This chapter addresses central aspects of Kant’s late engagement with the internal obstacle to the realisation of the highest good, the inadequacy of the human will. It argues that his idea of a moral ‘revolution’, whereby the good disposition of a human fallen into evil is restored to its original power, involves an account of moral progress that produces an irresolvable tension: in necessitating an appeal to a doctrine of grace, it in fact reintroduces the paradox of Kantian theodicy. However, Kant’s account also points the way beyond the paradox, opening up a second path towards implicating the will in its concrete phenomenal environment. The possibility Kant brings into view is that neither whether an agent has adopted an end nor what that adoption commits them to is ascertainable independently of the pursuit of the end itself. What prevents Kant from taking this path is his enduring understanding of the very nature of moral constraint. That understanding, however, which also underlies his introduction of radical evil, arguably reflects a misguided conflation, between his core thesis about the logic of autonomy and a strictly independent metaphysics of the human person.

This chapter begins by examining the emergence of Kant’s conception of the highest good in his pre-critical engagement with Stoicism and Epicureanism. His critiques of these schools and concomitant endorsement of Christianity anticipate both his later notion of heteronomy and an enduring commitment to the constitutive inadequacy of the human or finite will. The chapter then turns to explaining the nature of Kantian theodicy as an attempt, undertaken solely from the perspective of the autonomous subject, to show that and not just how rational criteria are instantiated. Since the content of Kantian theodicy is the idea of the highest good, we need to understand both why Kant thinks we need to hope for its realisation and the nature of this need, especially given his contention that the very reality of the moral law depends upon the possibility of the highest good. Seeing how the need for the highest good arises from the condition of finite autonomous beings allows us to understand the existential motivation behind Kantian theodicy. But it also alow us to identify a first path opened up, but not taken, by Kant towards rendering the content and possibility of autonomy dependent on the actual conditions of its development and exercise.

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s thinking about theodicy and explains the fundamental shifts in his attitude towards the project. It begins by examining his pre-critical sketch for a theodicy that remains firmly within the Leibnizian mould while repairing its structural inconsistencies and gaps. At the heart of his reparative measures is a different conception of divine freedom, one that Kant will retain throughout his critical period. The chapter ends with a consideration of his late essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy of 1791, in which he rejects the entire tradition of rationalist theodicy, whilst still maintaining the importance of an ‘authentic’ alternative. The basis of his rejection of previous theodicies is moral: the very pursuit of such a theodicy involves sacrificing individual freedom and rejecting an autonomous stance. Accordingly, the central sections of the chapter explain Kant’s critical concept of autonomy and how the theory of normativity it entails is fundamentally incompatible with a rationalist conception of value.

Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

The authors discuss haunting aspects resulting from a request for ethics consultation to support surrogate decision-maker authorization of long-acting reversible contraception in an individual with disabilities. The authors highlight the ethical tension between procreative freedom and equitable access to contraception, particularly noting ableism underlying each side of the argument. Bringing in prior case law, the authors favor a least-restrictive approach to contraception to best preserve the individual’s reproductive rights.

The narrative of the chapter explores haunting aspects of a patient’s inability to participate in capacity assessment due to communication challenges and generalized weakness. Through relying on prior wishes and historical context provided by the surrogate decision-maker, the ethical analysis presented by the authors demonstrates expressed concern with the surrogate decision-maker’s request for long-acting reversible contraception. As the consultation progresses to the patient’s assent to an informal arrangement of supported decision-making, each author shares their professional reflections on issues including equity, diversity and inclusion with a keen focus on ableism in the care of individuals with disabilities. While it may be legally permissible as well as ethically supportable to permit for surrogate decision-maker authorization of long-acting reversible contraception through supported decision-making, the authors grapple with whether the decision honored the patient’s values.

