This paper argues that the standard rationale for regulating markets also applies to democracy. Economists and philosophers commonly defend government intervention in markets on the grounds that markets predictably suffer from failures such as public goods problems, information asymmetries, principal-agent dilemmas, lack of competition, irrationality, and externalities. Democratic politics exhibits the same failures - often more severely - yet is typically assumed to be exempt from regulation. We challenge this asymmetry by showing that the justificatory structure for market regulation straightforwardly extends to democratic processes. We sketch a range of equality-preserving interventions - such as participation incentives, disclosure and promise-tracking mechanisms, transparent ballot design, and safeguards against catastrophic risks - that regulate democracy without abolishing it. Just as regulating markets is not the same as abolishing them, regulating democratic processes is not undemocratic. Recognizing this parity reframes debates about institutional design and opens a new research agenda in democratic theory.
When is a price just? This paper develops a new theory of justice in pricing, grounded in the Austrian market process tradition. Prices, I argue, are not merely outcomes to be evaluated against an external standard of fairness. They are instruments through which the competitive process performs morally significant functions: communicating information, generating incentives and coordinating the plans of millions under pervasive ignorance. When this process is operating, the prices it produces carry a genuine presumption of justice. I establish this claim through two complementary arguments and demonstrate its power across cases from price gouging to wages to monopoly.
Abstract Adam Smith worries that the commercial life is self-defeating: a treadmill of nonbeneficial ambition and consumption where actors systematically misidentify their own good. Numerous scholars – including Hanley, Hill, Rasmussen, Fleischacker and Sagar – have recently attempted to vindicate commercial society against Smith’s powerful objection. The current article clarifies this objection and refutes these attempts to overcome it. The article diagnoses a deeper illiberalism in these efforts – some moralistic, others consequentialist – to vindicate commercial society, and concludes by showing that consequentialist vindications mistake prudential judgements for moral ones. The discussion has implications for Smith scholarship and contemporary efforts to morally assess capitalism.
Many social welfare measures will sometimes rank a large population of very well-faring people below a very large population of barely well-faring people. Thus, they entail the repugnant conclusion. If such rankings are indeed repugnant, there must be some mistake behind measures that imply them. This paper discusses what that mistake might be. After rejecting other proposals, I suggest that the mistaken assumption is that welfare values that are insignificant for individuals, due to being small, could have significant impact on social welfare. To avoid this mistake, two new measures are introduced that aggregate significant and insignificant welfare values differently.
Abstract I argue against John, Millum and Wasserman’s position that telic prioritarianism justifies morally acceptable discrimination against persons with disabilities. I propose alternative considerations that explain why disability discrimination in the lifesaving cases JMW discuss is morally problematic.
