Complete Glossary
In rights-based theories, the moral principles that agents should follow in their decisions involve respecting the moral rights of others.
In justice-based theories, the moral principles that agents should follow in their decisions involve treating others as moral equals.
Objective consequentialism requires agents to make those decisions which lead to the best consequences from a point of view that is independent of the psychological states of individual people.
Utilitarianism requires agents to make those decisions that maximize positive mental states (subjective states) in themselves and others.
In duty-based theories of ethics, the agent should follow the principle of doing his or her duty, regardless of the consequences.
Ethical egoism is the ethical theory that agents ought always to maximize their own self-interest.
A virtue ethics holds that persons and organizations ought to cultivate a virtuous or morally excellent character.
A vice is a stable character trait with negative moral significance. Examples are avarice, cowardice, dishonesty, and sleaziness.
A care ethics is an ethical approach based in the special relationships, like that of mother and child, which people have to one another, and in the relationship skills and emotional traits that make such attachments possible.
A virtue is a stable character trait with positive moral significance. Examples are courage, generosity, benevolence, and fairness.
A principle-based approach to ethical reasoning looks at the decision-maker’s motivations. It assesses the decision as right or wrong according to what ethical principles the agent follows, or does not follow, when she makes her decision.
A consequence-based approach to ethics focuses on the results or outcomes of the action, and maximizes net benefits to all concerned.
An identity-based approach to ethical reasoning focuses on what sort of person (organization) the agent (organization) is becoming, on whether she (it) is virtuous and has a good character.
A person, organization, or nonhuman entity has moral standing if we must consider his, her, or its interests in making an ethical decision.
An agent is morally accountable for an action and its consequences if, and only if, we should be prepared to praise or blame her for her freely made decision and for its results.
An entity has moral agency if it is capable of understanding moral principles, is capable of responding to moral reasons, and is able to accept praise or blame.
Ethical pluralism says that we should make ethical decisions by considering the (often-conflicting) obligations that follow from all ethical theories, and then judge how to proceed.
Toleration is the virtue of respecting beliefs, attitudes, and practices different from one’s own.
Cultural diversity is the anthropological fact that cultures differ in their accepted beliefs, attitudes, and practices.
Ethical relativism is the metaethical view that the truth or falsity of ethical judgments is relative to the traditional practices of a cultural group.
Ethical theories are ways of systematizing ethical judgments that philosophers have developed over many years.
The “is/ought” gap means that we cannot derive an ethical conclusion from an argument consisting of purely scientific or factual premises.
The metaethical principle that “ought” implies “can” means that a person cannot be morally obligated to perform an action or bring about a consequence if he is unable to do so.
Ethical reasons are agreement-seeking because we offer them as justifications to others for acting in a certain way. They are reasons about which there can be argument and debate, and they have justifications on whose truth or falsity and applicability we want others to agree.
Ethical reasons are action-guiding because they motivate us to act in ways that we think are morally right, or at least ethically permissible.
Narrow self-interest is motivation arising from only the welfare of one’s own ego and body.
A contractarian ethic is the view that ethics is an enforced contract among ethical egoists designed to prevent dilemmas of cooperation.
The paradox of egoism is a weakness of ethical egoism that arises because ethical egoists cannot achieve some states of affairs greatly in their self-interest because they always ought to act selfishly.
A prisoner’s dilemma is a type of game where both players have dominant strategies that, when played, result in an equilibrium with payoffs smaller than if each had played another strategy.
A dominant strategy is a strategy in a game that yields a higher payoff regardless of the strategy chosen by the other player.
A payoff matrix in game theory is a table that shows each player’s payoff for every possible combination of strategies.
Ethical egoism is the ethical theory that people always ought to act to maximize their own self-interest.
Psychological egoism is the empirical theory that people always do act to maximize their own self-interest.
Rule utilitarianism uses the maximization of utility on the whole as a standard of rightness for which regulations people should follow.
Direct utilitarianism uses maximizing utility as a decision procedure for which decisions people should make.
Indirect utilitarianism treats maximizing utility as a standard of rightness that advocates obedience to principles, respect for rights, inculcation of virtues, and whatever else is necessary to produce maximum aggregate utility.
Act utilitarianism judges each action according to a calculation of the utilities it causes.
