prior probability

Note: This is the second of several blog posts devoted to Week 6/Module 6 of my business law summer course.

I begin my ethics & morality module with the following legal philosophy question: What is the relation between law and morality? Specifically, are they two separate and distinct domains (the “legal positivist” view), or is law a branch of morality (the “natural law” view)? After I explore both sides of this deep legal philosophical question, I then identify a huge blind spot in the natural law tradition–one that hits close to home as I consider myself a classical natural lawyer in the tradition of St Thomas Aquinas. The blind spot is this: even if there is such a thing as a timeless or universal God-given higher law (cf. the Declaration of Independence of 1776 or MLK’s famous “letter from a Birmingham jail”), how do we go about discovering the actual content of this natural law?

In other words, natural lawyers like myself are still going to need a substantive theory of ethics to tell us the difference between right and wrong and thus help us figure out what man-made rules and behaviors are consistent with natural law. (For the record, legal positivists will also need to study ethics; the leading legal positivist, the late great H.L.A. Hart, for example, famously pictured the law from “the internal point of view”–i.e. the subjective viewpoint of judges and other public officials–and this internal POV therefore allows ethics and morality to slip into the positivist legal picture through the backdoor, so to speak.) Accordingly, the next part of my ethics & morality module explores several major theories of ethics (or, what I like to call collectively “The Big Three”), beginning with crude consequentialism and utility maximization, then proceeding with hardcore Kantian duties and categorical imperatives, and concluding with ancient Aristotelian virtue ethics. I not only introduce my students to these three major theories of ethics; I also discuss the main strengths and weaknesses of each moral theory.

Why do I introduce my students to the major theories of ethics? For two reasons. One is to show them the leading alternatives to consequentialism, but the other (more important) reason has to do with the way in which I conceive the role of a university as well as my role as a scholar. To the point, at a minimum my job as a professor and the role of universities generally should be to cultivate what the great Erasmus of Rotterdam (whose portrait is pictured below) referred to as the bonae litterae (or “good learning”) of our students, and what better way of imparting this good learning by spending time on two of the most important aspects of the liberal arts tradition: ethics and morality, right and wrong, good and bad.

With this liberal arts/bonae litterae background in mind, I will discuss the moral status of animals in my next blog post (a topic that is especially relevant to the Tiger King docuseries), then proceed into business ethics and say a few words about the legal regulation of sex (remember all that polygamy in Tiger King!), and conclude with my course’s final project.

Artist Credit: Hans Holbein the Younger

I am interrupting my series of blog posts on my “Summer A” business law survey course because–after I had finished updating the homepage of my course for this week, which happens to be the last week of my “Tiger Law” course–my Internet surfing led me to the poignant portrait pictured below on the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine (check out the interactive version of the cover here), so I decided to update the bottom part of my homepage accordingly.

Note: This is an overview of Week 6 of my Tiger Law course and the first of several blog posts devoted to Week 6/Module 6 of my business law summer course.

Thus far, my business law survey course has proceeded as follows: first, we watched Tiger King and picked a side: Team Joe or Team Carole (Week 1). Next, we identified the main sources of law–State, federal, and international–that could apply to a roadside zoo like Joe Exotic’s G.W. Exotic Animal Park or to a wildlife sanctuary like Harold and Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue (Week 2). Later, we explored the common law, including torts, property, and contracts (Week 3), as well as the law of ideas, including trademark and copyright law (Week 4), and then we compared and contrasted the civil and criminal cases featured on Tiger King (Week 5). I have, however, saved the best for last. This week (the last week of the course!) is devoted to “Ethics & Morality”, including natural law, business ethics, and the moral status of animals.

