Richard Endörfer

Many proponents of the Harm Principle seem to implicitly assume that the principle is compatible with permitting the free exchange of goods and services, even if such exchanges generate so-called market harms. I argue that, as a result, proponents of the Harm Principle face a dilemma: either the Harm Principle’s domain cannot include a large number of non-market harm cases or market harms must be treated on par with non-market harms. I then go on to discuss three alternative arguments defending the status of market harms as exceptions to the Harm Principle and discuss why these arguments also fail.

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.

The world we inhabit is full of risks, many of which come about due to socially beneficial activities we undertake. Compensation is often invoked as a necessary element in the justification for why we are permitted to engage in these activities despite the risks they pose to ourselves and others. In this article, I discuss how Scanlonian contractualists ought to think about compensating the victims of socially beneficial yet risky practices that we engage with every day. I consider how two prominent risk-sensitive accounts of contractualism, ex ante contractualism and ex post contractualism, ought to take compensation into account. My main point is that ex ante contractualism fails to deliver the conclusion that victims of risky social practices ought to receive a reasonable amount of compensation for the harm they eventually suffer. Roughly, this is so because ex ante contractualism cannot explain why these victims ought to prefer compensation for harm rather than mere compensation for risk. I call this the callousness objection to ex ante contractualism. I argue that the callousness objection provides us with a strong reason to favor ex post over ex ante contractualism. Furthermore, I expand on the implications that the possibility of compensation has regarding the demandingness of ex post contractualism.