Critics of commercial societies complain that the free-market system of property rights and freedom of contract tends to commodify relationships, thus eroding the bonds of personal and civic friendship. I argue that this thesis rests on a misunderstanding of both markets and friendship. As voluntary, reciprocal relationships, market relationships and friendship share important properties. Like all relations and activities that exercise important human capacities and play an important role in a meaningful life, market relations and activities are essentially structured and (...) supported by ethical norms and, in turn, support these norms. The so-called norms of the market, such as instrumentality and fungibility, come in varying degrees and characterize not only market, but also nonmarket, relationships, including friendship. Furthermore, although market relationships are primarily instrumental, the individuals involved are not. The virtues of markets have their counterparts in friendship, as do their vices. For these and other reasons, market societies are not only not inimical to friendship, they create a more secure matrix for civic and personal friendship, as well as for other important values such as art, science, or philosophy, than any other developed form of society. Key Words: commercial societies • friendship • moral norms • virtues • vices. (shrink)

In this article I seek to say what it is for something to count as a neglected disease. I argue that neglect should be defined in terms of efforts at prevention, mitigation and cure, and not solely in terms of research dollars per disability-adjusted life-year. I further argue that the trend towards multifactorialism and risk factor thinking in modern epidemiology has lent credibility to the erroneous view that the primary problem with neglected diseases is a lack of research. A more (...) restrictive contrastive model of disease is endorsed as better suited to the definition of neglected disease. (shrink)

Cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions are an important part of the climate change policies of the EU, Japan, New Zealand, among others, as well as China (soon). However, concerns have been raised on a variety of ethical grounds about the use of markets to reduce emissions. In this paper we examine three types of concern. The first holds that emissions trading schemes are 'unethical'. We examine five ethical objections. These objections hold that emissions trading is unethical because it: involves (...) owning what should not be owned (objection 1), involves alienating responsibilities that should not be alienated (objection 2), necessarily worsens the condition of the vulnerable (objection 3), puts a price on the natural world (objection 4), and converts what ought to be a 'fine' into a 'fee' (objection 5). We find all five ethical objections unpersuasive. We then turn to consider a second kind of objection - namely that emissions trading schemes involve an unjust distribution of burdens and benefits. Finally, we consider the arguments adduced by those who question the effectiveness of emissions trading in reducing emissions. We conclude that only the objections based on distributional justice can be sustained. This points to reform of the carbon market system, rather than its elimination. (shrink)

Markets, law, and regulation are intimately intertwined. Thus, recent studies (by Morton Keller and Donald McCloskey et al.) of the intersection between public policy and the economy are both necessary and welcome. But the absence in these works of a nuanced conceptualization of the critical, constructive role of civil authority in the creation and maintenance of open, competitive markets, and the virtual absence of a concern for and understanding of the engines of real economic growth, results in scholarship that only (...) weakly articulates the profound linkage between civil authority, open markets, and economic growth. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to (...) stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context. (shrink)

Geographic Indications (GIs) are a form of trademark protection afforded to products that are historically the product of a particular place and production process by restricting use of the name to products that actually come from the place in question; “Champagne” can only come from that region of France, for example. GIs are often proposed as a way to protect indigenous cultural products from Western appropriation: a global GI regime would ensure that “Mysore” silk sarees were produced in India, and (...) thus ensure that the traditional producers of these goods would be the beneficiaries of purchases of them. Such a strategy would return both economic value and cultural recognition to the producers of these goods. -/- In this paper, I argue that the move to branding culture puts the source indicating function of trademarks radically into question, thereby increasing the risks associated with an expansion of GIs. Increasingly, consumers consume brands not for the products they designate, but for the affiliation with the brands themselves. Since the benefits of source protection to indigenous communities depend upon a consumer’s desire to have a product actually from that source community, if consumers care more about the brand designation than the actual source, those benefits will be more difficult to realize. Instead, the logic of trademarks in late capitalism will tend to push geographic source protections toward becoming de facto IP rights in culture. -/- After an introductory section, the second section of the paper theorizes trademarks as part of a process of commodification in order to suggest that the logic of the process leads to an emphasis on brands themselves as sources of value, rather than the products to which they refer. The third section uses this theoretical frame to discuss the risk that geographic source protections will tend to reduce cultural diversity, both by tending to promote exoticized images of cultures, and by increasing the importance of standardization. The fourth section situates these concerns in the larger context of David Harvey’s work on capitalist accumulation, in order to underscore how the reification of culture discussed in the third section can be used as a tool by cultural elites to suppress dissent and treat the source protection as intellectual property rights in culture. The concluding section offers some policy suggestions for ways to ameliorate these risks. (shrink)

