Based on Davenport’s (1998) social audit, we examined six firms’ corporate social responsibility activities within the beer industry in an effort to identify and compare these firms’ industry social standing. The results have implications in our understanding and assessment of corporate citizenship practices both within and across business industry groups.

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Offering a novel and pragmatic perspective, this timely book critically examines the development of a culture of machinist regulation and questions whether this approach is appropriate in an era of rising biological technologies. Adopting an ontological approach, James Griffin considers how current regulatory frameworks favour digital technology and how this may change in the future. Griffin adeptly investigates how regulation can impact the nature of new technologies, especially as biological computing is becoming more commonplace. Chapters provide a (...) wealth of critical analysis, considering cutting-edge technologies such as AI, prosthesis, and biological computing. Griffin outlines a proposed reformative system which focuses on the biological substrate in the creation of cultural works. The book serves to highlight the ever-increasing need for awareness of the importance of biological substrates and for a regulatory system which reflects this. The State of Cultural Biology will be an essential read for academics and students interested in intellectual property law, law and technology, legal philosophy and law's role in society. It will also prove invaluable to policymakers and professionals looking to broaden their knowledge on the regulation of modern technology. (shrink)

"Well-being," "welfare," "utility," and "quality of life," all closely related concepts, are at the center of morality, politics, law, and economics. Griffin's book, while primarily a volume of moral philosophy, is relevant to all of these subjects. Griffin offers answers to three central questions about well-being: what is the best way to understand it, can it be measured, and where should it fit in moral and political thought. With its breadth of investigation and depth of insight, this work (...) holds significance for philosophers as well as for those interested in political and economic theory and jurisprudence. (shrink)

Madison Powers raises the difficult problem of repugnant desires. The problem is not only difficult but pervasive, more pervasive even than Powers says. He notes that it affects hedonist, eudaimonist, and desire-fulfilment forms of utilitarianism; but it also affects the form of utilitarianism that uses a list of irreducibly plural values, so long as one of the values on the list is pleasure or happiness, and it can affect non-utilitarian positions as well for the same reason.

The book asks how, and how much, we can improve our ethical standards—not lift our behaviour closer to our standards but refine the standards themselves. To answer this question requires answering most of the major questions of ethics. So the book includes a discussion of what a good life is like, where the bounds of the natural world come, how values relate to that world (e.g. naturalism, realism), how great human capacities—the ones important to ethics—are, and where moral norms come (...) from. Throughout the book, the question of what philosophy can contribute to ethics arises. Philosophical traditions, such as most forms of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, are, the book contends, too ambitious. Ethics cannot be what philosophers in those traditions expect it to be because agents cannot be what these philosophies require them to be. The book starts by questioning the adequacy of both appeals to intuition and the coherence method of justification in ethics (e.g. wide reflective equilibrium) and ends with a description of the sort of justification available to us. (shrink)

Studies the central topics of Wittgenstein's philosophy prior to and within the first parts of the Tractatus, covering such subjects as objects, substance, states of affairs, elementary propositions, pictures, and thoughts. He concludes that analysis is reduction to what is basic not in experience but in reference, and argues that the Tractatus is concerned not with problems of knowledge but with problems of sense.

Discussion of the possibilities of comparing values of radically different kinds, and values that are essentially constituted by other simpler values.

Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, (...) settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation. (shrink)

The view that the obligation to promote happiness is, as Popper puts it, "in any case much less urgent" than the obligation to eliminate unhappiness we might call the "Negative Doctrine". I know of no plausible form of the Negative Doctrine.

I want to look at one aspect of the human good: how it serves as the basis for judgments about the moral right. One important view is that the right is always derived from the good. I want to suggest that the more one understands the nature of the human good, the more reservations one has about that view. I. One Route to Consequentialism Many of us think that different things make a life good, with no one deep value underlying (...) them all. My own list includes: enjoyment, accomplishing something with one's life, deep personal relations, certain sorts of understanding, and the elements of a characteristically human existence. Most of us also think that moral right and wrong are based, in some way or other, in how well individual lives go, and that the moral point of view is, in some sense or other, impartial between lives. Utilitarianism is a prominent, but not the only, way of spelling out this intuition. There is no reason why an account of the human good needs to be confined, in the classical utilitarian way, to happiness or to fulfillment of desire. Nor is there any reason why impartiality has to be confined to maximizing the good, counting everybody for one and nobody for more than one. We may generalize. Let us broaden the notion of the good. We might say, for instance, that though happiness is a good, so are the other items on my list. But though broadened, this notion of the good stays within the confines of individual goods; it still has to do with human well-being, with what promotes the quality of one person's life. (shrink)

