Abstract:According to an influential argument in business ethics and economics, firms are normatively required to maximize their contributions to social welfare, and the way to do this is to maximize their profits. Against Michael Jensen's version of the argument, I argue that even if firms are required to maximize their social welfare contributions, they are not necessarily required to maximize their profits. I also consider and reply to Waheed Hussain's ‘personal sphere’ critique of Jensen. My distinct challenge to Jensen seems to me fatal to any view according to which firms are normatively required to maximize their profits.

Theorists from John Stuart Mill to Robert Nozick have argued that citizens can gain insight into the demands of justice by experimenting with diverse forms of political life. I consider the rationality of such experimentation, arguing for three distinct but related claims. First, rational citizens will not be highly incentivized to conduct experiments in living. Here I develop an account of what I call the ‘prudential rationality constraint’ (PRC). The PRC implies that rational citizens will be undermotivated from the standpoint of social value to conduct experiments in living. Second, despite the success of various radical political experiments (e.g., democracy after 1648), citizens generally ought to engage in moderate rather than radical political experimentation. The latter will nearly always be prudentially irrational to conduct, hard to learn from, and quite possibly harmful to participants and third parties. Finally, there are important but overlooked ways, including through entrepreneurship, in which institutions can incentivize citizens to engage in socially valuable political experimentation.

A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most worth considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking (which increases greatly when one is desensitized to guilt) render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted.

No abstract

No abstract