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Peter A. French (born March 19, 1942) is an American philosopher and writer. He is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Arizona State University where he taught from 2000 until 2016. He previously was a professor at Northern Arizona University, University of Minnesota, Dalhousie University, Trinity University, and the University of South Florida.
French was born in 1942 in Newburgh, New York. His father was a Lutheran minister, his mother died of cancer when he was five years old.[ citation needed ] He was raised in New York and New England and earned a BA (with majors in philosophy and religious studies) from Gettysburg College (1963), an MA in philosophy from the University of Southern California (1964) and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Miami (1971). [1] He did post-doctoral work at Oxford University. [1]
French has been a professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University, the University of Minnesota, and a visiting professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. He has held the Exxon Distinguished Research Professorship in the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware, the Lennox Distinguished Professorship and Chair of Philosophy at Trinity University, and the Cole Chair in Ethics, Director of the Ethics Center, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is now Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Arizona State University where he served as the Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy, and was the founding Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics from 2000 to 2013. [1]
French is the author of twenty-one books on a wide range of topics in ethics, metaethics and applied ethics. A number of his papers are translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, French, Serbian, and Spanish. He was the editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy for 16 years (1988-2005) and general editor of the seven volume Issues in Contemporary Ethics series in the 1970s. [1] According to Zachary Goldberg, professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, French’s contributions to a wide spectrum of philosophical discussions made him an influential figure in the areas of moral responsibility and the agency of individuals and collectives. [2]
French is best known for his work on collective and corporate responsibility, especially his theory that corporations should be treated as members of the moral community and held morally responsible for their actions. [3] According to Professor Jeffrey Moriarty in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy French is “a seminal thinker on corporate moral agency.” He is responsible for developing the argument that firms have internal decision-making structures through which they act intentionally. [4] In "The Corporation as a Moral Person" French coined the term Corporate Internal Decision Structures (CID Structures) and defined a CID Structure as an organization of personnel for the exercise of a corporation’s power with respect to its ventures and interests. According to French a CID Structure produces decision-making, ratification, and action processes thereby forming a corporation into a functioning intentional morally responsible entity. He identified two sorts of rules crucial to CID Structures: organizational rules and policy/procedure rules. Organizational rules define levels of authority. Policies and procedures are recognition rules for identifying a decision or an act as having been made or performed for corporate reasons. [5] French expanded, defended, and modified this theory in publications in subsequent years. [6] According to Michael Kerlin in the Journal of Business Ethics French’s work on corporate ethics is “of intellectual sophistication with real world applications.” [7]
When the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Citizens United v. FEC , some philosophers and legal theorists wrote to French claiming his work had laid the groundwork for the treatment of corporations as persons and asked if he was willing to change his position on corporations and write an opinion piece for the New York Times. French declined and responded in a paper published in the festschrift honoring him that the Court’s majority opinion does not represent his position on corporate moral personhood. French noted that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his concurring opinion that corporate speech is “the speech of many individual Americans who have associated in a common cause, giving the leadership of the corporation the right to speak on their behalf.” [8] French argued that corporations do not speak for their employees, stockholders, or others affiliated with them. There is no necessary connection between what corporate speech expresses and the beliefs, desires, interests, plans, and goals of such individuals. Corporations speak qua corporate entities and the political speech of individuals is already protected. [9]
French distinguished two distinct types of collectivities in his discussions of collective responsibility: aggregates and conglomerates. According to Marian Smiley, French defines an aggregate collectivity as merely a group of people to whom collective responsibility cannot be ascribed. A conglomerate collectivity for French is an organization of individuals whose identity is not exhausted by the conjunction of the identities of the persons in the organization. Conglomerate collectivities can be held collectively responsible. [10] On French's account, responsibility may be distributable or non-distributable over the membership of a collectivity depending on the type.
