PEA Soup

Price Gouging Redux

Apropos our earlier conversation about price gouging, I've written up a full length paper on the topic.  I got quite a bit out of the our discussion in the comments section even if, presumably, I didn't get what many of you wanted me to get out of it, viz., that price gouging is clearly immoral. :-)

You can access the paper here.

The States of Nature

After having contributed one whole substantive post to this blog, I’m now going to take selfish advantage of the power of this public forum to request our readers’ help with an issue I’ve been working on.  I have an idea that seems original to me, but want to be sure I’m not overlooking important work already developed in the literature.

By no means am I an expert on either Locke or Hobbes.  But my understanding is that the scholarly consensus is that these two philosophers offer us very different, and mutually incompatible understandings of the State of Nature (SoN).  I think the assumption of mutual incompatibility is mistaken, and that that this has important implications for contemporary moral and political debate.

How Useful is Moral Theory for Applied Ethics?

The following are some thoughts I've been mulling over in anticipation of a lecture I will be giving at CSU Long Beach's Applied Ethics Center next Thursday.   I've been thinking about these issues with regard to business ethics, but I think the concerns extend to most other areas of applied ethics as well.