Joseph Heath Research Articles

Public Provision in Democratic Societies

If we hope to see values of equality and democracy embodied in our societies’ institutions, then we have a range of good reasons to favor expansive public provision of goods and services, and to oppose many forms of privatization. While Joseph Heath is right to argue that there are at least some forms of ‘anodyne privatization’, and while he is also right to argue for a more nuanced philosophical debate about the different dimensions of choice between forms of public and private provision, Heath fails to register various regards in which private provision can undermine these central public values. We often have strong egalitarian and democratic reasons to protect zones of decommodification; to resist the imposition of user-charges; and to favor insourcing and direct public procurement over various forms of outsourcing of public services. Public libraries provide a totemic illustration of some of the deep virtues of collective public provision in democratic societies. Overall, our reasons to reject privatization are stronger and more diverse than theorists such as Heath might have supposed.

Privatization, Structural Dependence, and the Problem of Legitimacy

How should a normative evaluation of the merits and demerits of privatization proceed? In response to Joseph Heath’s approach to this question, I first argue that the difference between core and economic functions is not as relevant to establish the limits of privatization, as Heath suggests. I claim, second, that Heath problematically neglects the structural and aggregative effects of privatization. An instance of privatization that, if analyzed in isolation, is anodyne may no longer be so when seen as a further contribution to an already expansive process of privatization. Finally, I argue that Heath fails to consider the risks that pervasive privatization poses in terms of democratic legitimacy, by giving rise to a situation where, on the one hand, citizens are dominated by a privatized state and, on the other hand, the state itself is dominated by private actors.

Ethics for Capitalists: A Systematic Approach to Business Ethics, Competition, and Market Failure, by Joseph Heath. Altona, MB: FriesenPress, 2023. 276 pp.

Ethics for Capitalists: A Systematic Approach to Business Ethics, Competition, and Market Failure, by Joseph Heath. Altona, MB: FriesenPress, 2023. 276 pp.

The Problem with the Anthropocene: Kainos, Not Anthropos

The Problem with the Anthropocene: <i>Kainos</i>, Not <i>Anthropos</i>

The desirability of institutionalized rivalry

ABSTRACT Many social institutions function with rivalry, whether it is the legal adversarial system, the electoral system, competitive sports or the market. The literature on adversarial ethics (with authors such as Arthur Applbaum, David Luban and Joseph Heath) attempts to clarify what is a good behavior in these situations, but this work does not examine if institutionalized rivalry is desirable given its good and bad aspects. According to Monroe Freedman, for instance, the confrontation between lawyers in a trial may help discover important facts about a case. Most economists believe that competition in the market increases economic efficiency. But institutionalized rivalry can also lead to morally wrong acts such as violence, deception or coercion. The aim of this article is to identify the conditions under which rivalry may be more or less desirable in our social arrangements. First, it will be necessary to clarify what is institutionalized rivalry and what is an adversarial scheme. Then, this article will explain what are the generic advantages and problems of adversarial schemes. Finally, this analysis will be used to outline a series of minimal requirements to consider that an adversarial scheme is desirable.

What’s the Point of Efficiency? On Heath’s Market Failures Approach

This article reviews and criticizes Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Our criticism is organized into three sections. First, we argue that, even under the ideal assumptions of perfect competition, when markets generate Pareto-efficient distributions, Heath’s approach does not rule out significant harms. Second, we show that, under nonideal conditions, the MFA is either too demanding, if efficiency is to be attained, or not sufficiently demanding, if the goal of Pareto efficiency is abandoned. Finally, we argue that Heath’s appeal to regulations and specific moral requirements as a remedy for market failures is unlikely to safeguard efficiency and exposes a number of general worries regarding the moral force of the MFA. We end this article with a constructive suggestion on how to adjust the MFA to avoid these problems while preserving its contractualist and Paretian spirit.

Joseph Heath, Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Joseph Heath, Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Managerial Discretion, Market Failure and Democracy

Managers often have discretion in interpreting their ethical requirements, and they should seek democratic guidance in doing so. The undemocratic nature of managerial ethical discretion is shown to be a recurring problem in business ethics. Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) is introduced as a theory better positioned to deal with this problem than other views. However, due to epistemic uncertainty and conceptual indeterminacy, the MFA is shown to allow a much wider range of managerial discretion than initially appears. The paper explores how this range can be narrowed down with democratic input, comparing models based on formal state institutions and on the informal public sphere. A case study from the pharmaceutical industry illustrates the merits of the informal public sphere approach.