Informed preference consequentialism is a type of ethical theory which holds that a state of the world is valuable if it would satisfy the preference that someone would have if she were fully informed and reasoning rationally.
Positive cost-benefit analysis is an economic technique that measures the financial costs and benefits of different decisions according to people’s willingness to pay for them.
Willingness to pay measures utility by maximum amount of money that someone would be willing to exchange for an additional economic good when no market price is established.
A normative cost-benefit analysis is a form of preference-satisfaction utilitarianism where utility is measured by willingness to pay.
According to preference-satisfaction utilitarianism, each agent ought to act to bring about the maximum amount of satisfied desires or preferences for recipients with moral standing.
According to experience-based utilitarianism, each agent ought to cause the maximum balance of pleasure over pain for recipients with moral standing.
Preference satisfaction is the experience of having a chosen desire satisfied.
A mental experience is a sensation or feeling of pleasure or pain.
Saintly altruism requires agents to maximize positive mental states in others only.
Ethical egoism requires agents to maximize positive mental states in themselves only.
Utilitarianism requires agents to make those decisions that maximize positive mental states (subjective states) in themselves and others.
Objective consequentialism requires agents to make those decisions that lead to the best states of the world from a point of view upon which everyone can potentially agree.
A divine command theory holds that people’s obligations are created by the commands of God.
A negative right imposes a duty on everyone else not to interfere with the right holder’s activities.
A positive right imposes a duty on others to assist the right bearer in some way.
A general right is a right whose correlative duty falls on everyone.
A specific right is one whose correlative duty only falls on a determinate person or group.
A legal right is a type of right that is legally enforceable.
A moral right is a type of right that is justified by a moral theory.
Autonomy is a person’s capability to make competent, rational choices.
The harm principle says that people (or the government) may interfere with people’s freedom, liberty, or exercise of their rights only in order to prevent harm to others.
A hypothetical imperative is a type of principle that will help someone get what he or she wants.
A categorical imperative is a type of principle that does not depend on anyone’s wants or desires.
Correlative duties are duties that agents owe to a right-holder because the right-holder has that right.
Prima facie duties are obligations that people have, but which may yield to stronger obligations.
Absolute duties are over-riding obligations that people have no matter what happens.
The difference principle says a distribution of rights and responsibilities is just if, and only if, everyone receives the same resources unless an unequal distribution will result in the least well-off receiving more.
Strict equality of resources holds that a distribution of property rights in resources is just if, and only if, it results in everyone having the same amount of resources.
Equality of welfare holds that a distribution of property rights in resources is just if, and only if, it results in everyone having the same level of welfare.
Equal consideration of interests holds that a distribution is just if, and only if, it assigns the same weight to everyone’s interests in the aggregation of interests for purposes of utilitarian maximization.
Equality of opportunity says that a distribution is just if, and only if, it assigns positions in society according to morally relevant criteria such as ability or merit and not according to morally arbitrary criteria such as race or gender.
The law of diminishing marginal utility is the hypothesis that as the consumption of a given economic good increases, the marginal utility produced by the consumption of one additional unit of this economic good or service tends to decrease.
Marginal utility is the additional utility gained through the consumption of one additional unit of an economic good or service.
Total utility is the sum of all the utility produced by the consumption of economic goods or services.
An indirect utilitarian theory of justice claims that equal consideration of interests will lead to equality of resources because of the diminishing marginal utility of income.
Libertarianism holds that a distribution of rights and responsibilities is just if, and only if, it respects people’s equal rights to self-ownership.
Moral equality requires that organizations (and individuals) not treat people differently based on characteristics that are morally arbitrary.
Distributive justice ensures that society allocates benefits and burdens in a way that treats people as moral equals.
Compensatory justice ensures that people, who infringe the rights of others without consent, recompense fairly those whom they harm.
Retributive justice ensures that we hold people accountable fairly for harming others or violating their rights.
Derivative virtues are justified because they help an agent fulfil the requirements of some other type of ethical theory.
People follow a virtue ethics rules of action if they emulate how a virtuous person in that situation would act.
Virtues are character traits that enable human beings to cooperate and flourish in communities of people with similar traits.
A care ethic is based in the special relationships, like that of mother and child, which people have to one another, and in the emotions that make such attachments possible.
A logic of domination is a structure of argumentation justifying relationships of domination and subordination within an oppressive conceptual framework.