This volume studies the origin and evolution of philosophical interest in Aristotle's Categories, and illuminates the earliest arguments for Aristotle's approach to logic as the foundation of higher education.

The best philosophical account of human rights regards them as protections of the values we attach to human agency. The international law of human rights is embodied in a large number of declarations, conventions, covenants, charters, and judicial decisions. There are many discrepancies between the lists of human rights that emerge from these two authoritative sources. This lecture explores the significance of these discrepancies.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2010, given by James Griffin, an American philosopher.

The article tries to qualify the contentious issue of whetherthere is a human right to welfare. Our notion of human rightsis practically without criteria for distinguishing between whenit is used correctly and when incorrectly. The first step inany satisfactory resolution of the issue about welfare rightsis to supply duly determinate criteria. I then consider thechief reasons for doubting that there is a human right towelfare, in the light of what seem to be, all things considered,the best criteria to attach to (...) the notion of a human right. (shrink)

Darwall's subject is a person's welfare – or to use his synonyms, a person's ‘good’, ‘interest’, ‘well-being’, ‘benefit’, or ‘eudaimonia’. Darwall is satisfied that there is a univocal notion here. I am unsure and shall come back to that question at the end.

By far the most common form of argument in ethics nowadays is what can be called piecemeal appeal to intuition. Any reader of philosophy will know the kind of thing I mean. ‘On your principle, it would be all right to do such-and-such. But that's counter-intuitive. So your principle is wrong.’ The word ‘intuition’ here is not used, as it was in earlier times, to refer to a special way of knowing; instead it is used to mean merely a moral (...) sentiment or belief that persons have independently of the moral theory or philosophy or stance that they might adopt. (shrink)

The best philosophical account of human rights regards them as protections of the values we attach to human agency. The international law of human rights is embodied in a large number of declarations, conventions, covenants, charters, and judicial decisions. There are many discrepancies between the lists of human rights that emerge from these two authoritative sources. This lecture explores the significance of these discrepancies.

My aim is to map some ethical ground. Many people who reject consequentialism and deontology adopt virtue ethics. Contemporary forms of virtue ethics occupy quite a variety of positions, and we do not yet have any satisfactory view of the whole territory that we call “virtue ethics.” Also, I think that there is a lot of logical space outside consequentialism and deontology not occupied by virtue ethics. In fact, I am myself rather more attracted to the environs of virtue ethics (...) than to virtue ethics itself, which particular environs I shall come to later. But, first, we have roughly to locate virtue ethics. (shrink)

James Griffin; IX—Consequences, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/65.

James Griffin; IX—Consequences, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/65.

At Aristotle,MetaphysicsE.1, 1026a14, Schwegler’s conjectural emendation of the manuscript reading ἀχώριστα to χωριστά has been widely adopted. The objects of physical science are therefore here ‘separate’, or ‘independently existent’. By contrast, the manuscripts make them ‘not separate’, construed by earlier commentators as dependent on matter. In this paper, I offer a new defense of the manuscript reading. I review past defenses based on the internal consistency of the chapter, explore where they have left supporters of the emendation unpersuaded, and attempt (...) to strengthen their appeal. I challenge Schwegler’s central case, developed by Ross and others, that the construction μὲν ἀλλ’ οὐκ demands an implausible ‘logical antithesis’ between inseparability and mobility. This is arguably the fundamental obstacle to the manuscript reading, and counterexamples have not to date convinced emenders. I offer a new, systematic review of Aristotle’s use of the phrase, including relevant cases from theRhetoric, to show how its usual meaning in Aristotle supports the transmitted text; I also reply to possible objections. Finally, I explore the implications of this defense for the classification of the sciences in E.1. (shrink)