Peter A. French

Kinds and Persons

1. In “The Corporation as a Moral Person, ”1 I argued that certain business corporations may be properly conceived of as intentional agents.

The principle of responsive adjustment in corporate moral responsibility: The crash on mount erebus

The tragic crash of Air New Zealands flight TE-901 into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica provides a fascinating case for the exploration of the notion of corporate moral responsibility. A principle of accountability that has Aristotelian roots and is significantly different from the usual strict intentional action principles is examined and defined. That principle maintains that a person can be held morally accountable for previous non-intentional behavior that has harmful effects if the person does not take corrective measures to adjust his ways of behavior so as not to produce repetitions. This principle is then applied to the Mt. Erebus disaster.

Undergraduate student research programs: Are they as viable for accounting as they are in science and humanities?

Abstract This paper reviews a recent thrust in academia to stimulate more undergraduate research in the USA, including a rapidly growing annual conference. The paper also describes programs in which significant foundation grants have been received to fund undergraduate research projects in the sciences and humanities. In particular, selected humanities students working in teams in a new “Philosophy Lab” are allowed to embark on long-term research projects of their own choosing. Several completed projects are briefly reviewed in this paper. In April 1989, Trinity University hosted the Third National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) and purposely expanded the scope of the conference to include a broad range of disciplines. At this conference, 632 papers and posters were presented representing the research activities of 873 undergraduate students from 163 institutions. About 40% of the papers were outside the natural sciences and included research in music and literature. Only 13 of those papers were in the area of business administration; none were even submitted by accounting students . In 1990 at Union College, 791 papers were presented; none were submitted by accountants. In 1991 at Cal Tech, the first accounting paper appeared as one of 853 papers presented. This paper suggests a number of obstacles to stimulating and encouraging accounting undergraduates to embark on research endeavours. These impediments are somewhat unique to accounting, and it appears that accounting education programs are lagging in what is being done to break down obstacles in science, pre-med, engineering, humanities, etc. This paper proposes how to overcome these obstacles in accounting. One of the anticipated benefits of accounting student research, apart from the educational and creative value, is the attraction of more and better students seeking creativity opportunities in addition to rote learning of CPA exam requirements. This, in part, might help to counter industry complaints that top students are being turned away from accounting careers nationwide.

A Principle of Responsive Adjustment

i6. At I2.42 p.m. the aircraft informed Mac Centre that it was flying VMC (visual meteorological conditions) and that it would proceed visually to McMurdo. This message indicated that the aircraft had found an area free of cloud through which it would descend before levelling out at an altitude less than the cloud base. Thus the aircraft would be approaching under the cloud layer in clear air at an altitude of about 2,ooo feet.

Inference Gaps in Moral Assessment and the Moral Agency of Health Care Organizations

In the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote in justifying revolution against the English King: He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. (Jefferson, 1950, p. 426)

Moral Belief/Behavior Discordance and Prizing or Lessons from Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Jefferson

The fictional character Huckleberry Finn and the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, provide rich examples of persons who sincerely hold and express a set of moral beliefs while behaving in ways that radically mismatch their moral beliefs. The moral beliefs that are of particular interest in this paper concern slavery. Finn’s moral beliefs do not condemn enslaving people against their will, treating them as property. (Bennett calls Finn’s a “bad morality,” but a morality nonetheless.) Slavery for Finn is, at minimum, morally permissible. Jefferson expressed beliefs regarding the immorality of slavery. Finn, however, abets a slave’s attempt to runaway from his owner and Jefferson not only was a slave owner, he based his economic wellbeing on the institution of slavery on his plantations. It might be thought that both Finn and Jefferson either did not really hold the moral beliefs they espoused (that they were hypocrites) or that when it came to acting, they were weak of will with respect to their moral beliefs. Rather than defend an account that they were weak of will or that, in Finn’s case, his moral beliefs were overridden by sympathy for a particular slave (Bennett’s position), the paper examines an account of moral belief/behavior discordance that purports to have roots in Hume’s dualistic conception of the architecture of mental states: the position taken by Tamar Gendler and Uriah Kriegel. For them, moral beliefs are not especially motivational and are typically trumped by what Gendler dubbed aliefs, mental states that produce associative chains that are affect-laden and inherently motivational. Gendler’s aliefs are “associative, automatic, and arational.” Although there are attractive aspects of the alief thesis, there are telling conceptual reasons not to adopt it to account for moral belief/behavior mismatching. The paper concludes by offering an alternative explanation of belief/behavior discordance. The suggestion is that what may be called prizings, a variety of what Frankfurt called cares, share characteristics cited by Hume in his account of passion and explain why people may both sincerely hold a set of moral beliefs while acting in ways that violate those beliefs. For example, Finn prizes his personal relationship with the runaway slave and Jefferson prizes the economic aspects of running his plantations on slave labor. What they prize connects more directly and with more force to their wills than the moral beliefs they sincerely hold regarding slavery. The moral belief/behavior discordant cases strongly suggest that volitional attitudes should be at the core of moral appraisals of character and epistemic states, such as beliefs (even moral ones), are not central to or dependably efficacious in forming a person’s volitional attitudes and so his or her behavior. The paper may be viewed as supporting an adage: “Believe whatever you will, it is what you will that counts morally.”