An oppressive conceptual framework is a conceptual framework that makes relationships of domination and subordination seem normal, natural, and unquestionable.
A conceptual framework is a mutually supporting, seldom questioned, and resilient set of fundamental assumptions about the world, about human nature, and about ethical values, that affects how people think and act in the world.
Conditioned power is the ability to dominate through internalized beliefs and attitudes.
Economic power is the ability to dominate through economic incentive or economic threat.
Coercive power is the ability to dominate through force or the threat of force.
Oppression is the exercise of domination by a group, community, or society as a whole.
Facts about causal responsibility are not as precise as most facts of science. Some people think causal conditions are necessary conditions, but these “but for” conditions have difficulty with over-determination. Some think they are sufficient conditions, but these have difficulties with situations of joint production that are analogous to Adam Smith’s pin factory. Some think they are NESS conditions, but these have difficulty attributing causal responsibility for committee decisions.
The retrospective role of determining causal responsibility is the use, after implementation of the decision, of knowledge of causation to assign moral accountability (praise and blame) to the correct agent.
The predictive role of determining causal responsibility is the use by a moral agent of knowledge of cause and effect to foresee the results of her decision.
The distribution of moral accountability is a method of assigning moral accountability within the corporation without taking away the moral accountability of the corporation as a whole.
Corporate character is a corporation’s disposition to behave in ways that we can judge to be virtuous or vicious, which are determined by its ethical codes, compliance-mechanisms, climate, etc.
Holism regarding corporate accountability is the theory that the corporation as a whole is capable of moral agency, and thus can be morally accountable for the deeds of its agents and employees.
Reductionism regarding corporate accountability is the theory that we cannot hold a corporation to be morally accountable and that all moral accountability lies with individuals within the corporation.
A necessary condition is required to produce the outcome, but is not always enough to produce the outcome by itself.
A sufficient condition is enough to produce the outcome, but is not always required to produce the outcome.
An agent is causally responsible for an action and its consequences if her freely made decision brings about the action.
A moral agent can be assigned praise or blame, and can understand moral principles, respond to moral reasons, and be held morally accountable.
A positive autonomy right is the right to assistance with one’s decision-making.
A negative autonomy right is the right not to have one’s decision-making interfered with.
A negative liberty is the right not to have one’s actions interfered with.
A negative right is a general right not to be interfered with.
A moral right is a morally justified claim on others that imposes a correlative duty on them.
An oppressive conceptual framework is a shared set of strongly held and resilient beliefs about the world, values, and human nature that makes relationships of domination and subordination seem normal, natural, and unquestionable.
Fraud is obtaining a benefit from a victim by lying or deception.
Deception is a non-linguistic action or omission that the perpetrator intentionally uses to cause her victim to believe something false.
A lie is a linguistic communication which the perpetrator believes to be untrue and with which the perpetrator intends to deceive his victim.
A coercive threat is a morally unjustified declaration of the intent to cause harm.
Informational privacy is the condition of being able to control access by others to information about oneself.
Physical privacy is the condition of freedom from intrusion by others.
Moral autonomy is the capacity to govern oneself according one’s own ethical reasoning.
Personal autonomy is the capacity to make authentic decisions about one’s own life.
Willingness to pay is the maximum amount of money that someone would be willing to exchange for an economic good or service.
A virtue is a stable character trait with positive moral significance. Examples are courage, generosity, benevolence, and fairness.
Transaction costs are the costs of reaching and enforcing an agreement between negotiating parties. They include the costs of researching information about the situation, negotiating the agreement, and legally enforcing the agreement.
The total utility of a group of economic goods or services is the sum of all the utility produced by the consumption of those goods or services.
A reservation price is the maximum amount of money that a consumer would be willing to exchange for one more unit of the commodity in the absence of a defined market price for that commodity.
Psychological egoism is the empirical theory that people always do act to maximize to their self-interest.
A positive right imposes a duty on others to assist the right bearer in some way.
An outcome is Pareto-efficient if no other outcome is possible that makes at least one person better off and no person worse off.
A person, organization, or nonhuman entity has moral standing if we must consider his, her, or its interests in making an ethical decision.
Conditions where the assumptions of perfect condition do not hold and markets are not efficient are market failures.
The marginal utility of an economic good or service is the additional utility gained through the consumption of one additional unit of that good or service.
