The for-profit corporation, considered as an ethical agent, should define its mission in a way that incorporates the positive good of all stakeholders, and focus primarily on achieving that mission by following through on the teamwork and contractual and extracontractual commitments that make that achievement sustainable over time.

Elizabeth Anderson, photo credit David Paterson

Elizabeth Anderson

University of Michigan


Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1987 and previously taught at Swarthmore College.  She is a Guggenheim Fellow, an ACLS Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association.  She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard UP, 1993), The Imperative of Integration (Princeton UP, 2010), and over 60 articles in journals of philosophy, law, and economics.  She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.  She has written extensively on the interaction of facts and values in social science research, and on the intersection of democratic theory and social epistemology. She has also written extensively on affirmative action and racial integration, antidiscrimination law (including the law on sexual harassment), and the ethical limitations of the market.  Her current project is a history of egalitarianism from the Levellers to the present, with a special focus on the organization of the workplace and labor relations, markets and contracts.