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that I know that it is poisoned. However, the fundamental or basic
justification for my having that duty is the nature of the person to
whom the duty is owed . . . she is rational, or sentient, or [substitute
your preferred characterization of a moral patient]—and her nature is
sufficient to ground.
See Diane Jeske, “Special Obligations,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2014 edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/spr2014/entries/special-obligations/.
3. Moritz Kronenberg, Kant: Sein Leben und Seine Lehre (Munich:
C. H. Bedsche Buchverhandlung, 1904), 133.
4. An alternative way of reaching the same conclusion is presented
in Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western
Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Siedentop argues
against the conventional view that liberalism arose in opposition to estab-
lished religion and traces the origin of liberal conceptions of the individ-
ual to early religious thinkers.
5. Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican: Liberia Editrice
Vaticana, 2000), article 1, paragraph 6, line 357. This type of argument,
in its broadest terms, is called status theory. Philosopher Warren Quinn
summarizes this approach: “A person is constituted by his body and his
mind. They are parts or aspects of him. For that very reason, it is fitting
that he have primary say over what may be done to them—not because
such an arrangement best promotes overall human welfare, but because
any arrangement that denied him that say would be a grave indignity. In
giving him this authority, morality recognizes his existence as an individ-
ual with ends of his own—an independent being. Since that is what he
is, he deserves this recognition.” See Warren Quinn, Morality and Action
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170.
Many important thinkers who emphasize the centrality of human
rights have been atheists and agnostics, and they have other strong rea-
sons for their views. Some argue that human beings have rights because
we are rational, conscious beings. Libertarians start with the premise
that we essentially “own” our bodies and hence have rights to do what
we want with and through them. Others believe that individual rights
originate in a basic social contract that sets the terms for our political and
social life.
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165
In addition, the logic of consequences discussed in chapter 2 also
provides a strong rationale for rights. What would society be like if indi-
viduals did not have a sense of basic security about their lives and their pos-
sessions? The likely answer came from the seventeenth-century political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said we would then live in a horrific
state of nature, swept up in a “war of all against all.” Hobbes used a phrase
of the ancient Romans—”homo homini lupus”—to describe life without
basic security: human beings would prey on each other like wolves. To
avoid this, humans create social and political institutions. These institutions
stipulate rights and duties, and they serve as bulwarks against barbarity.
6. Cicero, On Duties (Salt Lake City, Utah: Stonewell Press, 2013).
7. This quotation appears in Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 211. Hadot argues that stoicism is the ultimate origin of the
Western emphasis on the absolute value of the human person.
8. This perspective isn’t restricted to contemporary evolutionary
theorists. Adam Smith, writing long before Charles Darwin, observed
that “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some
principles in his nature which interested him in the fortune of others and
render their happiness necessary to him, so he derives nothing from it
except the pleasure of seeing it . . . by the imagination we place ourselves
in his situation . . . we in turn as it were, into his body and become in
some measure the same person with him.” See Adam Smith, The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 2.
9. Stanford University historian Lynn Hunt asks how human rights
became “self-evident truths” during the late 1700s and early 1800s. This was
a remarkable development because slaveholding, torture, and the widespread
subjugation of women had been accepted facts of everyday life. So what
changed? Why did these practices begin to recede? After all, for centuries
on end, they seemed to be permanent features of human existence.
Hunt’s answer is the rise of popular media and mass media.
Inexpensive novels and newspapers enabled more and more people in
Europe and the nascent United States to learn—in compelling physical,
psychological, and emotional detail—about the experiences of victims
of oppression. People who had never been tortured or enslaved or suf-
fered in extreme poverty read vivid direct accounts of how other people
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166
experienced these conditions. This understanding triggered empathy.
Readers intuited, emotionally rather than intellectually, that something
was profoundly wrong about these practices. It was a short step from
thinking these practices would be wrong for people like themselves
to thinking they were wrong for everyone. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing
Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
2007).
10. The British philosopher Bernard Williams coined this phrase
to summarize a basic critique of highly rationalistic approaches to eth-
ical decisions. See Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 17–18.
11. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 52.