French also coined the term “the responsibility barter game” to describe the common way people negotiate with each other to try to lessen or avoid personal responsibility for bad outcomes. According to Jane E. Jadlos writing in The Journal of Religion for French “responsibility is not a truth of some sort about the world, but a set of practices used to describe and understand individual and social behavior.” [11] French has also written on moral assessment, evil, loss of innocence, blame, shame, vengeance, moral originality, and moral belief/behavior discordance. [12] and he is a founding and senior editor of Midwest Studies in Philosophy , an annual series since 1976 in analytic philosophy. [13]
The first chapter of French’s War and Moral Dissonance is a memoir of his experiences teaching ethics to Navy and Marine chaplains during Iraq War. [14] Colonel James L. Cook of the United States Air Force Academy in a review of that book says that French discusses ad bellum and in bello ethical lapses in the war, but delves into the metaphysical issues others ignore and examines the war's aftermath. French's treatment is philosophically rigorous, but also poetically touching…[it] combines philosophical acumen with profound empathy even for a single victim of war.” [15]
In 2006 Gettysburg College awarded French a Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree for his work in philosophy and ethics. The citation read at the college’s 171st Commencement by then Gettysburg College President Katherine Will included the following: “Your book exploring the My Lai Massacre attracted national attention for its exploration of the question of whether army units or individual members of those units are responsible for military atrocities and is widely credited as a founding work of the field of applied ethics.” [16] In 2008 the American Philosophical Association dedicated an issue of its Newsletter on Philosophy and Law to French because of his “influence in applied ethics and having helped establish the field of applied ethics as a substantive area of research in the philosophy discipline.” [17] In 2014 the American Philosophical Association dedicated a Symposium Session on the Work of Peter French at its Central Division Meetings in Chicago.
Applied ethics refers to the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, the bioethics community is concerned with identifying the correct approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes questions regarding the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public or their loyalty to their employers.
In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology.
Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.
Harry Gordon Frankfurt was an American philosopher. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002. Frankfurt also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.
Kwame Gyekye was a Ghanaian philosopher, and an important figure in the development of modern African philosophy. Gyekye was an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Ghana, and a visiting professor of philosophy and African-American studies at Temple University. He is known for theorizing the concept of person-hood on the basis of Akan cultural paradigm in debate with Kwasi Wiredu, which is seen as one of the defining moments of modern African philosophy.
Collective responsibility, also known as collective guilt, refers to responsibilities of organizations, groups and societies. Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools, military units, prisons, psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.
Peter Guy Winch was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.
In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission in accordance with one's moral obligations. Deciding what counts as "morally obligatory" is a principal concern of ethics.
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.
John Martin Fischer is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and a leading contributor to the philosophy of free will and moral responsibility.
James Opie Urmson, was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy.
Geoffrey Scarre is a moral philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Durham.
Robert F. Almeder is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgia State University. He is known in particular for his work on the philosophy of science, and has also written on the philosophy of mind, epistemology and ethics. He is the author of 24 books, including The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (1980), Death and Personal Survival (1992), Harmless Naturalism: The Limits of Science and the Nature of Philosophy (1998), Human Happiness and Morality (2000), and Truth and Skepticism (2010).
Steven Frederic Sapontzis is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at California State University, East Bay who specializes in animal ethics, environmental ethics and meta-ethics.
Patricia Greenspan is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Greenspan works in analytic philosophy of action, and is known for work on rationality, morality, and emotion that helped to create a place for emotion in philosophy of action and ethics.
Moral blindness, also known as ethical blindness, is defined as a person's temporary inability to see the ethical aspect of a decision they are making. It is often caused by external factors due to which an individual is unable to see the immoral aspect of their behavior in that particular situation.
Christoph Lütge is a German philosopher and economist notable for his work on business ethics, AI ethics, experimental ethics and political philosophy. He is full professor of business ethics at the Technical University of Munich and director of its Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.
Herbert Morris (1928-2022) was an American philosopher, legal scholar, and literary critic, who spent his career at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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