Keynote: Human Rights, Corporations,
and Digital Technologies

Keynote Speaker

John Tasioulas

U. of Oxford

John Tasioulas is Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI. His career includes positions as Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Law at King’s College London. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Australian National University.

His recent scholarship focuses on philosophical issues in punishment, human rights, and international law. He is co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Abstract I begin by outlining three major theoretical achievements of the UN Guiding Principles of Human Rights, which consist in their rejection of three human rights dogmas: the statist dogma that the state is the only, or the primary, bearer of human rights obligations; the legalist dogma that human rights are the creatures of law or to be primarily implemented through law; and the mirroring dogma that business’ human rights obligations are always identical in content with the obligations that bear on states. I also add to the rejection of these three dogmas an emphasis on three human rights truths that need to be embraced if we are to build on the progress made by the UNGPs: (a) that human rights are sources of obligation which do not, however, exhaust the entire domain of ethical concern; (b) that they have associated with them obligations of various kinds that need to be configured and allocated in a holistic manner; and (c) that they are objective moral standards, not simply the creatures of social expectations.

With this initial theoretical groundwork laid down, I then show that the UNGPs – with their heavy reliance on the distinction between respecting human rights and protecting them – do not provide adequate guidance in specifying the human rights obligations of businesses. This is because (a) it is often highly indeterminate what ‘respecting’ human rights involves, and in any case it is doubtful that the obligations businesses are required to respect are identical in content to those that states must respect, and (b) contrary to the UNGPs it is not exclusively states, but also businesses, that are plausibly subject to obligations to ‘protect’ human rights by means of third party governance, a fact that is made especially vivid by the way in which the widespread adoption of new technologies as a dimension of public infrastructures has shifted governance functions from states to corporations. Some thoughts about the way forward are then offered.

Plenary: Ethics and Business Ethics

Friday Plenary Session Speaker

Roger Crisp

Roger Crisp is Director of the Uehiro Oxford Institute, and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Mill on Utilitarianism, Reasons and the Good, The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics, and Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham. He edited Business Ethics: Perspectives on the Practice of Theory (with Chris Cowton), as well as the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, and translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press. He is currently translating and commenting on three of the Platonic dialogues concerned with the death of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito.

Abstract Roger Crisp has studied and taught ethics and the history of ethics for over four decades. In this lecture, he will explain his conception of ethical theory and what implications that theory might have for business and philosophical business ethics.