The renaissance of Aristotelian virtue ethics has produced an extensive philosophical literature that criticizes markets for a lack of virtues. Drawing on Michael Sandel’s virtue-ethical critique of price gouging during natural disasters, we (1) identify and clarify serious misunderstandings in recurring price-gouging debates between virtue-ethical critics and economists. Subsequently, (2) we respond to Sandel’s call for interdisciplinary dialogue. However, instead of solely calling on economics to embrace insights from virtue ethics, we prefer a two-sided version of interdisciplinary dialogue and argue (...) that virtue ethics should embrace economic insights. In particular, we argue that if virtue ethics is to preserve its social relevance under modern conditions, it should re-conceptualize its notion of virtue and re-evaluate the self-interested but effective—and in this sense solidary—help among strangers via markets as virtuous rather than devaluate it as greed, that is, as vicious price gouging. (shrink)

This paper questions the dominance of market-based mechanisms (MBMs) as the primary means of climate change mitigation. It argues that, not only they are unsuccessful on their own terms, but also they actually make the task more difficult by the unintended consequence of normalising the act of polluting and crowding out alternatives. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to draw a link between two bodies of literature. The first is the business ethics literature on the dominance of market-based rather (...) than direct regulation, and the second is the literature on market ethics, particularly the work of Michael Sandel on how MBMs crowd out non-market norms. The empirical contribution is to use the international maritime transport sector to illustrate the way market-based regulation renders alternatives such as direct regulation and supply-side approaches invisible. (shrink)

The market failures approach to business ethics argues that economic theory regarding the efficient workings of a market can generate normative prescriptions for managerial behaviour. It argues that actions that inhibit Pareto optimal solutions are immoral. However, the approach fails to identify goods that should be regulated or prohibited from the market, something common to the moral limits to markets approach to business ethics. There are, however, numerous assumptions underlying Paretian efficiency, including some about the preferences of market participants. Trade (...) in some goods violates some of these assumptions, and so these goods are morally suspect and can be understood to indicate that the market for these goods is not moral. This creates grounds sufficient for regulating, and possibly prohibiting, these goods. To help determine whether it is then necessary to regulate the goods, I propose a supplementary economic analysis to ascertain why an assumption regarding a particular preference is being violated. (shrink)

The goal of this text is to elaborate the notion of pricelessness. The issue of pricelessness is distinguished from other important points in the Moral Limits of Markets debate. The proposition of the meaning of pricelessness is presented and discussed. I argue that the notion of pricelessness should not be identified with the notion of dignity or the highest value. The value which is a basis for the pricelessness claim does not have to be a moral value, the notion of (...) pricelessness functions at the crossroads between different kinds of values (moral, aesthetic, scientific, sentimental, commercial etc.). I argue that the core intuition associated with pricelessness refers to the incomparability of values. It is expressed as being price-less because money is seen as a universal comparator - it has a potential to translate any other values. Further, I distinguish three models of relation between commercial and priceless realms, named as: 1) contamination model, 2) contractual model, and 3) contextual model, in order to show that the attitudes toward the intuition that pricing itself may corrupt intrinsic values, depends on the presuppositions one shares. I argue that the conviction about corrupting force of money might be also explained by the intuitive concerns related to purity and degradation under Moral Foundations Theory. Using Radin's concepts, I claim that both non-commodities and incomplete commodities might be meaningfully called priceless. Finally, I recognize the limits of the argument from pricelessness and admit that it is rarely strong enough in itself to justify prohibition of commodification. (shrink)