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The Free Market and Social Justice
Calixtus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So we've had a few threads recently that got me thinking about this. Sometimes, in debates, appeals are made to the existance of a free market on which a particular service/commodity can be sold as a replacement for a moral argument regarding the same "product", and I'd like to talk more about that.
I'll try to explain my objection without getting too specific so we don't run off on a tangent; If there is a demand for a particular product/service/commodity, if it can be sold, then moral criticism of it is useless, because clearly there is a market for it, so the public must find it acceptable. Discussions regarding the general desireability of the product for the whole of society are not relevant, because the producers of such a product have no responsibility towards society as a whole to modify their product. It's not that if it sells it's morally right, it's that if it sells, the morality of it, or the benefit to greater society, becomes less important.
The next evolution of this line of reasoning is that societal change should be brought about using market forces. If you identify a product that you find morally disagreable, then you should alter your own purchasing decisions and fuck off from criticizing others for theirs.
Now, I don't like this argument (And because of my distaste, someone else may have to take a stab at formulating it so I don't strawman myself). In no particular order;
"It's nobody/everybodys fault." Variations of the tune The Market Is A Shapeless Mass That Can Do No Wrong, and the suppliers are Merely Satisfying A Demand. I don't think this is a valid approach to moral argumentation; It is essentially shrugging and talking about what is as if its existance was enough justification for it's moral acceptability. It's a deflection where instead of taking an overt opposing stance on the issue at hand, the status quo is defended by oblique references to how "unavoidable" it is.
This is, I feel, bullshit. Arguing an opposing "ought" is one thing, arguing that what "is" is somehow all that could ever be is trying to reframe - or shut down - the discussion to dodge the more difficult questions. Another variation is "Can't find a specific someone to pin it on? Oh well, must not be a problem then".
The free market responds to capital, not the will of the people. The allocation of capital is not democratic, hence the free market will not respond to democratic concerns. This brings about several sub-issues; social injustice and low economic power tends to come hand in hand, meaning that the people who would stand most to benefit from a given change, lacks the purchasing power to actually bring it about. The free market, unlike democratic society at large, has no interest in justice, equality or freedom and referencing it as if it was some kind of final arbiter of either of those three...
I can't decide whether I should be scared as fuck or just angry.
tl;dr: The free market is really unsuitable to addressing social injustices, and I don't understand why people reference it as if it weren't, or as if it was an unstoppable force of nature that could not possibly be controlled.
What do you think?
I'll try to explain my objection without getting too specific so we don't run off on a tangent; If there is a demand for a particular product/service/commodity, if it can be sold, then moral criticism of it is useless, because clearly there is a market for it, so the public must find it acceptable. Discussions regarding the general desireability of the product for the whole of society are not relevant, because the producers of such a product have no responsibility towards society as a whole to modify their product. It's not that if it sells it's morally right, it's that if it sells, the morality of it, or the benefit to greater society, becomes less important.
The next evolution of this line of reasoning is that societal change should be brought about using market forces. If you identify a product that you find morally disagreable, then you should alter your own purchasing decisions and fuck off from criticizing others for theirs.
Now, I don't like this argument (And because of my distaste, someone else may have to take a stab at formulating it so I don't strawman myself). In no particular order;
"It's nobody/everybodys fault." Variations of the tune The Market Is A Shapeless Mass That Can Do No Wrong, and the suppliers are Merely Satisfying A Demand. I don't think this is a valid approach to moral argumentation; It is essentially shrugging and talking about what is as if its existance was enough justification for it's moral acceptability. It's a deflection where instead of taking an overt opposing stance on the issue at hand, the status quo is defended by oblique references to how "unavoidable" it is.
This is, I feel, bullshit. Arguing an opposing "ought" is one thing, arguing that what "is" is somehow all that could ever be is trying to reframe - or shut down - the discussion to dodge the more difficult questions. Another variation is "Can't find a specific someone to pin it on? Oh well, must not be a problem then".
