CONTENTS
Series Editors´ foreword
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part I The ethical trouble and its makers: a perennial plague
1 The institution and the conflicts behind it
Institutional history
Debtor protection and/or creditor protection?
Creditors' equality and collective proceedings
Part II Philosophical fundamentals of credit: should debts be paid?
2 Natural law, consequentialism and contractualism: theories of
promising and their shortfalls
3 In search of the ultimate obligation: why a metaethical affair?
4 Ethics founded on autonomy: a modest objectivist foundationalist
interpretation of Kant
Reviving the metaphysics of morals: a Kantian bridge to deontological
values
5 Autonomy and promissory obligations
Kant on promises
A theory of promissory autonomy
Should debts be paid?
Part III Ethical principle of insolvency: should debts always be paid?
6 Going broke, breaking promises
Forgiveness
Impossibility
Legalism
Utilitarianism
7 Deontological ethics and insolvency
Distributive justice
Autonomy and discharge
When is autonomy under threat?
8 What kind of discharge?
Piecemeal or one-off?
Non-contractual debts
Part IV In defence of dunning: a counterattack
9 Propping up civil liability: contract, breach of trust and tort
Legal and moral absolutism
Wasting other people´s money
Breach of trust
Tort
10 Punishment
Retributivism
Utilitarianism
Fraud
Recklessness
Negligence
Bad judgements and doing one´s best
Commercial risk calls for commercial judgement
Deterrence
Debtor's character and skills
Benefits from deterrence
Part V Applying the principles: a current affair
11 Bankruptcy law reform: an ethical perspective
Law reform inquiries in the United Kingdom and Australia
Conditional discharge
Retrospective incrimination
Disabilities
The consistency of creditors´ submissions
Cross-border insolvency
12 Gearing up, crashing loud: should high-flyers be punished for
insolvency?
Retribution for solvent high-flying
Returns from penalties
Insolvent extravagance
Ethics and self-interest
Debt and distributive justice
Parsimony vs leverage
Part VI The corporate veil: chador or gauze?
13 Corporate moral personhood
Milton Friedman: no corporate personhood
Peter French: full-fledged corporate personhood
Thomas Donaldson and Kenneth Goodpaster: stakeholder theory
Patricia Werhane: secondary agency
A new philosophy of the corporation
14 Moral responsibility for corporate debts
A moral pattern for the corporate veil
The corporation's moral responsibility for debt
Corporate governance: directors´, managers´ and shareholders´
moral responsibility
Our moral duty to pay the corporate creditors
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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