Just War, Economics, and Corporate Boycotting: A Review of Dr. Ted Lechterman’s 2022 St. Cross Special Ethics Seminar
Professor Larry Locke (University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and LCC International University)
One of the more worrisome aspects of the modern concentration of resources in large corporations is that it often allows them to have societal impact beyond the capability of all but the wealthiest persons. Notwithstanding that disparity of power, much of modern ethical discourse remains focused on the rights and moral responsibilities of individuals, with relatively little analysis for evaluating and directing corporate behavior. Dr. Ted Lechterman, of the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, has identified this gap in modern ethics scholarship. At the 10 February, 2022, St. Cross Special Ethics Seminar, he stepped into the breach with some pioneering arguments on the ethics of corporate boycotts.
Individuals boycotting companies or products, as an act of moral protest, is widely regarded as a form of political speech. Individual boycotts represent a nonviolent means of influencing firms and may allow a person to express her conscience when she finds products, or the companies that produce them, to be ethically unacceptable. These same virtues may be associated with corporate boycotts but, while relatively rare compared to boycotts by individuals, corporate boycotts may also introduce a series of distinct ethical issues. Dr. Lechterman sampled a range of those issues at the St. Cross Seminar.
- As agents of their shareholders, should corporations engage in any activity beyond seeking to maximize profits for those shareholders?
- Do corporate boycotts represent a further arrogation of power by corporate management, with a concomitant loss of power for shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders of the firm?
- Because of their potential for outsized impact, due to their high level of resources, do corporate boycotts (particularly when directed at nations or municipalities) represent a challenge to democracy?
- Under what circumstances, if any, should corporations engage in boycotting?
Announcing the Winners and Runners Up in the 8th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Please join us in congratulating all four of the finalists in the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2022, and in particular our winners, Matthew Price and Lily Moore-Eissenberg.
This, the 8th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics was, for the first time, held as a National competition. From 5:30pm on the 15th March, in the lecture theatre of the Faculty of Philosophy, as well as online, the four finalists presented their papers and ideas to an audience and responded to a short Q&A as the final round in the competition. Over the coming weeks a selection of the winning essays and honourable mentions will be published on this blog.
Undergraduate Category
Winner: Matthew Price – Why We Should Negatively Discount the Well-Being of Future Generations
Runner Up: Leo Rogers – Terra nullius, populus sine terra: who may settle Antarctica?
Honourable Mentions: Lukas Joosten – When Money Can’t Buy Happiness: Does Our Duty to Assist the Needy Require Us to Befriend the Lonely?
Alexander Scoby – Why don’t we just let the wise rule?!
Graduate Category
Winner: Lily Moore-Eissenberg – Legal Proof and Structural Injustice: Should jurors be given information about structural racism?
Runner Up: Avital Fried – Statistical Evidence and the Criminal Verdict Asymmetry
Honourable Mentions: Lise du Buisson – How should career choice ethics address ignorance-related harms?
Kabir Singh Bakshi – Against Broome’s ‘Against Denialism’
Event Summary: Vaccine Policies and Challenge Trials: The Ethics of Relative Risk in Public Health
St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Presented by Dr Sarah Chan, 18 November 2021
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Sarah Chan explores three key areas of risk in ‘challenge trials’ – the deliberate infection of human participants to infectious agents as a tool for vaccine development and improving our knowledge of disease biology. Dr Chan explores a) whether some forms of challenge trials cannot be ethically justified; b) why stratifying populations for vaccine allocation by risk profile can result in unjust risk distribution; and c) how comparing these cases and the evaluation of relative risk reveals flaws in approach to pandemic public health.
Special St Cross Seminar summary of Maureen Kelley’s: Fighting Diseases of Poverty Through Research: Deadly dilemmas, moral distress and misplaced responsibilities
Written By Tess Johnson
Lately, we have heard much in the media about disease transmission in conditions of poverty, given the crisis-point COVID-19 spread and mortality that India is experiencing. Yet, much of the conversation is centred on the ‘proximal’—or more direct—causes of morbidity and mortality, rather than the ‘structural determinants’—or underlying, systemic conditions that lead to disease vulnerability in a population. As a result, much global health research is focussed on infectious disease treatment and prevention, rather than responses to the complex political, economic and social needs that underly disease in vulnerable communities. This can result not only in less efficient and effective research, but also moral distress for researchers, and a disconnect between research goals and the responsibility that researchers feel for addressing a community’s immediate needs.
In her Special St Cross Seminar last week, Maureen Kelley introduced her audience to these problems in global health research. Professor Kelley outlined, first, empirical findings evidencing this problem, a result of research she recently performed with the Ethox Centre’s REACH team, in collaboration with global health research teams around the world. Second, she linked this empirical work to theory on moral distress and researchers’ and institutions’ responsibilities toward participating communities in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Continue reading
Seminar Recordings: The Neuroscience of a Life Well-Lived
Audio and Video recordings of Professor Morten L. Kringlebach (Aarhus University, Denmark; University of Oxford) online St Cross Seminar (21 January 2021) are now available.