An ethics consultation case is presented in which a hospice patient wished to deactivate his Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Device (CIED), specifically an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, at the end of life to prevent the prolongation of the dying. The consultants developed an ethical analysis supporting the deactivation of the pacemaker based on authoritative literature and moral reasoning. The consultants’ recommendations to deactivate the pacemaker were ultimately rejected by the medical team based on an alternative assessment which concluded the patient is suicidal, doubts based on the consultants not being physicians, and the healthcare professionals’ sense that deactivating a pacemaker is different from withdrawing other forms of life-sustaining treatment at the end of life. Professional reflections by the consultants and lessons learned are discussed.

This chapter advances the argument that jurisdictional arbitrage is not merely a tactic of tax or liability avoidance, but a distinct form of power – rooted in autonomy, control, and legal engineering – that enables CCMCEs to reshape their operating environments. Drawing on insights from corporate strategy, international political economy, and the CORPLINK project, it reframes arbitrage as a modality of power akin to the creation of a ‘hidden empire’. Through the modular structure of the CCMCEs, MNCs exploit legal and jurisdictional fragmentation to escape regulatory constraints, minimize costs, and amplify market valuation. This structural agility insulates them from state oversight, enabling them to strategically socialize costs and privatize gains. Unlike traditional theories that depict corporate power as relational or behavioural, the chapter argues for a third dimension: power as autonomy – the ability to opt out of constraints by rearranging legal structures. This form of rule-based transgression is monopolized by a global elite of corporations, investors, and advisory firms who exploit regulatory differences not by violating rules but by mastering them. Jurisdictional arbitrage, then, is a primary mechanism of modern corporate power and a central driver of global inequality.

Clinical ethics prides itself on communication, collaboration, interdisciplinary cooperation and mediation. But what happens when all those skills and efforts fail? This chapter describes a difficult situation fraught with clinical uncertainty and complicated by an unbridgeable cultural divide that left the clinical parties feeling as if they failed the patient. This case demonstrates that sometimes there is no real closure, no understanding, and no sense of having been helpful. These are the kinds of cases that haunt us.

Chapter 6 will compare how shareholders in the three countries monitor management by voice from the perspective of the tradeoff between management autonomy and monitoring management. Japanese and Chinese corporate laws give shareholders wider decision-making power compared to the US corporate law. On the other hand, Japanese and Chinese corporate laws provide an ambiguous fiduciary duty of directors, which allows management to balance stakeholder interests, while the US law provides a strict fiduciary duty to shareholders. The three countries share similar disclosure regulations, both by corporate law and securities regulation. Institutionalization of stock ownership structure strengthened shareholder activism since the 1990s in the United States, and now Japan is catching up. In China, shareholder activism is historically nearly absent; however, the China Securities Investor Service Center (ISC) has raised a substantial number of shareholder activism cases and has become influential in Chinese corporate governance.

Machine-readable humanity is an evocative idea, and it is this idea which Hanley et al. spell out and critically discuss in their contribution. They are interested in exploring the technological as well as the moral side of the meaning of machine-readability. They start by differentiating between various ways to collect (and read) data and to develop classification schemes. They argue that traditional top-down data collection (first the pegs and then the collection according to the pegs) is less efficient than more recent machine readability, which is dynamic, because of the successive advances of data and predictive analytics (“big data”), machine learning, deep learning, and AI. Discussing the advantages as well as the dangers of this new way to read humans, they conclude that we should be especially cautious vis-à-vis the growing field of digital biomarkers since in the end they could not only endanger privacy and entrench biases, but also obliterate our autonomy. Seen in this light, apps (like AdNauseam) that restrict data collection as a form of protest against behavioral profiling also constitute resistance to the inexorable transformation of humanity into a standing reserve: humans on standby, to be immediately at hand for consumption by digital machines.

Chapter 6 uses this new understanding of chilling effects to elaborate the dangers of chilling effects both on an individual level and societal scale. The chapter elaborates the two dimensions of chilling effects – repressive and productive. The former speaks to how chilling effects today can repress speech and other rights on a mass scale; the latter speaks to how chilling effects are conforming effects, and thus produce conforming and compliant behavior on a societal scale, which has critical implications for individual identity, development, autonomy, and equality, but is also corrosive to democracy and democratic societies.