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.
This essay examines Nicole Hassoun’s concept of creative resolve, a virtue she proposes to bridge the gap between moral knowledge and action in pursuit of a minimally good life for all. While creative resolve emphasizes persistence, imagination, and the willingness to challenge perceived limits, this analysis highlights key challenges in its application. First, the virtue is often only recognizable retrospectively, as the moral and practical significance of actions remains uncertain during complex social or political processes. Second, the ends toward which creative resolve is directed can be underdetermined, raising questions about how to ensure morally desirable outcomes. Third, exercising creative resolve can reinforce hierarchies and power asymmetries between actors and beneficiaries, particularly in public or institutional contexts. While the virtue offers a compelling framework for moral action, its ethical value depends on how it is exercised, toward what ends, and in what structural and relational context.
In his Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, Jesse Spafford offers an extended argument for social anarchism. Spafford’s moral tyranny constraint plays a key role in that extended argument. Spafford’s moral tyranny constraint is proposed and defended as a general constraint on the acceptability of a moral theory. In this symposium contribution, I express some reservations about Spafford’s moral tyranny constraint.
