Morality, Competition, and the Firm: The Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics

ISBN-13: 9780199990481 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 424 str.

Joseph Heath

Opis

In this collection of provocative essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations that private actors in a market economy have toward each other and to society. In a sharp break with traditional approaches to business ethics, Heath argues that the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the modern business corporation. In four new and nine previously published essays, Heath articulates the foundations of a "market failures" approach to business ethics. Rather than bringing moral concerns to bear upon economic activity as a set of foreign or externally imposed constraints, this approach seeks to articulate a robust conception of business ethics derived solely from the basic normative justification for capitalism. The result is a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state, which offers a reconstruction of the central normative preoccupations in each area that is consistent across all four domains. Beyond the core theory, Heath offers new insights on a wide range of topics in economics and philosophy, from agency theory and risk management to social cooperation and the transaction cost theory of the firm.

Recenzje

...the book is well worth engaging by anyone interested in economics, agency theory, fiduciary concerns, public policy, corporate governance, and of course, business ethics. Heath is to be commended for this provocative book, explaining a provocative approach to business ethics (market failures approach) that sees as its guiding star the always elusive Pareto-optimal market conditions. I know it has informed my own approach to how I will teach stakeholder theory, theory of the firm, and competition in future courses.

O autorze

Joseph Heath is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy as well as the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous scholarly works, including Communicative Action and Rational Choice (2001) and Following the Rules (2008). In 2012 he was appointed a fellow of the Trudeau Foundation.