The free market responds to capital, not the will of the people. The allocation of capital is not democratic, hence the free market will not respond to democratic concerns. This brings about several sub-issues; social injustice and low economic power tends to come hand in hand, meaning that the people who would stand most to benefit from a given change, lacks the purchasing power to actually bring it about. The free market, unlike democratic society at large, has no interest in justice, equality or freedom and referencing it as if it was some kind of final arbiter of either of those three...
I can't decide whether I should be scared as fuck or just angry.
tl;dr: The free market is really unsuitable to addressing social injustices, and I don't understand why people reference it as if it weren't, or as if it was an unstoppable force of nature that could not possibly be controlled.
What do you think?
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Calixtus on
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If, on the other hand, we were to discard this assumption that short term profit is the only priority that can apply to managing a business, then we might structure things very differently. I've never understood this attitude that it is not only acceptable but somehow a kind of moral imperative to make the most powerful entities in our society act in the most sociopathic way possible.
Market reform legislation is really our best (and perhaps only) tool in making sure our capitalistic economy doesn't result in ruin and instability. In terms of basic exchanges of goods and services, capitalism is preferable to other forms of dynamics (save a handful of concerns, like healthcare), but that doesn't somehow validate its standing as an inherently virtuous machination. We use it because it works better than the government being responsible for everything, end of line.
Do insanely wealthy corporations owe a moral obligation to society? Absolutely, but determining what exactly that means is difficult and different for each case, and like SKFM said, waiting on these companies' shareholders and boards to make these movements is a long wait for a ship what don't come.
Simply, don't expect the free market to answer for social inequity. That's not what it's built for.
Lets say you are a father and you have 2 attractive daughters...
OK that's slightly unfair, but we already regulate and subsidize business significantly. Adding positive incentives - or at least emphasizing the benefits to executives who might (and let's put this as neutrally as we can) might not naturally be inclined to see the business case for the corporation acting as a responsible member of society - would reframe the argument. There are other options as well, such as levying the true cost of activities like pollution, false advertising, and so on. The sheer truth is that businesses receive a large number of subsidies and incentives to act in anti-social ways; it will be difficult for you to persuade me that we could not or should not remove those incentives and replace them with ones that promote a social good.
The problem is that a lot of self-described "free-market capitalists" don't know the first thing about what "free market" means and think that the First Amendment protects them when they enact unscrupulous policies, or that "capitalism" means "whatever it takes to make money."
Failure is a big part of the free market. This is not Anarcho-Capitalism.
In short, social responsibility and financial success need not be opposed goals. There are objective reasons why slave economies are not leading the G7, and they're nothing to do with hippy huggy socialism. But there are still gains that could be made by government regulation providing a useful end-run against the dilemma of the Tragedy Of The Commons. (Whereby company A might want to enact long-term good policy B, but if it does it will lose out on short term share value vs company C; therefore the managers of company A are dissuaded from enacting policy that would be to the long term good of both the employees and shareholders of company A; and company C may well be in exactly the same position).
tl;dr: game theory analysis in a "free market" does not always lead to optimum long term results.
I think an additional problem is the idea that, if an employee (let's try to avoid anthromorphising capital - people have duties, companies don't) has a duty to make money, it's not their only duty. We all have a complex mix of duties to sort out, and clocking in shouldn't magically make those go away. Your responsibility to be honest or your responsibiilty to protect other people don't disappear once you get to work.
I have never heard a reason why those responsibilities should disappear, but some people maintain that they do, without ever showing why.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Vaguely related mini-rant to follow:
yeah, exactly.
The idea that business ought to be exclusively concerned with making money is fundamentally good one, because making businesses responsible for anything else creates a bunch of weird incentives and opportunities for malfeasance.
The problem is that (in the United States, at least) we have largely convinced ourselves (as a society) that it somehow isn't our responsibility to collectively enforce social justice. So when we do confront collective action problems (like say, health care) we have no common framework with which to discuss them. Into that vacuum has been thrust a clumsy substitution of profit for public good, which is why a significant portion of the population apparently believes that as long as insurance companies are making bank we have a world class healthcare system.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
In recent threads here a lot of this stuff has been in the context of the entertainment industry and the "messages" it sends, but even that's also a very nebulous distinction, and it's not at all clear where the moral responsibility even lies. I have a hard time getting behind the idea that writing Twilight is an immoral act, despite the crappy gender roles it features. It's a piece of fiction that resonates with a huge number of people, including the author - what right do I have to dismiss their fantasies as immoral?