Congratulations to our Winners and Runners up in the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2021
Please join us in congratulating all of the finalists in the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2021, and in particular our winners, Imogen Rivers and Lily Moore-Eissenberg.
As the Uk continues to be in lockdown due to the pandemic, the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics was again held as a Zoom webinar event. The Finalists in each category presented their ideas to an online audience and responded to a short Q&A as the final round in the competition. Over the coming weeks a selection of the winning essays will be published on this blog.
Undergraduate Category
Winner: Imogen Rivers: Against Making a Difference
Runner Up: Tanae Rao: Why, if at all, is it unethical for universities to prioritise applicants related to their alumni
Honourable Mention: Edward Lamb: ‘Rational Departure’: What Does Stoicism Reveal About Contemporary Attitudes Towards Suicide?
Graduate Category
Winner: Lily Moore-Eissenberg: Causing People to Exist and Compensating Existing People. Does the nonidentity problem undermine the case for reparations?
Joint Runners Up: Rebecca L Clark: Should Feminists endorse a Universal Basic Income & Oshmita Ray: May the use of violent civil disobedience be justified as a response to institutional racism?
Honourable Mention: Jules Desai: Is there a moral difference between Corpses biological and artificial?
Seminar Recordings: Towards a Plasticity of the Mind – New-ish Ethical Conundrums in Dementia Care, Treatment, and Research
Audio and video recordings of David Lyreskog’s online St Cross Seminar (25 February 2021) are now available.
Climbing the Pension Mountain: A Review of Michael Otsuka’s 2020 Uehiro Centre Lecture Series
Written by Professor Larry Locke (University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and LCC International University)
On three successive Tuesdays last November, Michael Otsuka of the London School of Economics delivered the annual Uehiro Centre Lecture Series. The Series, entitled “How to Pool Risk Across Generations”, focused on the ethics of pension reform. Otsuka attacked the real-world problem of low bond yields producing a crisis of pension funding with three alternative models. Echoing Derek Parfit’s magisterial work, On What Matters, Otsuka presented his proposals as three alternative means for scaling the dangerous summit of pension obligations.
Otsuka’s proposals are important. Ethics issues rarely come with this much money at stake. In 2018, the Office of National Statistics published a study showing that UK pension schemes were underfunded by over £5 trillion . That is an attention-grabbing number but not extraordinary in the context. The Trustees of the US Social Security system recently published their 2020 report indicating this scheme alone anticipates a shortfall of US$16.8 trillion over the next 75 years. Like scientists employing standard form when the numbers they use become too large to comprehend, the US Social Security Administration now refers to its shortfall in terms of percentages of total payroll taxes.
The proposals Otsuka has set forth are not amoral financial models. Each involves shifting risk and responsibility among parties, and sometimes across generations, with diverse arguments as to the fairness of these shifts. Any resulting pension system’s impact on lifestyles and liberty for workers, employers, and governments may strain the social contract between these groups and set them up for a potential fall. Continue reading
Podcast and Event Summary: New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar: Medically Assisted Dying in Canada: from where we’ve come; to where we’re heading, presented by Professor Arthur Schafer (Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of Manitoba)
Written by: Dr Amna Whiston
In this seminar (available on podcast), Professor Arthur Schafer discussed the ethical challenges involved in the Canadian euthanasia debate at the New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar (online). Professor Schafer, who has written extensively over the last thirty years about a range of topics that includes professional and bio-medical ethics, having been a long-standing proponent of the view that allowing people to die with dignity enriches our rights as humans, critically addressed the question of whether Canada is currently heading in the right direction regarding the legalization of medical assistance in dying.
Autonomy, as Professor Schafer reminds us, is one of the core Canadian values, and this is reflected through the public battle against the prohibition of assisted suicide. Back in 1993, (Rodriguez v. British Columbia [Attorney General]), the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada urged that at that time there was no public consensus among Canadians that the autonomy interest of people wishing to end their lives is paramount to the state interest in protecting the lives of its citizens. In recent years, Canadian public opinion has undergone a significant shift in favour of the autonomy interest of irredeemably suffering patients who, with no hope of recovery, wish to end their lives with dignity. In June 2016 the Canadian Parliament passed a legislation bill legalizing medical assistance in dying, which has now become legally permissible in several American states (Oregon, Washington State and Montana) and in a number of European nations (the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxemburg). Today more than two-thirds of Canadians support the new legislation which makes it legally permissible for doctors to help the terminally ill to end their lives. This fact, nonetheless, leaves open a more general question (beyond the Canada context) of whether constitutional rights should be settled by opinion poll.
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