Joseph Heath's Morality, competition, and the firm: the market failures approach to business ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 424 pp.

Abstract

Review of Joseph Heath's Morality, competition, and the firm: the failures approach to business ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 424 pp.Anyone who has taught or taken a business ethics course will be familiar with the tired debate between shareholder theory and stakeholder theory. Shareholder (or stockholder) theory is almost always represented by a Milton Friedman opinion piece from a 1970 issue of New York Times Magazine that traditionally plays a role in the business ethics classroom comparable to that of the 'heel' in a professional wrestling match. It announces in its title the view it purports to defend: The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits (Friedman 1970). (Friedman's piece actually contains a variety of arguments that are difficult to reconcile with each other, which makes his ultimate views on the social responsibility of business both more nuanced and harder to pin down than the title suggests.) Swooping in to rescue business from Friedmanite moral laxity is usually an article expounding stakeholder theory by its founding father, R. Edward Freeman, who claims that the firm's managers should advance the interests of all of a firm's stakeholders, not merely those of shareholders, as an ultimate goal.Shareholder theory and stakeholder theory have both generated enormous literatures. When reading through the three decades' worth of contributions to this literature, one gets the sense that there is little left to say. shareholder-stakeholder debate has grown stale, but it never reached a particularly satisfying resolution. big questions that originally set off the debate remain open: What are the ethical responsibilities of the corporate manager? What factors must the corporate manager take into account, and how, in order to run the corporation ethically?Over the past decade, University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath has written a series of papers that put forward a new way of thinking about these central questions of business ethics. Heath's work features extensive use of economic theory. This is relatively common in business ethics. Indeed, as I have mentioned, one of the articles that gave rise to business ethics as an academic discipline was written by none other than Milton Friedman. But usually, economic approaches to business ethics are used to argue for extremely minimalist views about the ethical obligations that apply to corporate managers. What separates Heath's work from much of the previous business ethics literature is his extensive use of economic theory to justify a much more demanding set of ethical norms for business. Morality, competition, and the firm is a collection of essays on his novel alternative to stakeholder and shareholder theories, which he dubs the 'market failures' approach to business ethics. (Six of the chapters in the book develop and defend core elements of this approach, and the remaining eight chapters address related subjects relevant to the evaluation of markets, firms, and agents.)Heath's book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in new ways of thinking about the foundations of business ethics. But the themes in the book are also likely to be relevant to scholars working at the intersection between ethics, political philosophy, political economy, and economics more broadly. There is tension, to put it mildly, between mainstream views in political philosophy and mainstream views in economics. What is distinctive about Heath's work is that it links mainstream egalitarian views about justice in political philosophy to certain aspects of mainstream thinking about economics. Indeed, one of the most important chapters in the book, Efficiency as the implicit morality of the market (which I will briefly discuss later), gives an explicit and detailed account of how norms of economic efficiency are compatible with a commitment to a strict egalitarian theory of justice. …