Keynote: Killing for Profit

KEYNOTE Speaker

Jeff McMahan

Jeff McMahan is Sekyra and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He works primarily in moral, political, and legal philosophy, but particularly in the area of practical ethics. He is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Killing in War (OUP, 2009). At present, he is writing a book about the relevance of population ethics to various issues in practical ethics: The Ethics of Creating, Saving, and Ending Lives (OUP, forthcoming).

Abstract: Over the past century, executives in many businesses have marketed products that they knew would kill a large number of people, both purchasers and others. Obvious examples are executives in the tobacco, asbestos, and gun industries. How do these executives differ from ordinary murderers? There are of course many general differences. Executives do not, for example, literally kill people; often the buyers do to themselves what eventually kills them. Nor do executives intend the deaths their products cause. Those deaths are, one might argue, unintended side effects of legitimate business activities, such as selling cars to people, some of whom will be killed in accidents. Some people argue, moreover, that insofar as responsibility for the deaths extends beyond the purchasers, it is not individuals but collectives, such as corporations, that bear that responsibility. I will analyze these and other general differences in an effort to determine how significant they may be morally. I will, in addition, attempt to determine to what extent executives might be liable to be harmed defensively, or to be punished or compelled to compensate victims.

The joint SBE/SIM Keynote is made possible by the Academy of Management – Social Issues in Management, THE Donahue Center for Business Ethics & Social Responsibility at UMass Lowell, and the Society for Business Ethics.

Plenary: The Paradox of Invisible Work

Friday Plenary Session Speaker

Eric Posner

Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. In 2022-2023, he served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. His research interests antitrust law, financial regulation, and constitutional law. He has written a dozen books and more than a hundred academic articles on law and legal theory. His most recent books are How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford); Radical Markets (Princeton) (with Glen Weyl), which was named a best book of 2018 by The Economist; Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (Chicago), which was named a best book of 2018 by The Financial Times; and The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute.

Abstract: Certain types of work-like behavior are not treated as paid labor in the law—and thus is not taxed or given workplace protections, for example—and often is not understood to be work by ordinary people. This kind of “invisible work” is exceedingly common. It encompasses not only the traditional example of household labor, but also the work, or some of the work, of (for example) athletes, soldiers, students, artists, volunteers, religious and political leaders, data laborers, and even consumers who implicitly exchange work as well as money for products and services. The usual objection to invisible work is that is devalued. I will argue that, in fact, converting invisible work to paid work often devalues it by converting activities that are performed for higher motivations into activities that are performed for self-interest. This creates a paradox: “commodification” of invisible work so that it is subject to government administration and market forces both increases the compensation for workers and devalues the meaning of their work. Businesses exploit the resulting ambiguities to push down labor costs. Implications for employment law and antitrust law are discussed.