You also get into a lot of situations where there isn't any one person to blame. It's not immoral for an individual director to make a movie with a male protagonist, even if the prevalence of male protagonists is a social justice problem. In other words, the problems are often collective rather than individual, and the social justice issues come from the whole instead of any individual.
Uh no. In fact, the "free market" can often have a direct effect on social justice. See: Healthcare
The larger point is one effects the other. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes by design.
And since they do, a conflict ensues between the disparate goals of the two ideas.
Although really, you seem to just want to drag another threads topic in here for ... I don't know what reason.
Can you expand a bit on that? Because it seems to me that there already a bunch of weird incentives and opportunities for malfeasance by making businesses exclusively concerned with making money.
Well, healthcare shouldn't be a free market issue. The rest of the world has already made that decision, it's just the US that has lagged behind due to some hard-right politicians trying to make hay to win elections.
I gave a few specific examples of companies. Do you have any feelings on those? Do you have your own examples you'd like to present? Because until you do I really have no idea what we're talking about here. It seems impossibly vague and not something any corporation could base its decisions on.
Like many people told you in the thread you dragged this from, art IS culture and culture effects people. And thus, people will express their opinions on their culture and what should be a part of it. Because culture, a thing in many ways synonymous with social justice issues as a whole, is not something that should or is left up to the free market.
"It sells" is not a valid response to "that shit is bad and we don't want it around".
That means you're then left with three primary concerns:
Have I asked the right question? Like all evolutionary systems, the only thing that comes out of the free market are systems that work well under the conditions you have set, replacing systems that don't work as well. There's no moral component at all, other than what you assign when you're setting up the conditions for success and any that might arise as the 'mutations' in part of the system. That said, the fact I'm typing this and you're reading this in another country rather than thinking about ambushing shrews and voles is a huge testament to the fact that co-operation is a very powerful tool, the foundation and mortar that altruism is built on. An evolutionary approach will just find something that works, but it won't always be pleasant and can be unsustainable if the right conditions aren't set up at the beginning (i.e. some system of punishing cheaters who aren't co-operating in good faith)
Is this the right method to answer this question? If you want something useful out of an evolutionary system, you need decent number of samples who can compete against each other. You also need to accept that things will fail without needing to worry about what that means. You're effectively introducing a set level of inefficiency (the profit) into a system and rewarding systems that can increase that level of inefficiency (hopefully by removing other redundant steps).
What's my end point? In addition to rewarding a certain type of inefficiency, you've also got an added inefficiency in the resources spent on systems that fail (i.e the money wasted of things that go out of business. For some things this is fine - questions like "what's going to be the next big fashion/trend" are open ended enough, of a broad enough scope and sufficiently hard enough to predict that an evolutionary approach is really the only way to go about it. However in other instances, you have something very specific in mind - how can I run this bit of infrastructure so that this goals are met (e.g. total coverage, self sustaining)? At which point continuing to use an evolutionary model is just making things more expensive due the intentional inefficiencies (often a monopoly). At this point you would close that project down and use the system it's produced, or set a new set of conditions to solve a new puzzle.
I think it could be quite an interesting model for a cycle of nationalisation and privatisation. Start by putting things out to tender with a set goal in mind, presented as an investment. We would like you to make our hospitals 30% more efficient above inflation over 15 years, with at least an increase of 3% in efficiency every three years. After those 15 years (or earlier and with a penalty if conditions aren't met and a bonus if you're system is adopted on a wider scale) we'll buy the system back off you for 'X' dollars. The hospitals are then run publically using that system and under similar conditions - since we're hoping to use the evolutionary approach to develop a system which will continually try to recognise insufficiencies and improve itself. If they then fail to meet the (potentially increasing) targets set, then we go back to the private sector to see if we can develop a new system and the whole cycle repeats itself.
