the legitimacy conditions of corporate power. This paper argues in favour of a double-fiduciary theory for corporations. Based on a concession theory of markets, it sees all markets as authorized by states (in the name of society), for the purpose of creating economic value, or wealth. Hence corporations, as much as non-incorporated firms, have a fiduciary duty to the state/society to create wealth, in the competitive structure (...) of the market. However, their pursuit of wealth often creates unbalanced relations of power between corporations and their stakeholders, which can at some point be classified as instances of domination. Therefore, corporations need to be subjected to a second fiduciary duty, i.e. not to dominate others in the economy. This duty is also, in the final instance, owed to the state/society. In an era when everyone can incorporate their business, states/societies can be interpreted as having, through corporate law, mandated shareholders as ‘proximate beneficiaries’, to incentivize corporations to create wealth. Now states/societies need to think about how to prevent corporations from dominating others. New mechanisms of accountability towards stakeholders and/or citizens as proximate beneficiaries are needed. Only in this way can corporations be effectively held to account for both of the fiduciary duties which characterize their normative status. (shrink)

Friendship was an important topic for classical philosophers; the analysis, Value, And duties of friendship all received considerable attention. But friendship has been a relatively dormant topic among more recent philosophers. This paper (a) presents an analysis of friendship and explains its core elements, (b) discusses several different models for explaining the value of friendship, And (c) argues that there are special duties of friendship and that these aren't based solely on utilitarian considerations.

According to cognitive non-naturalism, normative judgments are standard beliefs that purport to be about non-natural properties. An influential plurality of normative theorists, including non-naturalist realists, error theorists and skeptics, share this view. But it is mistaken. For it predicts an epistemic profile for normative judgments that they do not have. In particular, they are not disposed to extinguish in light of accepted evidence that the any non-natural properties are absent, and they are not disposed to come into existence in light (...) of accepted evidence for any non-natural property. So normative judgments might be beliefs, and there might be non-natural properties, but normative judgments are not beliefs about non-natural properties. (shrink)

Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in any (...) given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. While Sen’s model of discrete identity prioritization is a clear advance over single-factor accounts, it overlooks significant lessons about identity from over 150 years of scholarship by feminists of color. In ignoring the experiences of women of color, Sen’s model falsely assumes that identities are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation; and, in obligating individuals to make such identity-based “reasoned choices,” Sen’s model forces those with multiply marginalized identities to choose from a set of externally defined identity options, none of which sufficiently captures their experiences. (shrink)

If individual moral agents do wrong they usually deserve and are liable to some kind of punishment. But how can states be punished for failing to comply with moral duties without therewith also punishing their citizens who are not necessarily deserving of any punishment?