Joseph Heath: Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Joseph Heath: Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Approaches to the study of the phenomenon of counterculture: the attempt of typology

In the article the author analyzes the directions of studying the phenomenon of counterculture in Western science. An attempt is also made to typologize these scientific approaches. The term is first encountered in the work of Talcott Parsons «Social System» in 1951. The term is used in the context of a discussion on the ideology of subculture movements and deviant groups. His term sounds like «counter-culture». In a somewhat modified writing, with an expanded description of the term, it is used by American sociologist J. Milton Jinger in 1960. His term «contraculture» in English first encountered in 1960. The term gained its scientific and public popularity in 1969 after Theodore Roszak`s publication “The Making of a Counter Culture”. He used this term to describe countercultural, subcultural movements in the United States of the 1960s, including the hippies, the «New Left». The term also was related to their critical program, as well as to characterizing an alternative society, whose creation was propagated, and partly carried out by the representatives of the movements of the sixties. This approach characterizes counterculture in a narrow sense. In the broad sense, it does not connected to a concrete time period and defines a set of ideas, values, world outlook, which oppose the official basic culture. After investigating the views of scholars on counterculture, since the 1970s the author identifies three different directions, divided by the criterion of relation to counterculture. Among them are apologetic, critical and balanced approaches. To the apologetic approach belongs the work of researchers, which is characterized by a clearly positive attitude to counterculture, social and political aspects of its activities. Often there are some critical remarks but they do not change the general picture of the author’s commitment to the phenomenon. Critical approach include researchers who consider counterculture as a negative social phenomenon and practice. The most radical representatives include Daniel Bell, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter and others. Balanced approach combines the work of many researchers, which combines efforts to investigate counterculture as an objective phenomenon, while taking into account its weaknesses and strengths. At the same time, the authors recognize the importance of existence of the phenomenon, its influence on socio-cultural and political processes. Criticism relates to radical cultural practices, political extremism and excessive interest in psychedelics among representatives of counterculture. The approaches of researchers to this direction vary, from the «pioneer» of research of the phenomenon J. Milton Jinger, and to the researchers who tried to conduct research directly inside of the countercultural movement, in particular Kenneth Keniston, and others.

Corporate responsibility and the plurality of market aims

AbstractA number of recent authors, most notably Joseph Heath, have persausively defended a market‐centered account of corporate responsibility that grounds standards of business conduct upon the normative presuppositions of the market. They have us focus on two important items: first, the value of welfare, or Pareto efficient outcomes, which underwrites the legitimacy of market arrangements; and second, the behavioral requirements needed to assure that corporations conduct business in a manner consistent with this value. This article critically examines the aspirations of this literature by embracing its basic method but questioning how well it understands the aim of the market. It puts forth a limited case for corporate responsibility anchored in other dimensions of the public good, distinct from the value of efficiency, and argues that a plausible understanding of corporate responsibility arises from the notion that market arrangements are sites of delegated social authority to provision other aspects of the common good.

On the Origin, Content, and Relevance of the Market Failures Approach

The view of business ethics that Christopher McMahon calls the “implicit morality of the market” and Joseph Heath calls the “market failures approach” has received a significant amount of recent attention. The idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the “point” of market activity, and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized. While this view has been much-discussed, it is still not well-understood. This paper seeks to remedy this problem. I begin by showing, against some recent commentators, that McMahon’s view and Heath’s view are fundamentally the same. Second, I clarify the sense of “efficiency” at work in the market failures approach. Finally, I argue that, in its current form, this view has little relevance to the real world of business. I conclude by sketching two ways of modifying it to fit our world.

Is the Market Wage the Just Wage?

Do markets generate a “just” wage? The answer to this question will depend upon the particular theory of the market that the political economist employs. When comparing actual labor markets with the neoclassical theory of competitive equilibrium as its normative benchmark, Joseph Heath (2018) argues that factor pricing is orthogonal to normative issues such as distributive justice. We argue that Heath’s conclusion, though not invalid, follows from a similar normative benchmark of equilibrium, one that evaluates factor pricing without taking into account the institutional conditions within which factor prices emerge. Though indeed classical political economists and early neoclassical economists failed to deliver an explicit theory of distributive justice, what Heath overlooks is that implicit to their understanding of the market process was an institutional theory of distributive justice.

The Domain of Desert Principles for Taxation

Joseph Heath (2018) makes a strong case that the principles of fairness or desert that arise in social interactions have at best a loose connection to economic outcomes in decentralized markets. However, there is evidence that when people are given the opportunity—say, in collective bargaining situations—they will try to alter these market outcomes in favor of their own perceptions of justice, fairness, or desert. Taxation is an important domain in which the public can alter market outcomes. This paper explores to what extent desert can be used as a principle of tax policy. It analyzes tax policies that can be used to implement both individualized and categorical assessments of desert. I argue that there might be some room for tax policy at the broad, categorical level. Finally, using the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 as a case study, I explore whether merit or other bases for desert were embedded in the recent legislation. While there was evidence of attempts to implement ideas based on principles of deservingness in the legislation, they were not of the type necessary to sustain a merit-based society.