I think the big thing is to take a step back from the last centuries values and systems and actually look at what they are and how they should be applied properly. Capitalism is no more or less morale than Central planning, it's just a different tool for the job. The hard part is in setting the right conditions, and that involves recognising the advantages and benefits of each system and when it's appropriate to use them.
Let's take a relatively simplistic issue like clean water. It is obviously in a community's interest to have a clean source of water. But at the same time, its in various industries' interest to dispose of various byproducts as expeditiously as possible; historically we have seen that this leads them to dump into whatever water supply is nearby.
Even if a particular industrial actor found it morally unacceptable to dump unsafe chemicals into a water supply, in the market this would function as a competitive disadvantage compared to actors not similarly scrupulous. We have long since recognized that its unrealistic for industry to keep our water clean if left to its own recognizance, and so we have the EPA (among other agencies.)
The same thing is currently playing out in our health care debate; we recognize that it is morally problematic to leave the young, the poor and the infirm without health care (it's also economically problematic for society.) We can't rely on business to solve this problem because every incentive suggests they should do otherwise; even if one insurance company chose to magnanimously offer coverage to cancer patients, they would quickly cease to be competitive with those that did not.
There's also the question knuckle dragger poses, which is that if we do expect businesses to decide things on at least partially moral terms, what moral code are we expecting them to follow?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Which part of "what you said"?
In the two replies to you, I addressed both your inane idea that the free market and social justice don't effect one another and your other ideas that there's no moral responsibility inherent in a commercial action because, hey, it sells.
Turning a profit is something that has no basis in social justice. It does effect it however.
Which is the larger point of this thread.
The issue with things like clean water is part of the larger scope of the failure of markets to eliminate externalities.
I never said that they didn't affect one another, I said that when they affect one another it's often in a very nebulous and indirect way.
If the point of this thread is whether or not companies should dump pollutants into the water supply then there isn't a lot to discuss. I don't think anyone thinks they should be allowed to do those things, and that's why we regulate these things as part of our laws. Where the discussion actually gets interesting is how far the social justice idea extends - that's why I brought up makeup, McDonalds, and gun stores. I think those are all examples of cases where a business could be argued as having a negative impact on social justice, but isn't directly harming anyone in the way pollutants in the water supply harms people.
So I ask again - are gun stores immortal? Is fast foot immoral? Is the line drawn only at physical harm, or are business owners immoral for doing things that harm the "fabric" of society? How should that harm to the fabric of society be measured and what can reasonably be done about it?
To me this seems like the most damning evidence that the so-called "free market" is in itself a problem that has to be solved, before arguing if the "free market" is capable of providing a solution to any social problem. If the responsible and sensible thing to do (not damaging the environment) puts you at a disadvantage, the whole system is flawed. And since it's a man-made system to begin with, I don't see why we cannot fundamentally change it until its outcome is less harmful to society.
I honestly don't think that this is a problem. If anything it is an ongoing debate (like anything to do with morality, coded or otherwise) and I think our greatest failing is our reluctance to engage or fully enter it. The question isn't which moral code we should follow. As it stands we are becoming painfully aware of the absence of one that is actually concerned with the well-being of the majority of people and the promotion of social stability.
Instead of quibbling about the details, we should acknowledge that not only do we need business to follow some larger, more encompassing moral or ethical code, but that it is damaging bordering on the malicious to avoid having one.
Given that we see mass movements and sometimes even legislation attacking these issues, I'm not sure how it's even up for debate.
We already do have a code we require businesses to follow. In fact, we have an entire system of regulation, agreed upon by a system of representative democracy and enforced by a legal system and if necessary by men with guns.
Like, is this just a thread about why regulation is good and why we should have it? Or why there should be more regulation? Yes, the free market on its own tends to breed corruption, monopoly, and massive exploitation of common resources. That's why, in the face of innumerable historical examples, we allow government to regulate the free market and prevent it from harming its citizenry. While different nations have different specifics and different levels of regulation, this basic approach is followed by almost every developed nation on earth.
So what are we talking about here, exactly?
