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Title: Methodological Missteps: A Response to Brooks' "On Retribution"
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2006, 2006-05-14
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Thom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), ...
Show moreThom Brooks claims his paper has only one thesis—that, for epistemological reasons (in particular, requiring a “gold standard of desert”), “retributivism is impossible to enact as a practice”. I think the paper has at least two other theses as well, both unacknowledged and more or less independent of the first. One is that there is only one true retributivism (“pure retributivism” or “retributivism strictly speaking”). This claim seems to rest on an unjustified, and (I believe) unjustifiable, Platonism. The second unacknowledged thesis is that this one true retributivism suffers (and must suffer) from certain flaws, in particular: 1) moral rigorism (forbidding the criminal justice system to show mercy or to deviate in any other way from what the criminal deserves for his crime); 2) methodological individualism (requiring that desert be “a particular criminal’s desert” unaffected by “other factors, such as society’s equilibrium”); and 3) methodological absolutism (an inability to “choose punishments on account of how they might be related to each other and various crimes”). What I propose to do here is, first, briefly dispose of Brooks’ epistemological claim, then (at greater length) explain why retributivism is best thought of as a family of loosely related theories no one of which has the privilege of being “true retributivism” (even though some are certainly historically or conceptually closer to the core of retributive thinking than others) and, last, why, so understood, retributivism does not suffer from any of the three flaws Brooks claims true retributivism must suffer from.
Published as part of the Online Philosophy Conference, May 14, 2006.http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
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Title: Ethics After the Crash
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2005, 1987-12-10
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Though my title may suggest a concern with wrongdoing, my primary concern is good conduct, how to get people to do the right thing. I shall...
Show moreThough my title may suggest a concern with wrongdoing, my primary concern is good conduct, how to get people to do the right thing. I shall argue that you have a special role to play in the firms for which you work, a role that goes beyond financial analysis. Your training in ethics and your commitment to a standard higher than law, market, and morality, give you insight into certain hard choices that your employer or co-workers may lack. I also shall argue that you should go out of your way to make that insight available.
Paper presented at a meeting for the Society of Financial Analysts, Toronto, Canada, December 10, 1987.
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Title: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Workplace : A Philosophical Inquiry
Creator: Ladenson, Robert F.
Date: 2005, 1979-11-01
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Should the employees of a large private business be free to speak out on any subject without fear of dismissal or other sanctions even when...
Show moreShould the employees of a large private business be free to speak out on any subject without fear of dismissal or other sanctions even when they level harsh criticisms at their employers? In this paper I will argue that they should for reasons that closely parallel one of the fundamental bases for the principle of freedom of expression pertaining to the relation between individuals of the state. An important consequence of this view is that corporate employees should be free to speak without fear of sanction even when they make false allegations that lead to a decline in either productivity or profits.
Paper presented at the Conference on Business Ethics, Western Michigan University, November 1-2, 1979.
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Title: General Contractors : Some Ethical Problems
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2003, 1987-10
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: A series of small ethics case studies illustrating ethical dilemmas that general contractors in the construction industry are likely to face.

Title: Ownership of Computer Programs
Creator: Snapper, John W.
Date: 2006, 1981-12-09
Publisher: Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, IIT
Description: Discusses reasons for against copyrighting computer software programs. Reasons against include the potential for holding back scientific...
Show moreDiscusses reasons for against copyrighting computer software programs. Reasons against include the potential for holding back scientific discoveries. Though the labor that goes into creating computer programs does seem to create property rights, the principle of free thought seems to override this right. The author discusses some of the problems that exist in copyright, trade secret, and patent law and discusses why these laws should be changed to discourage secrecy so they do not interfere with free thought.
Presented at a meeting of the Collegiate Institute for Values and Science, University of Michigan, December 9, 1981
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Title: Machine Learning at the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Creator: Ellis, Robert, Kannan, Vinesh
Date: 2019-11-21
Description: Vinesh Kannan (CS '19) shares his experiences working as a...
Show moreVinesh Kannan (CS '19) shares his experiences working as a data science fellow at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Vinesh worked on the team that produces occupation and wage data used by policymakers, hiring staff, job seekers, and researchers across the country. He helped improve machine learning systems at the BLS: automatically identifying problematic training data and classifying rare jobs. Vinesh offers advice for students who may be interested in applying for the 2020 Civic Digital Fellowship, a program that recruits university students at all levels to spend a summer working on civic technology projects with various federal agencies.
Sponsorship: College of Science, Department of Computer Science, Department of Applied Mathematics, Machine Learning at IIT
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Title: Doing the Minimum as an Alternative to Exercising Reasonable Care in a Professional Role
Creator: Davis, Michael
Date: 2008, 2000
Description: In the second edition of ENGINEERING ETHICS:CASES AND CONCEPTS (Wadsworth, 2000), Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins distinguish three conceptions...
Show moreIn the second edition of ENGINEERING ETHICS:CASES AND CONCEPTS (Wadsworth, 2000), Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins distinguish three conceptions of professional responsibility: the "minimalist," the "reasonable care" and the "good works". Of the minimalist conception, they say (among other things) that it "holds that engineers have a duty to conform to the standard operating procedures of their profession and to fulfill the basic duties of their job defied by the terms of their employment." (p.101). In contrast, the reasonable care conception "moves beyond the minimalist view's concern to 'stay out of trouble'. (p.103) I will argue that this distinction is incoherent, that the "minimalist conception" (so defined) necessarily includes not only reasonable care but at least some of what Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins classify as "good works". I conclude with a suggestion for what they might say instead about a certain "minimalist attitude" one finds in business (though it truth, it should be called "sub-minimalist".
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (A.P.P.E.), Washington, DC, February 26, 2000.
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Title: Unscrambling Ethics for Managers
Creator: Weil, Vivian
Date: 2005, 1988-04-26
Description: Though people tend to wonder what there is to talk about when discussing business ethics, many conversations with business faculty at IIT have...
Show moreThough people tend to wonder what there is to talk about when discussing business ethics, many conversations with business faculty at IIT have lead the author to believe that ethics is large part of business practice. The author explores why business people can be timid when talking about ethics and discusses three major questions surrounding this topic. One, is it possible to teach ethics to people who are no longer children, two, how do you spot ethical problems, and 3, how can you approach ethical problems.
Talk delivered to Frontenac Company Seminar, Carefree Colorado, April 26, 1988.
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