Insider Trading and Sabotage

Insider trading is widely reviled, and yet – as Smith and Block argue – it is consistent with the basic principles of a free market system. This article draws attention to an argument against insider trading that Smith and Block don’t address, namely the potential for sabotage. However, this issue still fails to justify insider-trading legislation, and thus ultimately supports Smith and Block’s view that regulatory attempts to prevent it are misplaced.

Scharding on Non-Centrally Regulated Currencies and Price Volatility

Tobey Scharding claims that Bitcoin’s lack of a central regulator makes it open to price fluctuations. I argue that a currency not having a central regulator does not necessitate it being more volatile than centrally regulated currencies. First, I argue that Scharding’s reason for suggesting that Bitcoin is open to price fluctuations – its potential to face legal restrictions – is also faced by centrally regulated currencies. Second, I use silver in London as an example of a non-centrally regulated currency with relatively low price volatility when compared to other centrally regulated currencies showing that non-centrally regulated currencies are not necessarily more volatile.

Adorno's Critical Moral Philosophy and Business Ethics

Reeves and Sinnicks present Theodor Adorno as a philosopher with a sombre message to business ethics. Capitalist markets distort our needs and work in business organisations stultifies our moral capacities. Thus, the discipline’s self-understanding must be revised, and supplemented with reflections on what would be good work: free creative activity. After raising some questions about their interpretation of Adorno’s writings on human needs, I argue that the paper does not contain all the necessary resources to support its ferociously critical claims. Once such resources are made available, however, the appeal to a notion of good work is no longer viable.

Sweatshop Regulations and Ex Ante Contractualism

Kuyumcuoglu argues that defenders of sweatshop regulations should reject consequentialism and accept an ex ante interpretation of contractualism instead. In this Commentary I show that Kuyumcuoglu’s argument doesn’t succeed. Defenders of sweatshops shouldn’t become ex ante contractualists because its advantages on this issue are more apparent than real.

In Memorium: The Contribution of Dr. Arthur Wesley Cragg

The author comments on two journal articles authored by his former PhD supervisor, Dr. Arthur Wesley Cragg.

The Peculiar Nature of the Duty to Help During a Pandemic

Duties of beneficence are said to allow for leeway to discharge them. By distinguishing between two different types of leeway, Mejia (2020) identified three structurally different duties of beneficence. In this Commentary I deploy those distinctions to clarify the nature of a fourth type of duty of beneficence, one prompted by a global pandemic, a duty with a peculiar, and seldom recognized, conceptual logic. I provide some guidelines that should orient managers when they take themselves to be fulfilling such a duty on behalf of shareholders.

The Challenge of Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry Within Leadership-As-Practice

Herein, I clarify my concern regarding Raelin’s Leadership-as-Practice (L-A-P) and argue that inconsistent moral philosophies undermine the veracity of leadership theory, especially more recent democratic, shared, collective, and practice oriented theories; that this problem seems to be proliferating in the social sciences, and that this is especially concerning in socio-psychologically oriented theories. I contend that the moral foundations of L-A-P remain philosophically disquieting, unless it is understood as excluding moral agents other than those of a genealogical tradition, and that such exclusionary consequences in practice may lead to moral disengagement, which might then lead to cognitive dissonance and even self-harm.