Except those very businesses influence the rules they are forced to follow.
The regulations that are supposed to hedge in utterly amoral actors are written by those same amoral actors.
And even if this weren't true, regulation can't always account for everything and is often reactionary.
At least part of the suggestion would seem to be that businesses cannot just be amoral profit seekers because of the above.
No advertising campaign or business innovation is going to beat being the only choice in the market. Or being one of the select few choices on the market.
Sure, but that's a function of a breakdown in the system due to some particular rules we have in American politics, not a condemnation of the system in general. We can see examples of functioning regulatory systems in other nations, so clearly it's possible and it works.
And as you note, other nations don't do it by asking businesses to be moral, they do it by forcing them to be moral using the rule of law. Even an amoral business will function morally under a strong regulatory system, because the penalties of doing so will outweigh the rewards. Businesses don't need an innate morality, they need a system of strong regulation that forces everyone to play by the same rules.
Other systems may function BETTER, but they still suffer the exact same issues.
What, you think corporations influencing, say, environmental regulations is elusively an American phenomenon?
They're separate concepts, and if there is a relationship between the two it's an inverse relationship (as I'm reasonably certain there's no way to have a just society with a truly free market, without redefining "justice", the inverse I think is less true but still applicable)
The primary reason, which most of you have pointed out, that free markets suck is that they are cannibalistic. A free market with no regulation will eventually destroy itself, prioritization of short term gains in corporations will destroy the future to the benefit of the present, because it's not rational for a market actor to prioritize the long term survival of the economy or care about somewhat abstract concepts like externalities
Not at all. But again, when corporations are able to successfully influence the regulations affecting them, that represents breakdown and corruption within the system rather than a failure of the system itself. If a police department takes bribes that represents a problem within that particular police department, but it is not necessarily a condemnation of the concept of police departments. Some police departments take bribes, but many others successfully reduce crime, and we're much better off with them than without them.
Do you have a system to suggest above and beyond central regulation of corporate morality by government authority? What other form could such a system take?
How many drilling rigs, for example, do you think were set-up & operated more or less in exactly the same fashion as the Deepwater Horizon before that disaster occurred? My guess would be 'an awful lot', but because the bad practices & safety short-cuts didn't really put any one particular manager at risk, the status quo was maintained (and I imagine that it'll continue to be maintained even after the disaster, for the same reason: spills are as intermittent as CEO changes).
This is a problem that could be solved, of course, by handing the means of production over to the workforce.
They have become related, if not intertwined due to historic developments. Capitalism has become the dominant economic system on which our societies operate. Consumerism the dominant social principle. It should be apparent how these two interlock.
I find it very strange to claim that the ideology of the "free market" is somehow entirely separate from social justice. When the latter is visibly limited by the demands of the former.
This doesn't even make fucking sense, like to the degree that I don't think you have a working definition of 'free market".
1)There is no market you could make where avoiding costs is not a rewarded behavior. You can create disincentives to avoiding the costs, like giant EPA fines, but controlling costs and making profit are inexorably linked via basic math. There for if its not illegal, and it saves/makes you money the incentive will always be to do it, rectitude not withstanding.
2)The free market is in many ways the opposite of a man-made system, in so much as it is not made-- look at its antithesis, the planned economy. Saying you are going to change the free market to make it more beneficial to society is missing the point that a free market intrinsically doesn't work that way. One can't lower the price of heating oil by fiat, because it is not set that way in the first place.
Chick-Fil-A donates millions to anti-gay causes every year, as it's corporate purpose is "to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us." Granting them credit that they are acting on their true moral beliefs(and being privately owned that $$$ comes straight from the owners pocket), you are okay with a company making this part of their moral platform?
This entire moral/ethical conversation is fundamentally flawed. A company does not have agency. It's officers do. By making a 'moral code' for companies you are making either A) a non-binding set of guidelines for the officers/owners to please abide, or
If activity X is damaging to everyone outlaw X, because the only alternative is some sort of centralized ethics committee to review ever decision a company makes, ie run them. Which is in fact what one of proposed solutions to this problem was, and it worked for shit.