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Category Archives: Ethics
The Law of the Trolley Problem
We recently rediscovered and reread Lon Fuller’s classic “Case of the Speluncean Explorers” (via Peter Suber), and in the process of writing up our own response to Fuller, we noticed a possible parallel between this hypothetical case and the famous … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Philosophy
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Lon Fuller’s Speluncean Explorers
In our previous post, we mentioned Peter Suber’s beautiful book on Lon Fuller’s fictional “Case of the Speluncean Explorers.” By way of background, this hypothetical case occurs in the year 4300 A.D. in the Commonwealth of Newgarth. The relevant facts … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Philosophy, Probability, Uncategorized
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Facebook 101
This fall, we are teaching a large undergraduate survey course (n > 800) on “the legal and ethical environment of business.” Instead of trying to cover everything, we will focus instead on the founding and subsequent explosive growth of Facebook–as … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Uncategorized
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Ethical machines (part 3 of 3)
In our previous posts, we presented Brett Frischmann’s novel idea of a Reverse Turing Test, i.e. the idea of testing the ability of humans to think like a machine or a computer. But, how would we create such a test? … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Philosophy, Science
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Price effects, virtue effects, and the law
Richard Craswell, a law professor at Stanford, once posed the following question in his paper titled “Promises and Prices”: why do economists and philosophers who study law differ so greatly in the relevance they assign to price effects. Here is … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Ethics, Law, Probability
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Is an immoral promise a “promise”?
We address this paradoxical question in our work-in-progress titled “Immoral Promises.” We consider this question to be a “paradoxical” one because people are generally supposed to keep their promises according to most theories of morality. In short, most philosophers think it is morally wrong … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Paradoxes
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“Respondeat Superior” (the Law of Agency)
Because of the ubiquity of principal-agent relationships in the business world, we will spend an entire lecture on the law of agency in our next class. Also, although we have been focusing mostly on the founding of Facebook this semester, … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law
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Metallica v. Napster
“Napster was the ultimate geek banner, a battle that had been fought by hackers on the biggest stage of all. Ultimately, the hackers had lost, but … it was still the biggest hack in history.”–Ben Mezrich, Accidental Billionaires (Ch. 18) … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law, Music
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Honor Code (Lessons 8 & 9)
“This wasn’t right, damn it. This wasn’t fair.” –Quote attributed to one of the Winklevoss twins in Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. In our next lecture, we are going to re-enact another pivotal scene from the film “The Social Network” … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law
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The Law of Ideas
“I’m thinking we keep it simple and call it the facebook.” –Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, as quoted in Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. When Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name for “thefacebook” and began building his new website in late … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law
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prior probability 