Edmund F Byrne

• J.D., Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

A drone industry has emerged in the US, initially funded almost exclusively for military applications. There are now also other uses both governmental and commercial (in the US and abroad). Many military drones are still being made, however, especially for surveillance and targeted killings. Regarding the latter, this essay calls into question thei...

This book is a personal account by one man who left the priesthood and transitioned into a successful career as an academic. It is no fairy tale, however, as it details the problems he encountered first in the religious and then in the secular world as he grew to become a lover and a parent. Enhancing the story are a collection of poems by the auth...

Many scholars and activists favor banning illicit businesses, especially given that such businesses constitute a large part of the global economy. But these businesses are commonly operated as if they are subject only to the ethical norms their management chooses to recognize, and as a result they sometimes harm innocent people. This can happen in...

Abstract Some progress has been made in recent decades to articulate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and, more recently, to associate CSR with international enforcement of human rights. This progress continues to be hampered, however, by the ability of a multinational corporation (MNC) that violates human rights not only to shift liability fr...

Abstract Business ethicists should examine ethical issues that impinge on the perimeters of their specialized studies (Byrne 2011). This article addresses one peripheral issue that cries out for such consideration: the international resource privilege (IRP). After explaining briefly what the IRP involves I argue that it is unethical and should not...

Business ethics should include illicit businesses as targets of investigation. For, though such businesses violate human rights they have been largely ignored by business ethicists. It is time to surmount this indifference in view of recent international efforts to define illicit businesses for regulatory purposes. Standing in the way, however, is...

Business ethicists should examine not only business practices but whether a particular type of business is even prima facie ethical. To illustrate how this might be done I here examine the contemporary U.S. defense industry. In the past the U.S. military has engaged in missions that arguably satisfied the just war self-defense rationale, thereby im...

Work, including work done for a transnational corporation, is done in community. So corporate decisions should be not only corporate and/or governmental but also community-based. But increasingly corporations exercise de facto sovereignty. To counter this state of affairs theorists – especially those who favor social contract theory – need to take...

Scholarly critiques of the just war tradition have grown in number and sophistication in recent years to the point that available publications now provide the basis for a more philosophically challenging Peace Studies course. Focusing on just a few works published in the past several years, this review explores how professional philosophers are rec...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a focal point for research aimed at extending business ethics to extra-corporate issues; and as a result many companies now seek to at least appear dedicated to one or another version of CSR. This has not affected the arms industry, however. For, this industry has not been discussed in CSR literature...

The humanities have not enjoyed preeminence in academe since the Scientific Revolution marginalized the old trivium. But they long continued to play a subordinate educational role by helping constitute the distinguishing culture of the elite. Now even this subordinate role is becoming expendable as devotees of the profit motive seek to reduce cultu...

Just war theory needs to become a realtime critique of government war propaganda in order to facilitate peace advocacy ante bellum. This involves countering asserted justificatory reasons with demonstrable facts that reveal other motives, thereby yielding reflective understanding which can be collectivized via electronic media. As a case in point,...

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.4 (2004) 333-335 This fine work compares the political philosophies of four German philosophers whose collective careers spanned the first century after the American and French revolutions: Kant (1764-1802), Fichte (1762-1814), Hegel (1770-1831), and Marx (1818-1883). Anyone familiar with these philosophers'...

What sort of connection is there between business ethics and philosophy? The answer given here: a weak one, but it may be getting stronger. Comparatively few business ethics articles are structurally dependent on mainstream academic philosophy or on such sub-specialities thereof as normative ethics, moral theory, and social and political philosophy...

The journalistic device of applying military imagery to describe business strategies is appropriate insofar as businesses implicitly base their strategies on a military model whose origins lie in Social Darwinism. What this involves is an unexamined understanding that any means may be adopted to achieve corporate objectives. Recent workforce reduct...

This paper proposes a way to undercut anarchist objections to taxation without endorsing an authoritarian justification of government coercion. The argument involves public goods, as understood by economists and others. But I do not analyse options of autonomous prisoners and the like; for, however useful otherwise, these abstractions underestimate...

Ethical questions regarding access to and use of electronically generated data are (if asked) commonly resolved by distinguishing in Lockean fashion between raw (unworked) and refined (worked) data. The former is thought to belong to no one, the latter to the collector and those to whom the collector grants access. Comparative power separates free...

There is a kind of gut-level feeling, especially among those most immediately affected, that a plant closing or any other traumatic work-force restructuring must be unjust. But the instincts of corporate decisionmakers and their libertarian supporters engender no such feeling. As a result, at least in a capitalist society, anyone who doubts the lic...

John Dewey may prove to have been one of America’s most important philosophers of technology. Like Thorstein Veblen, however, Dewey took technology to encompass all applications of scientific method to the solution of human problems. Thus his ‘instrumentalist’ approach to problem-solving included, indeed came to focus on, social organization as a s...

The philosophical study of technology has acquired only recently a voice in academic conversation. This situation is due, in part, to the fact that technology obviously impacts on "the real world," whereas the favored stereotype of philosophy allegedly does not. Furthermore, in some circles it was assumed that philosophy ought not impinge on the wo...

American business's fascination with both laborsaving devices and low wage environments is causing not only structural unemployment and dissipation of the nation's industrial base but also the deterioration of abandoned host communities. According to individualist understandings of the right of private property, this deterioration is beyond sanctio...

A complete library of writings on the interface between work and technology would include everything from Aristotle’s reflections in the Nichomachean Ethics about machine replacements for slaves up to the latest rationale for automation. The task of producing a definitive catalogue for that library would be not Herculean but Procrustean in view of...

It is unquestionably people who decide to develop and introduce new technologies. But technology advances so rapidly now that it is no longer apparent to the uninvolved observer that human beings are actually still in control of it. Technology, it is said, is on a “runaway” course; it is becoming “autonomous” of human agency. Taken literally, this...

Die Industriegesellschaften erleben eine rasante Entwicklung, die allgemein als mikroelektronische Revolution bezeichnet wird und deren wichtigste Folgewirkung wohl das Aussterben herkömmlicher Berufe und Qualifikationen sein könnte. Sicher werden an anderer Stelle neue Arbeitsplätze beziehungsweise Qualifikationen entstehen, doch nicht in entsprec...

A description of how microelectronics and robotics are tending to increase unemployment, followed by comparisons between the social policies of Western European countries and the United States with regard to this problem. A conclusion points out the need for a social philosophy of technology that acknowledges workers’ rights.

The U.S. doctrine of employment-at-will, modified legislatively for protected groups, is being less harshly applied to managerial personnel. Comparable compensation is not otherwise available in the U.S. to workers displaced by technology. Nine pairs of arguments are presented to show how fundamentally management and labor disagree about a company'...

Recently, while I was in Dijon, France, I happened to be listening to BBC on the radio, and heard a Yorkshire consumer affairs official complaining that the law gave him power only to require that “push-chairs” (baby carriages, or prams) be stable and have reliable brakes, but not to require that their handles not come off. Reacting to an incident...

Viele Menschen überall in der Welt, besonders die Intellektuellen, die sich über die möglichen Gefahren einer ungeregelten Technikentwicklung Gedanken machen, gehen stillschweigend davon aus, daß staatliche Regelungen hier eine zuverlässige Abhilfe schaffen würden. So hat zum Beispiel Victor Ferkiss 1969 versucht, die Merkmale des „technologischen...