Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Publication Title
Journal of Business Ethics
Volume
165
Issue
1
First Page
113
Last Page
124
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Moriarty, Jeffrey, 2020. On the Origin, Content, and Relevance of the Market Failures Approach, Journal of Business Ethics.
Included in
Applied Ethics Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Economics Commons