Libertarianism holds that a distribution of rights and responsibilities is just if, and only if, it respects people’s natural rights to self-ownership.
The law of increasing marginal cost states that, in the short-run, the marginal cost of producing each additional item will tend to increase.
The law of factor-proportions says the owners of a country’s relatively abundant factors will gain from free trade, while the owners of a country’s relatively scarce factors will lose.
The law of diminishing marginal utility states that as the consumption of a given economic good increases, the marginal utility produced by the consumption of one additional unit of the good tends to decrease.
Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage states that there exist terms of trade under which two countries will both gain from trade if they specialize in producing goods in which they have a comparative, not an absolute, advantage.
Indirect utilitarianism treats utilitarian reasoning as a justification procedure, and advocates obedience to rules, respect for rights, inculcation of virtues, and the creation of whatever policies are necessary to produce maximum aggregate utility.
Ethical egoism is the ethical theory that agents ought always to maximize their own self-interest.
Economic utilitarianism is a form of preference-satisfaction utilitarianism where we measure the utility of a good or service to someone according to her willingness to pay for it.
Direct utilitarianism treats utilitarian reasoning as a decision procedure and judges each case according to a calculation of the utilities it causes.
The difference principle says a distribution of rights and responsibilities is just if, and only if, everyone receives the same resources unless an unequal distribution results in the least well-off receiving more than in the strictly equal distribution.
A contractarian ethical theory is a theory claiming that ethics consists in an enforced contract among ethical egoists designed to prevent dilemmas of cooperation, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma situation.
One country has a comparative advantage over a second country in the production of a commodity if, and only if, the first country can produce that commodity more cheaply in terms of another commodity than the second country can.
One country has an absolute advantage over a second country in the production of a commodity if, and only if, the first country can produce that commodity more cheaply than the second country can.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the market value of all final goods and services produced in a country during a year.
The Coase Theorem states that if agents can negotiate the selling of rights to do activities that cause external costs, and do so with perfect information and no transaction costs, then they can always find a market-based solution to problems caused by external costs that maximize total net social benefits.
Socially Optimal Level of Pollution (SOL) is the point at which the financial cost of reducing pollution by one increment outweighs the cost that this increment of pollution will create.
Sustainable development is growth that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
A contractarian ethical theory is a theory claiming that ethics consists in an enforced contract among ethical egoists designed to prevent dilemmas of cooperation, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma situation.
A person, organization, or nonhuman entity has moral standing if we must consider his, her, or its interests in making an ethical standing.
Inter-generational justice is concerned with the distribution of rights and duties between present and future people.
Market fundamentalism is an approach to environmental problems which says that, whatever the environmental effect of an economic market based on existing individual property rights, those effects are ethically permissible.
Conditions where the assumptions of perfect condition do not hold and markets are not efficient are market failures.
Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) is a measure of the cost of decreasing pollution by one increment.
An internal cost is a cost arising from the economic activity of an agent that is incorporated into the market price of a product.
A tragedy of the commons is a particular type of external cost situation that spreads the external costs of any individual participant’s actions overall all the participants in the situation. This gives each participant a positive net internal benefit and an incentive for doing the action, yet the result of similar actions by all participants is a worse situation.
Environmental economics is an approach to environmental problems that recognizes market failures regarding the environment and studies how we can take collective action to fix environmental problems in a cost-effective manner.
Free-market environmentalism is an approach to environmental problems which says that the bad environmental effects of market behaviours are not ethically permissible, but that the best solution to environmental problems is to privatize the environment.
Marginal Damage (MD) is a measure of the social costs that each additional increment of pollution imposes on everyone.
Ethical egoism is the ethical theory that agents ought always to maximize their own self-interest.
Green virtues are character traits that enable people and corporations to cooperate and flourish in environmentally sustainable societies of people and corporations with similar dispositions.
Cost-Benefit Analysis is a technique of environmental economics that measures the costs and benefits of different environmental policies according to people’s willingness to pay for them. The total net benefits of each policy are calculated and used either as a factual input to a policy decision, or as a way of making a policy decision.
An external cost or negative externality is a cost arising from the economic activity of an agent that is born by others because the market price of the product does not incorporate this cost.
The discount rate is a percentage used by economic utilitarianism to compare present and future benefits and costs.