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The field of business ethics is subject to sceptical (if not cynical) worries. This is expressed by the popular line that the very term ‘business ethics’ is an oxymoron: where there is business, there is no ethics – and vice versa. In the face of this, a credible account of business ethics has to avoid two extremes. On the one hand, business ethics has to be more than the ethics of ordinary life applied to the world of commerce. After all, markets could not be competitive, if they did not allow for a weakening of altruistic norms that are part and parcel of everyday morality. On the other hand, the cynical assertion that there simply is no place for ethics in business at all, cannot be taken seriously. Surely, there are some practices that are immoral, even in the context of market competition.

Over the last decade and a half, Joseph Heath has developed what he calls the market failures approach to business ethics. It is an approach that tries to avoid the two extremes of naïveté and cynicism by claiming that “the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the modern business corporation.” Heath’s work embeds business ethics in a broader view that has important implications for economic regulation, the welfare state, and corporate law. It represents an impressive blend of economics, ethics, and political philosophy. It is thus, in a lot of ways, the kind of work that P&E students are uniquely suited to appreciate and discuss. This course will engage with Heath’s body of work, by working carefully through his recently published collection of essays Morality, Competition, and the Firm.