12. This account of the Tysabri problem is based primarily on Joshua
D. Margolis and Thomas J. DeLong, “Antegren: A Beacon of Hope,”
Case no. 9-408-025 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2007).
13. Leif Wenar, “Rights,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2011 edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2011/entries/rights/. A parallel problem appears in national consti-
tutions. Most acknowledge some basic rights, but the range runs from
New Zealand, whose constitution provides for no fundamental rights, to
Bolivia’s, which specifies eighty-eight basic rights. For a detailed compar-
ison of political constitutions, see the Comparative Constitutions project
at http://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/ccp-rankings/.
14. John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to
Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping
Behavior,” Journal of Personality Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108.
15. Gerald E. Myers, William James (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1986), 31.
16. For an extended discussion of the argument made in the two
preceding paragraphs—that managers in the United States do not have
and should not have a legal duty to maximize shareholder value—
see, for example, Bruce Hay, Robert Stavins, and Richard Vietor,
eds., Environmental Protection and the Social Responsibility of Firms
(Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2005), 13–76; and
Lynn Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First
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167
Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public (San Francisco: Berrett-
Koehler Publishers, 2012).
17. A leading legal scholar wrote in 2013:
The flexible legal framework that enables the founding, growth,
and organizational change of business firms allows for a wide range
of choices of values that firms may embrace, as well as a wide range
of choice about what specific goods and services are produced and
how they are produced and sold. Nothing in the basic legal frame-
work of business firms mandates a particular orientation to making
money over all other possible values. Instead, the decentralized legal
framework that exists in most parts of the world allows for a num-
ber of different kinds of firms to develop with mixtures of profit and
nonprofit value orientation.
See Eric Orts, Business Persons: Legal Theory of the Firm (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 221.
18. An elaboration of this argument, as well as a description of
the context of Tim Cook’s comments, is Steve Denning, “Why Tim
Cook Doesn’t Care About ‘The Bloody ROI,’” Forbes.com, March
7, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/
why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/.
19. American Law Institute, Corporate Governance: Analysis and
Recommendations 2.01, Reporter’s Note 29, 2.01(b)(2)-(3) and Comment d.
20. The classic work on stakeholder analysis is R. Edward Freeman,
Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Boston: Pittman, 1984). Its
ideas significantly influenced subsequent work in a wide range of fields,
such as project management, conflict resolution, business- government
relations, and strategic planning. Freeman’s book was updated in 2013;
see R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
21. Captain Renault to Rick, Casablanca, Julius & Philip Epstein,
screenwriters (Hal B. Wallis Production, 1942).
22. See Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: Free
Press, 2011).
23. Looking even more broadly, the stakeholder view may reflect a
recent, now bygone era in American capitalism—a time of stability when
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168
companies had long-term shareholders, a limited number of domestic
competitors, a few government regulators, and stable employees repre-
sented by a union. These parties could be viewed benignly as important
partners working together to meet the ongoing needs of their societies or
as an “iron triangle” that collaborated on narrow shared interests. Both
perspectives have important elements of truth, but they may also reflect an
era that is now ending. An important example of the iron triangle view
is Gordon Adams, The Politics of Defense Contracting: The Iron Triangle
(New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1981). More recently, scholars
have argued for a more complex view of American business-government
relationships, ranging from situations in which industries may have “cap-
tured” their government regulators to valuable, exemplary relationships
that served the public interest. See David Carpenter and David Moss,
Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit
It (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
24. Burke wrote, referring to the French revolutionaries of the late
eighteenth century, “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.
All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imag-
ination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as neces-
sary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to
dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd,
and antiquated fashion.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790; London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1872), 75. The
concept of moral imagination is multifaceted, and a conceptual and his-
torical overview is David Bromwich, Moral Imagination (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 3–40.
25. Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991), 90.
26. A similar analysis of basic rights and duties—described as “core
values” reflecting a global “overlapping consensus” and accompanied
by detailed practical guidance for business managers—is Thomas
Donaldson, “Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home,” Harvard
Business Review, September–October 1996, https://hbr.org/1996/09/
values-in-tension-ethics-away-from-home.
27. Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments before The
Wealth of Nations, and he returned to it in the years before his death.
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