Ethics for Capitalists: A Systematic Approach to Business Ethics, Competition, and Market Failure

Joseph Heath

Apr 2023 · FriesenPress

About this ebook

Ethics for Capitalists offers a powerful new statement of the Market Failures Approach to business ethics. While the competitive context of the market economy provides economic actors greater freedom to pursue their interests, it also imposes moral constraints on the range of strategies they may employ. The pursuit of profit must be consistent with the overall objective of market institutions, which is to promote efficiency in the production and allocation of goods and services. Ethics for Capitalists draws out the implications of this view for business strategy, corporate governance, managerial authority, and shareholder primacy. The result is a philosophically rigorous, comprehensive approach to business ethics that will be foundational for all future reflection in the field.

About the author

Joseph Heath is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of several influential works in applied ethics, including Morality, Competition and the Firm (Oxford, 2014), which brought together his early work on business ethics, and The Machinery of Government (Oxford, 2020), which won the Donner Prize for Best Book in Public Policy in 2021. He is also the author of Enlightenment 2.0 (HarperCollins, 2014), which won the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing in 2015.