Lunch and dinner invitations are, in the United States, a normal part of doing business. By extending such an invitation, you are then not gaining an unfair advantage over your competitors who (insofar as they are interested in doing business with the same company) will -- or at least can -- also extend such invitations. Thus, your payment of the meal is neither unfair to your competitors nor defrauding the shareholders/owners of the purchasing company because it does not disturb the purchasing manager's incentive to make the deal that is best for his company. By contrast, your payment of a 20% kickback will displace this incentive by inducing the purchasing manager to make a deal that is much inferior for his company. The kickback and the purchasing manager's acceptance of it therefore are unfair to your law-abiding competitors and constitute a defrauding of the shareholders/owners of the company represented by the purchasing manager.

Just to clarify terminology. I would understand an empirical theory of ethics as one that explains the activities of a group of ethicists. An empirical theory of descriptive ethics would seek to explain the activities of those who describe ethical beliefs and practices; and an empirical theory of normative ethics would seek to explain the activities of those who justify or challenge ethical beliefs and practices. An empirical theory of normative ethics would not itself seek to justify or challenge normative-ethical propositions. Leaving terminology aside, I think what you mean to ask is whether an empirical account of how human beings behave has normative implications. In response, I would certainly agree that it does not follow from the fact that human beings tend to behave in certain ways that they ought to do so. Still, I would not think that empirical knowledge about human beings is normatively irrelevant. Two examples. If a morality is too complicated for human beings to understand or to...

A society where this is the norm is not one in which the two sexes are equal. So, as a social norm, this division of gender roles is not compatible with the feminist belief in the equality of the sexes. But at the individual level the two are compatible. In a society in which the sexes are equal, there would be lots of women working while their male partners mind the kids. This is compatible with feminism, surely. Therefore, a feminism that believes in the equality of the sexes must then also find acceptable the mirror image: men working while their female partners look after the kids. If these two role divisions were roughly equally frequent, I think feminists should find no fault.

It is very good of you to pay attention to these costs borne by others -- most people don't. Given the amount involved ($120,000 per annum), I think you should make an effort to find out more. Your oncologist says that no generic drug "can be administered this way" -- well, is there a compelling reason why it should be so administered, or would you be equally well off with the generic product administered in some other way? It is quite possible that your oncologist makes a lot more money from giving you the expensive medication rather than the cheaper one, so explore the question on the internet and perhaps also ring Medicare to get their opinion. If we all pay attention in this way, then it will be much harder for pharmaceutical companies and medical providers to overcharge the system we all pay for. If the expensive drug you are taking really is the only way to manage the symptom in question, then I would expect this symptom to be serious enough to justify this lavish reimbursement. But perhaps...

It sounds like you are drawing a distinction here, but I am not sure that you are. Suppose you have the ability to intervene in a certain situation in a way that makes the outcome better. If you do not intervene, then the outcome will be X; if you do intervene, then the outcome will be X+. Suppose you decide not to intervene. Now we can say of you that you have allowed a bad thing (X) to come to pass; and we can also say of you that you have failed to make a good thing (X+) happen. Now you might save your distinction by defining some threshold such that, if X is below this threshold, then your non-intervention is allowing a bad thing to pass, and if X is at or above this threshold, then you are merely failing to make a good thing happen. But I don't see a good way of defining such a threshold and also no good reason to give it moral significance: Wherever the threshold is, why should it be unethical to allow a very small bad thing just below the threshold and not unethical to fail to make an...

Sure. There can be an empirical theory of how moral judgments and reasoning develop in children for example, as presented by Lawrence Kohlberg and his successors (including Carol Gilligan). And there can be an empirical theory of how -- in reponse to features of human psychology and of the human natural environment -- prevalent conceptions of morality evolve in societies or in the human species. Philosopher David Hume presents a fascinating empirical theory of the latter sort in Books II and III of his Treatise of Human Nature , somewhat recast in his later Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals . A different broadly empirical theory of this kind is offered by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals . Kohlberg's empirical theory was written with the intent to vindicate a certain universalistic style of moral reasoning, and Hume took his theory to vindicate the moral commonsense of his time. By contrast, Nietzsche wrote with deflationary intent: once we fully...

I am in full agreement with the precept that an accused person is to be presumed innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty. But this precept is not violated when your defense attorney declines your case or resigns from it. This is so because the presumption applies to the state and its agents and agencies. The precept does not forbid citizens to form the opinion that some accused person is guilty. Nor does it forbid citizens to act on such opinions. You are perfectly free, for example, to change your mind about buying Joe's used car or to warn your daughter against dating Joe, on the sole ground that you have just learned of a criminal case of fraud against Joe and of the evidence presented against him. I agree that an accused person is entitled to be represented by a qualified attorney. But again, this right is not violated when one attorney declines or resigns. Compare: your right to get married is not violated when the person you have chosen as your spouse declines -- or even...

Infinite numbers are not found in nature but rather constructed through mathematical axioms and reasoning. This is somewhat analogous to how we can also construct the natural numbers by starting from 1 and then adding 1 again and again. We start from a set of cardinality aleph-naught, for example the set of all natural numbers. (Cardinality is a measure of how many elements the set contains; and aleph-naught is countable infinity: the cardinality of any set whose members can be mapped one-to-one into the natural numbers.) We then construct a set of higher cardinality, for example the power set of the set with which we started. The power set of any set S is the set of all the subsets of S -- and Cantor showed that the powerset of the set of all natural numbers has higher cardinality than the set of all natural numbers (i.e., that the powerset of any countably infinite set is uncountably infinite). Sets of even higher cardinality can be constructed through replication of a simple principle, much like ever...

Your well-articulated question brings out something interesting about how we moderns think about morality. When we consider whether a certain piece of conduct is morally acceptable or not, we tend to examine what complaints other people might plausibly raise against this conduct and how the agent might possibly answer these complaints. This is pretty clearly the approach of your female friend in the case of the man on the bench. Your friend thinks along the following lines, I believe: if the man's behavior is to be wrong, then this must be in virtue of some complaint one might raise on behalf of the girl (who else?). Her complaint must be that he is looking at a part of her body that he should not be looking at. But this is not a convincing complaint, because it is as a consequence of her own conduct that this part of her body has appeared in his visual field. His sitting where he is sitting is entirely innocent, and the viewing opportunity arose (unexpectably for him) through her choosing to wear...

I read your queston as envisaging that the attorneys in question not merely contribute to a miscarriage of justice but do so knowingly -- or at least have strong reason to believe that the outcome they are achieving is the wrong outcome. I also read you as stipulating that the cases you have in mind happen within a largely just legal system. Within a seriously unjust legal system, an attorney who gets a guilty client (who really did make a joke about the dictator) acquitted has done a morally good deed, and similarly the attorney who gets one of the regime's torturers convicted for a crime he didn't commit. To be reasonably just, a criminal justice system must not merely punish the kinds of conduct that ought to be punished and permit the kinds of conduct that ought to be permitted. It must also have rules and procedures that are reasonably reliable in ensuring that guilty people get punished and especially that innocent people are acquitted. It is not consistent with such a system that...