Matthew Caulfield

Business owners sometimes refuse to transact with certain customers on principle, given some normative (political, personal, moral, or religious) commitment which they hold. I call such refusals ‘conscientious refusals.’ Evaluating two possible positions on the permissibility of vendor conscientious refusals, I argue in favor of an impersonal market in which vendor conscientious refusals are generally not justified. I argue impersonal norms, which crowd out conscientious considerations, support pluralist, healthy markets from which we reap individual and communal benefits; further, impersonal markets buttress individual freedom by providing a distinctive sphere of activity characterized by norms of radical inclusivity. These considerations constitute a strong case that vendor conscientious refusals are ceteris paribus unjustified. I conclude by addressing several potential objections to this view.

A question facing nearly all private firms is whether they may keep employee pay secret. Many think it is obvious that firms are obligated to disclose a good deal of pay information once we properly appreciate the severity of pay discrimination in our economy and the autonomy-related interests that would be served by pay disclosure. This article puts forth a dissenting voice against the vast majority of recent commentary. It exploits a fissure between reasons we have to support certain coercive regulations and reasons firms have to act in the absence of such regulation. While acknowledging that we may need transparency regulations for firms that fail to act morally, it argues that otherwise moral firms need not disclose pay on the surveyed grounds.

Jeffrey Moriarty argues that unequal pay for employees who do the same work is not necessarily wrong, but can be wrong if it is discriminatory or deceptive. Moriarty does this in part by stressing that pay should be considered primarily as a price for labor and therefore that our views on price discrimination and unequal pay should mirror each other. In this critique, I argue that Moriarty fails to adequately account for the expressive functions of pay. A pluralist view of pay reveals otherwise overlooked normative concerns regarding pay and cautions against adopting too strong of an analytical connection between price discrimination and unequal pay.