An exposition of Karl Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse for the logical development of money, this essay is divided into three parts. Since Marx is concerned to distinguish himself and his method from that of the seventeenth century political economists, I begin my paper with a brief reflection on “the scientifically correct method” or the “theoretical method” (Grundrisse 101 and 102). The second part of this paper considers how Marx justifies beginning his reflection with the concept of production in general. (...) To understand the importance that Marx attributes to production, one must also appreciate the way in which distribution, exchange, and consumption belong to the sphere of production. In the remaining pages of this section of my paper, then, I attempt to reconstruct Marx’s argument for the way in which these concepts (distribution, exchange, and consumption) are to be understood in relation to the sphere of production. (shrink)

"Capital is moved as much and as little by the degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. Apres moi le deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation" (Marx, CAPITAL Vol 1, 380-381).

I examine John Rawls' objection to libertarianism that it permits economic shares to be distributed in a morally arbitrary way. This argument was dropped largely for two reasons. First, talk of "arbitrariness" has been vague and associated with implausible views about moral desert, collective assets, and noumenal selves. Second, several criticisms which Robert Nozick made 25 years ago have gone unanswered. In this essay, I reconstruct the arbitrariness argument, giving it a new, Kantian interpretation, and I show that the new (...) version is intuitively plausible and avoids Nozick's major objections. (shrink)

There are strong Lockean considerations that count in favor of a global basic income program. This paper articulates a conception of equal share left-libertarianism that is supported by the rights of full self-ownership and world-ownership. It is argued that an appropriately constructed global basic income program would be a key institution for promoting the rights of full self-ownership and world-ownership.

The philosophical tradition of liberal political thought has come to see tolerance as a crucial element of a liberal political order. However, while much has been made of the value of tolerance, little work has been done on individual-level motivations for tolerant behavior. In this paper, we seek to develop an account of rational motivations to tolerant behavior, and where the limits of tolerance lie. We first present a very simple model of rational motivations for tolerance. Key to this model (...) is an application of David Ricardo’s model of trade to thinking about tolerance. This model supports the claim that we always have reasons to be as tolerant as possible. We then explore why we do not always see tolerant attitudes in the actual world, and point to some potential preconditions for tolerance that the initial model does not capture. Subsequently, we examine a more detailed model that allows us to more carefully investigate the conditions under which tolerant behavior can be rewarded. We conclude by arguing that a consideration of self-interested motivations for tolerance is essential to the success of a robust theory of tolerance for a diverse society, but that even this approach has its limitations. (shrink)

According to an often repeated definition, economics is the science of individual choices and their consequences. The emphasis on choice is often used – implicitly or explicitly – to mark a contrast between markets and the state: While the price mechanism in well-functioning markets preserves freedom of choice and still efficiently coordinates individual actions, the state has to rely to some degree on coercion to coordinate individual actions. Since coercion should not be used arbitrarily, coordination by the state needs to (...) be legitimized by the consent of its citizens. The emphasis in economic theory on freedom of choice in the market sphere suggests that legitimization in the market sphere is “automatic” and that markets can thus avoid the typical legitimization problem of the state. In this paper, I shall question the alleged dichotomy between legitimization in the market and in the state. I shall argue that it is the result of a conflation of choice and consent in economics and show how an independent concept of consent makes the need for legitimization of market transactions visible. Footnotes1 For helpful comments and suggestions I am most grateful to Marc Fleurbaey, Alain Marciano, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Thomas Pogge, Hans Bernhard Schmid, to seminar or conference participants in Aix-Marseille, Tutzing, Paris, and Amsterdam, and to two anonymous referees. (shrink)

Differences in socioeconomic and infrastructural elements among nations, differing conceptions about childhood, and the failure to distinguish between child work and child labor render a simple ban on child labor abroad idealistic and impractical.

This paper analyzes the proposed use of combinatorial derivatives markets for event prediction, especially for catastrophic events such as terrorism, war, or political assasination. Following a presentation of the philosophical principles underlying these politico-economic tools, I examine case studies (U.S. DoD proposals) that evaluate their advantages and disadvantages in terms of both efficacy and moral considerations. I conclude that these markets are both fatally flawed due to internal conceptual contradictions and morally problematic.

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is an influential metaphor with widespread currency in debates about freedom of speech. We explore a number of ways competition between ideas might be described as occurring in a marketplace and find that none support the use of the metaphor. We suggest that an alternative metaphor, that of the ‘garden of ideas’, may offer more productive insights into issues surrounding the regulation of speech.