Even if state-led biodiversity conservation projects can result in the displacement, exclusion, and impoverishment of former reserve residents, they are often presented as responding to the public interest. The core idea of these projects, I argue in this paper, is that nature and people should be separated, because people are too dangerous to be part of the landscape. However, this narrow perspective fails to acknowledge the numerous wrongs caused by conservation-induced displacement. That is, considering the interdependent relationships between human and non-human entities at the core of several Indigenous approaches to biodiversity conservation, I show that the conservation-induced displacement of some Indigenous groups can cause three interconnected wrongs: territorial, epistemic, and identity-based.
Business ethics increasingly explains corporate duties through failure-based theories. The Market Failures Approach (MFA) limits profit-seeking by reference to competitive efficiency, while the Justice Failures Approach (JFA) bars firms from benefiting from unjust background conditions. This article argues that both leave a distinct class of corporate wrongs under-theorized, namely the degradation of relational goods through which corporate authority becomes legitimate and social cooperation remains stable. The article develops a Relational Failures Approach (RFA), according to which firms are relationship-constituting institutions whose permission to exercise discretionary power depends on sustaining relational goods. Drawing on sociology and organizational research, the article defends an empirically grounded and non-perfectionist account of these goods and shows how firms can commit efficiency-compatible, justice-compatible, and institutionally corrosive wrongs. The argument clarifies why familiar corporate pathologies, including disposability regimes and fear-based cultures, are not adequately captured by efficiency or justice alone in contemporary corporate ethics debates.
A number of philosophers reject the view that there are any possible cases in which some feature of the causal history of a person’s vulnerability is a necessary condition for an act of taking advantage of that vulnerability to constitute prima facie wrongful exploitation. I challenge this denial through a series of cases in which a thief falls into a pit and can only be rescued by the person he robbed. The vulnerability or desperation flows directly from the putative exploitee’s own wrongdoing against the would-be exploiter and, depending on the specifics of the case, the transaction fails to constitute prima facie wrongful exploitation even though it bears all the surface marks of prima facie wrongful exploitation. These examples show that, at least in some cases, whether an interaction counts as prima facie wrongful exploitation depends in part on features of the causal history that produced the would-be exploitee’s vulnerability or desperation.
One pressing concern in the world at the moment concerns the gathering and use of personal information in digital contexts. This may be one of the main reasons why so much of the recent literature on the philosophy of privacy focuses on ‘informational privacy’—that which can be explained in terms of information about a person, instead of something like the privacy of a particular location: a bedroom, a lockbox, etc. This paper argues that narrowing the focus in this way has led to some important mistakes about how privacy can be diminished. It is important to remember that there is rarely an easy or clear delineation between informational and locational privacy. In particular, I argue that this wider perspective allows us to see differences in how we treat information—privacy over one’s information is still diminished when that privacy is ‘invaded’ or ‘intruded upon’, regardless of the mental states of the invader. This has both practical upshots in the ethics of mass surveillance by non-humans, and theoretical upshots in the debates about the theoretical nature of privacy itself.
In this essay, I argue against Jesse Spafford’s Moral Tyranny Constraint on the grounds that it would undermine the socialist value of community. The socialist value of community is appealing because people in community are disposed to voluntarily benefit each other unconditionally, without constantly keeping score or worrying about who is gaining an advantage and who is being taken advantage of. The Moral Tyranny Constraint betrays the socialist value of community because it is a theory of enforceable rights, which permits and potentially requires constant attention to material circumstances and advantages.