A note on discourse ethics and naturalized social contracts

Beginning the first section with Joseph Heath’s criticism on Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, the author clarifies the structure of deontological ethics in its Kantian version and discourse ethics version. He argues that if we are not satisfied with a transcendental inference, we should take a naturalistic approach to the problem of ethics and norms. In the second section, he appreciates the game theoretic approach to the problematic social contract by Brian Skyrms and Kenneth Binmore. As a result of the historical evolution of a society, a naturalistic version of ethics (e.g., Binmore’s empathy equilibrium) comes to reflect historical heritage and then the dominant social structure. In the third section, he offers a scheme of the dual structure of the normative and real dimensions to grasp the problematic areas of the ethical problem. He explains these areas and maintains that a dual-dimension scheme can compensate for the partiality of both the idealist and naturalist directions.

The Wage Setting Process

The Wage Setting Process&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In this paper I will defend a conception of fairness in labor markets. I will argue that we should take a procedural approach to the evaluation of fairness in markets. The procedural approach defended here goes beyond the traditional procedural view that requires only the absence of force and fraud. But it avoids the pitfalls of the other classical conception of fairness in the market: the idea of a just wage or just price. Fairness in markets is analogous to fairness in the democratic process. &#x0D; I will start with a discussion and critique of Joseph Heath’s stimulating discussion of fairness in labor markets. Though I agree in part with his assessment of the just wage tradition, I will argue that there is room for thinking about fairness in markets. I will then lay out a conception of fairness that is based on the analogy with democracy. The procedural idea of equal power can be given an interpretation both in perfectly competitive markets and in imperfectly competitive markets. I will show how this approach has implications for conceiving of how firms ought to be organized and for defining a fair process of wage setting in the essentially highly imperfect conditions of the labor market.&#x0D;

Just Wages in Which Markets?

Joseph Heath argues that we should reject the idea of a ‘just wage’ because market prices are supposed to signal scarcities and thereby to promote overall efficiency, rather than reward contributions. This argument overlooks the degree to which markets are institutionally, socially, and culturally embedded. Their outcomes are hardly ever ‘pure’ market outcomes, but the result of complex interactions of economic and other factors, including various forms of power. Instead of rejecting moral intuitions about wage justice as misguided, we can often understand them as pointing towards questions about the embeddedness of markets, or lack thereof. At least in some cases, changes in the framework of markets can both increase efficiency (or at least not reduce it) and get us closer to conventional notions of fair wages, e.g. when gender discrimination is reduced. Thus, while an abstract notion of a ‘just wage’ remains problematic, we can and should recognize that some wages are unjust.

Wages, Talents, and Egalitarianism

This paper compares Joseph Heath’s critique of the just deserts rationale for markets with an earlier critique due to Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Heath shares their emphasis upon the role of luck in prices based on supply and demand. Yet he avoids their claim that the inheritance of human capital is on a moral par with the inheritance of ordinary capital, as a basis for unequal shares of the social product. Heath prefers to argue that markets do not tend to reward talent as such. The paper raises some doubts about this factual claim, and argues that sweeping the issue of talent under the rug threatens to make our theory of justice less egalitarian than it would otherwise be. The paper also addresses the objection that claims of unfairness based on the arbitrariness of the distribution of innate abilities will undermine self-respect.

Is the Market Wage the Just Wage? A Reassessment of Factor Pricing and Distributive Justice

Do markets generate a “just” wage? The answer to this question will depend upon the particular theory of the market that the political economist employs. By comparing actual labor markets with the neoclassical theory of competitive equilibrium as its normative benchmark, Joseph Heath (2018) argues that factor pricing is orthogonal to normative issues such as distributive justice. We argue that Heath’s conclusion, though not invalid, is misplaced since it is directed towards a model of the market rather than the market itself. Though indeed classical political economists and early neoclassical economists failed to deliver an explicit theory of distributive justice, what Heath overlooks is that implicit to their understanding of the market process was an institutional theory of distributive justice. From this theory, distributive justice is evaluated on the degree to which institutions generate the conditions necessary for individuals to not only realize, but also increase their marginal product of labor. By arguing in terms of an equilibrium, Heath avoids the more relevant question of a comparative institutional nature, which is to understand under which institutional conditions a just wage can be discovered. Therefore, Heath evaluates factor pricing without taking into account the institutional conditions within which factor prices emerges in the first place.

The Implicit Morality of the Market and Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics

Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is a good. But, contra Heath, the ethical consideration at work is a consequentialist one; and acknowledging this consequentialism exposes limitations of Heath’s “market failures” approach to business ethics. We suggest two limitations, and we expect many will accept our argument that Heath’s conception of business ethics is too narrow. The present paper outlines two broader implications. First, acknowledging that the justification for markets is ethical eliminates the apparent—and false—conflict between purportedly amoral economic activity on one hand and ethical considerations on the other; instead, business ethics is a matter of weighing the consequentialist ethical benefit of economic activity and markets against other moral arguments/other ethical considerations. Second, Heath restricts business ethics to the constraints needed to protect the market’s ability to efficiently satisfy consumer preferences, constraints he calls “efficiency imperatives”; this restriction (inadvertently, perhaps) supports the widespread tendency to think that all social problems are economic; and, a business ethics so-conceived diminishes the perceived importance of noneconomic values—this attitude is dangerous.