In the world of human resource management employees that deliberately “withhold effort” on the job are called “production deviants”. The implication is that workers are under a duty to perform as best they can, but why should we accept this? Three answers are presented and interrogated....

CSR involves the management of a corporation using the resources of that corporation to promote the welfare of non-shareholders (disadvantaged members of the community, the global poor, animals, future generations etc). In some cases CSR is used as a tactic to augment the competitive strength of...

Elizabeth Anderson exalts the transition from the aristocratic to the modern ethic of debt as one of the most significant cultural achievements of capitalism. Whereas the debitor was once forced to compromise his liberty, dignity, and equality, today the rights and freedoms of insolvents are...

The principle of absolute sovereignty may have been consigned to history, but a strong presumption against foreign intervention seems to have been left in its stead. On the dominant view, only massacre and ethnic cleansing justify armed intervention, these harms must be already occurring or...

The 'working poor' are paid below‐subsistence wages for full‐time employment. What, if anything, is wrong with this? The extant philosophical literature offers two kinds of answers. The first says that failing to pay workers enough to live on takes unfair advantage of them; the workers are...

A construction worker may have agreed to a risky job, but this does not oblige him to follow orders where it is foreseen that the harm risked will materialize. If the worker is directed by his site foreman to climb an unstable scaffold in a cyclone, he is within his rights to refuse, morally and...

If pacifists are correct in thinking that war is always unjust, then presumably we ought to eliminate the possibility and temptation of ever engaging in it; we should not build war-making capacity, and if we already have, then demilitarization—or military abolition—would seem to be the...

The debate between laissez-faire free-marketeers and advocates of regulated or “leashed” capitalism reached something of an intellectual stalemate in recent decades. In the public consciousness at least, this stalemate was broken by the recent global financial crisis. There have been intense...

The idea that jobs should be awarded purely on merit has become something of an axiom, but the moral basis of it remains elusive. If employers are under a duty to appoint the most qualified candidate, to whom exactly is this duty owed, and on what grounds? I distinguish two kinds of answers to...