But before I provide a general overview of Week 6 of the course and describe the contents of Module 6, you might be asking, Why devote an entire week to ethics? I will tell you why. Simply put, the official title of my course is “The Legal & Ethical Environment of Business,” so ethics is a key part of my survey course and deserves sustained attention. Specifically, my module on “Ethics & Morality” is divided into seven parts as follows:

• Intro Video, Textbook Chapter, & Theme Song
• The Natural Law Tradition
• Theories of Ethics
• The Moral Status of Animals
• Business Ethics (CSR)
• Bonus Section: The Legal Regulation of Sex
• Final Project

In other words, we cover a lot of ground in this module, including not just “business ethics” or corporate social responsibility but also deeper questions like the relation between law and morality as well as some of the major theories of ethics, including consequentialism, Kantian duty ethics, and virtue ethics. Because of my Tiger King theme, we also explore the moral status of animals in light of these theories of ethics. Rest assured, we will delve into the details of the last module of my course in my next few blog posts. In the meantime, below are some screenshots of the homepage of my course for Week 6:

Desktop version (from top to middle):

Canvas App Version (from top to bottom):

What do I miss the most about our pre-pandemic times? It’s not sports or bars or restaurants. It’s the experience of going to the movies. Specifically, I miss going to Enzian, the fine arts cinema in Maitland, Florida (where years ago I photographed the above iconic still in the gentlemen’s washroom).

… “Betsy Ross Day” in honor of a humble woman who helped changed the course of history. Here is her Wikipedia page.

I can’t ask for a better son in the whole world! Kleber Enrique just graduated from Lake Mary H.S. and is going to attend college at the University of Florida (#GoGators) in the fall. May the Force be with you in your future endeavors!

My Guaranteed Income paper now appears in print. It is part of a symposium issue of the Chapman Law Review devoted to the 91st Congress. (An electronic version of the paper is also available here free of charge via SSRN.)

Note: This is the last of several blog posts reviewing Tyler Cowen’s book “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.”

Now that we have reviewed the first eight chapters of Tyler Cowen’s “Love Letter,” it’s time to conclude our extended review with Chapter 9, the last chapter of Professor Cowen’s ode to big business, but before proceeding any further, let me say that Cowen has saved the best for last, for in many ways his concluding chapter is the most intriguing and fascinating chapter in a book full of intriguing and fascinating chapters!

To begin with, Professor Cowen’s concluding chapter poses a paradoxical query: If big business is so great in so many different ways, why do people “hate on” (to use the popular expression) business so much? Although Cowen offers an intriguing conjecture, alas, it is totally wrong! Specifically, Cowen speculates (p. 184, emphasis in the original) that “we anthropomorphize corporations–we imbue them with human qualities,” instead of seeing business firms for what they really are: cold, impersonal, legal abstractions with “a legally binding responsibility” to maximize their profits (p. 197).

I call bullshit (again)! Maybe this is how Professor Cowen himself sees corporations (though I highly doubt it), but I don’t know of a single person who “thinks of corporations as people” (p. 184) or who sees business firms as their “friends” (p. 198). People are not that stupid, and an economist no less should know better. Yes, I will concede that most people are most likely unaware that the managers of a corporation owe a common law “fiduciary duty” to the shareholders, but most people already know that most companies, especially the big business firms that Cowen is writing about in his book, are cold, impersonal, legal abstractions whose main corporate mission is to maximize profits. That’s precisely why “we” hate on big business firms, engage in shoplifting, lie on our resumes, etc.! Because large corporations are seen as cold and impersonal and abstract entities!

In closing, let me end my extended review on a positive note. Tyler Cowen concludes Ch. 9 by asking, what is the social responsibility of business? Is it to just make profits, or is it something more? Professor Cowen’s pithy riposte to this question is (pp. 205-206, emphasis in the original), the social responsibility of business is to come up with new and better conceptions of the social responsibility of business. At a surface level, this response is pretty lame, but at a deeper level, Cowen’s aphorism blew me away. Markets are not limited to products and services. Maybe markets also extend to ethical paradigms and moral doctrines. In addition to providing us a wide array of products and services, perhaps business firms also provide us differing degrees of ethical dogmas and moral menus!

In my view, ethics and morality are not just about choosing between good and bad, right and wrong. After all, often in life we must choose between two or more bads, two or more wrongs! Fundamentally, ethics and morality are about how we treat and interact with other people (and with nonhuman animals), and that is one way of understanding what business firms do. Business firms are an agglomeration of stakeholders, and most of these stakeholders are people: owners, managers, employees, contractors, customers, etc. Moreover, business firms employ a wide variety of methods of treating or interacting with these sundry stakeholders, and these different ways are, at bottom, guided by different visions of ethics and morality …

Professor Cowen (with apologies to DJ Khaled, pictured below), maybe it is time for you to “make” another book!