Joseph Heath

Joseph Heath
Born 1967 (age 48–49)
Nationality Canadian
Alma mater McGill University
Northwestern University
Occupation Professor
Employer University of Toronto
Notable work

Joseph Heath (born 1967) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance.[1] He received his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1990, where his teachers included Charles Taylor, and his Master of Arts and doctor of philosophy (1995) degrees are from Northwestern University, where he studied under Thomas A. McCarthy and Jürgen Habermas.[2] He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory.

Heath is the recipient of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2012).[3] In 2013, Heath was named to the Royal Society of Canada.[4] His popular book Enlightenment 2.0 won the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.[5]

Ideas

The central claim of The Rebel Sell is that counter-cultural movements have failed, and that they all share a common fatal error in the way they understand society; thus counter-culture is not a threat to "the system". For example, it is suggested of Adbusters' Blackspot campaign that the shoe's existence proves that "no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture."

In the book Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath criticizes the idea that tax-paying is inherently different from consumption, and argues that the idea of a tax freedom day is flawed:

It would make just as much sense to declare an annual "mortgage freedom day", in order to let mortgage owners know what day they "stop working for the bank and start working for themselves". ...But who cares? Homeowners are not really "working for the bank"; they're merely financing their own consumption. After all, they're the ones living in the house, not the bank manager.[6]

Business ethics

In business ethics, Heath advances a new theory, what he calls a "market failure" or "Paretian" approach, which states that "the market is essentially a staged competition, designed to promote Pareto efficiency, and in cases where the explicit rules governing the competition are insufficient to secure the class of favoured outcomes, economic actors should respect the spirit of these rules and refrain from pursuing strategies that run contrary to the point of the competition". The approach is neither akin to the shareholder theory, the stakeholder theory or to a personal ethics framework.

Heath’s market failure approach follows from his work in political economy. According to Heath, the market is not a system of natural justice. Rather, it is an imperfect but efficient institutional arrangement designed to maximize social welfare by way of an unresolved collective action problem.[7] In other words, markets are "special-purpose institutions designed to promote efficiency", that need to be "embedded within the broader context of a welfare state, which engages in both market-complementing and redistributive policies to claim to be just."[8]

Since these structured competitions are implemented "for the narrow reason" that, in a reasonably competitive market, they generate social benefits through positive externalities, "adversarial ethics" are acceptable in the circumscribed and limited role of markets. Indeed, economic actors engaged in market transaction "must be given a fairly broad exemption from the norms of equality or fairness".[8]

However, they must be held accountable to the fundamental principles required to have a competitive and efficiency promoting market. Therefore, "the central role of business ethics is […] not to bring in 'outside' moral considerations to condemn the latest outrage, but to clarify and to correct the self-understanding of participants in the market economy […]. In order to do so, it has no need to appeal to normative standards beyond those that are already implicit in the institutions of a market economy." [9]

Hence, "the overall set of profit-maximizing strategies is partitioned into three categories, separating out the immoral and the illegal strategies from the normatively acceptable ones. The efficiency standard can be used to make both cuts. The 'acceptable/unacceptable' distinction is imposed by the efficiency properties of the market system as a whole. The set of unacceptable strategies can then be subdivided into 'immoral/illegal' using a transaction cost or regulatory cost analysis."[10] In other words, the "basic thrust of 'business ethics' is […] to discourage firms from taking advantage of market imperfections, even in cases where legal regulation is not feasible." [11]

Thus, "the firm should behave as though market conditions were perfectly competitive, even though they may not in fact be. The following list of imperatives provides some examples of the restrictions that this would imply :

  1. Minimize negative externalities
  2. Compete only through price and quality
  3. Reduce information asymmetries between firm and customers
  4. Do not exploit diffusion of ownership
  5. Avoid erecting barriers to entry
  6. Do not use cross-subsidization to eliminate competitors
  7. Do not oppose regulation aimed at correcting market imperfections
  8. Do not seek tariffs or other protectionist measures
  9. Treat price levels as exogenously determined
  10. Do not engage in opportunistic behaviour toward customers or others firms"[12]

Publications

Popular books

Academic books

See also

References

  1. ↑ University of Toronto School of Public Policy and Governance Archived December 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ↑ Biography - Trudeau Fondation, www.trudeaufoundation.ca
  3. ↑ Media release - Trudeau Foundation
  4. ↑ RSC 2013 New Fellows
  5. ↑ "Writers' Trust of Canada". March 16, 2015.
  6. ↑ Heath, Joseph (2009), Filthy Lucre: Economics for People who Hate Capitalism, HarperCollins, p. 90, ISBN 978-1-55468-395-6
  7. ↑ Heath, 2014, p. 98
  8. 1 2 Heath, 2014, p. 10
  9. ↑ Heath, 2014, p. 19
  10. ↑ Heath, 2014, p. 35
  11. ↑ Heath, 2014, p. 6
  12. ↑ Heath, 2014, p. 37

Sources

External links

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