Business corporations are important, often powerful actors within the economy. They are able to exercise power over other actors, such as employees, consumers and nation-states. This contribution discusses how corporate power is constituted (ontological question), for what purpose it should be exercised, (normative question) and how it should be controlled (governance question). It focuses on the competing anwers to these questions that have been proposed by three political theories of the corporation. Concession theories emphasize the state's role in chartering corporations, (...) and hence require corporations to act in the public interest. Contractualist theories present corporations as tools for contract partners (most often shareholders), with corporate purpose focused on the benefits to these partners. Real entity theories focus on the corporation as an autonomous, separate entity with a purpose to be determined by the group seeking incorporation. (shrink)

Background: Giving money as a direct incentive for patients in exchange for depot medication has proved beneficial in some clinical cases in assertive outreach . However, ethical concerns around this practice have been raised, and will be analysed in more detail here.Method: Ethical concern voiced in a survey of all AO teams in England were analysed regarding their content. These were grouped into categories.Results: 53 of 70 team managers mentioned concerns, many of them serious and expressing a negative attitude towards (...) giving money for depot adherence. Four broad categories of ethical concern following Christensen’s concept were distinguished: valid consent and refusal , psychiatric paternalism , resource allocation , organisational relationships , with a residual category others and unspecified .Discussion: The main concerns identified are discussed on the background of existing ethical theories in healthcare and the specific problems of community mental health and AO. Points for practice are derived from this discussion. A way forward is outlined that includes informed consent and an operational policy in the use of incentives, further randomised controlled trials and qualitative studies, and continuing discussions with all stakeholders, especially service users. (shrink)

Timothy Murphy (2012) argues for the “incompatibility” of religion and bioethics, drawing a stark dichotomy between the two: “Either bioethics does its work on the assumption of an independently di...

Human beings are embedded in diverse social, cultural and political groups through which we make sense of our technologically mediated lived experience. This article seeks to reaffirm the postphenomenological subject as a primarily social subject. Critics maintain that the current postphenomenological framework does not adequately address the social, cultural and political context in which human-technology relations take place. In recent years, various additions to postphenomenology have been suggested in order to address this contextual deficit. In this article, I argue that (...) a return to the phenomenological roots of postphenomenology reveals underexamined analytical tools that allow for greater socio-cultural and political sensitivity. I take Don Ihde’s supposed macroperceptual and microperceptual divide as a point of departure in claiming that postphenomenology has too hastily turned away from the subject as primarily socially situated. I draw upon the phenomenological tradition, particularly the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to develop a social postphenomenological approach. This approach is informed by the Schutzian notions of action, the stock of knowledge at hand and consociates. In the resulting account, the postphenomenological schema of _I—Technology—World_ is reconstrued as _We—Technology—World_. (shrink)

Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental (...) question of how to demarcate childhood from adulthood. After summarizing the case, we identify a ‘demarcation dilemma’ that frames much of the public and expert debate. On the one hand, it seems morally imperative ‘to treat like alike’, which means that both children and adults should be allowed to undertake all actions for which they have the relevant competences. On the other hand, requiring proportional treatment of children and adults seems to neglect the special nature of childhood as a distinct stage in life that ends at a specific age. We introduce the notion of a ‘regime of childhood’ to deal with this problem. This regime includes several dimensions, including the limited liability for children, the supervisory responsibilities of parents, the role of age-based thresholds, and the overarching purpose of childhood as a context for developing autonomy. We argue that, all things considered, there are good reasons not to shift to a regime that offers individual children the option of qualifying for adulthood on the basis of age-neutral criteria. (shrink)

Authors like Iris Young and Philip Pettit have come up with proposals for theorizing ‘structural injustice’ and social relations marred by ‘domination’. These authors provide conceptual tools for f...

ABSTRACT:Demands have been growing upon firms to take actions in the interests of workers, the environment, local communities, and others. Firms sometimes have felt they could best discharge such responsibilities by cooperating with other firms. This, however, is suspect from the point of view of a purely economic interpretation of competition law, since interfirm agreements may raise prices and thus lower welfare for consumers. Should competition law remain focused on competition enhancing economic welfare, or be reformed to allow for acts (...) of cooperation that are socially beneficial? To answer this question, the article provides a philosophical reevaluation of the deep-seated view that firms are merely private actors. It argues that demands of political legitimacy should also be addressed at firms cooperating together, and that standard views of democratic accountability should be broadened, introducing a model of delegated, sequential decision making which allows regulatory agencies and parliaments to control interfirm agreements. (shrink)

A capability approach prescribes paternalist government actions to the extent that it requires the promotion of specific functionings, instead of the corresponding capabilities. Capability theorists have argued that their theories do not have much of these paternalist implications, since promoting capabilities will be the rule, promoting functionings the exception. This paper critically surveys that claim. From a close investigation of Nussbaum's statements about these exceptions, it derives a framework of five categories of functionings promotion that are more or less unavoidable (...) in a capability theory. It argues that some of these categories may have an expansionary dynamic; they may give rise to widespread functionings promotion, which would defeat the capabilitarian promise that paternalist interventions will be exceptions to the rule of a focus on capabilities. Finally, the paper discusses three further theoretical issues that will be decisive in holding this paternalist tendency in check: how high one sets threshold levels of capability protection, how lengthy one's list of basic capabilities is, and how one deals with individual responsibility for choices resulting in a loss of one's capabilities. (shrink)

The 2008 global financial crisis raises ethical as much as financial questions. Moral outrage centered on the imbalance between banks profiting from excessive risk-taking in good times and taxpayers suffering the costs in bad times. The paper analyzes this imbalance in terms of ethical theory. It first develops a rights-based framework to answer questions about the moral obligations of states and banks towards each other. It then criticizes standard economic thinking, which de-moralizes the phenomenon of moral hazard. Moral hazard between (...) states and banks arises in a context that cannot be interpreted as normal economic contracting, but should rather be characterized as governed by an implicit social contract giving rise to moral obligations. (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)

The capability approach is one of the main contenders in the field of theorizing social justice. Each citizen is entitled to a set of basic capabilities. But which are these? Martha Nussbaum formulated a set of ten central capabilities. Amartya Sen argued they should be selected in a process of public reasoning. Critics object that the Nussbaum-approach is too perfectionist and the Sen-approach is too proceduralist. This paper presents a third alternative: a substantive but non-perfectionist capability theory of justice. It (...) presents a two-level concept of individual agency as connected to social practices. It then argues basic capabilities are those necessary to for the agency necessary to navigate freely and autonomously between different social practices. (shrink)

Disruptions in theory of mind faculties and the ability to relate to an intersubjective reality are widely thought to be crucial to schizophrenic symptomology. This paper applies a cognitive linguistic framework to analyze spontaneous perspective-taking in two corpora of stories told by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. We elicited natural narrative language use through life story interviews and a guided storytelling task and analyzed the linguistic construal of viewpoint in these stories. For this analysis, we developed a reliable and widely (...) applicable viewpoint model that allows for the categorization and quantification of speakers’ linguistic presentation and navigation of spatiotemporal domains. We found that our participants skillfully presented, navigated and embedded different narrative viewpoints through a variety of linguistic viewpoint devices. They presented complex viewpoints of other people in both the here-and-now of the interaction and the there-and-then of a narrative, and made use of transition markers to demarcate spatiotemporal discourse domains. We found no differences in viewpoint variables when comparing their guided stories to a control group. If problems with intersubjectivity are indeed an essential part of schizophrenia, an explanation of how this group can take on and navigate complex linguistic viewpoints in natural narrative interaction is called for. (shrink)