Ben Wempe

Contractarian Business Ethics: Credentials and Design Criteria

Contractarian business ethics (CBE) is in great vogue in the present study of corporate morality. Its stated ambition is to provide better practical guidance than the more general ethical theories of business ethics, such as Kantianism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics or the stakeholder model. But how good is this new trend in business ethics theorizing? This article aims to assess CBEs credentials as a social contract argument. For this purpose, it embarks on a comparative analysis of the use of the social contract model in two earlier domains: political authority and social justice. Building on this comparison, it then develops four criteria for any future CBE. To apply the social contract model properly to the domain of corporate morality, it should be: (1) self-disciplined, i.e. not aspire to results beyond what the contract model can realistically establish; (2) argumentative, i.e. provide principles that are demonstrative results of the contractarian method; (3) task-directed, i.e. it should be clear what the social contract thought-experiment is intended to model; and (4) domain-specific, i.e. the contractarian choice situation should be tailored to the defining problems of corporate morality.

Reframing the Moral Limits of Markets Debate: Social Domains, Values, Allocation Methods

What should and what should not be for sale in a society? This is the central question in the Moral Limits of Markets (MLM) debate, which is conducted by a group of business ethicists and liberal egalitarian political theorists. These MLM theorists, which we will dub ‘market moralists,’ all put forward a specific version of the argument that while the market is well suited to allocate some categories of goods and services, it is undesirable for the allocation of other such categories. We argue that the current MLM debate is too much framed in terms of a market/non-market dichotomy. Moreover, authors tend to distinguish insufficiently between values such as freedom, equality, and efficiency, and allocation methods such as the market, the queue, and rationing. We introduce a new conceptual scheme consisting of societal domains, values, and allocation methods to provide a better structure for this debate. The argument is illustrated from the education and healthcare domains.

Theorizing the Moral Limits of Markets: Social Domains, Values, Mechanisms

The ever-increasing impact of the market in modern societies has triggered a debate among political theorists on ‘the moral limits of markets’ (MLM). This paper develops a new conceptual division into social domains, societal values and distributive mechanisms so as to apply it to the current MLM debate. We argue, first, that this debate can be improved using the concept of domain differentiation, which was originally introduced by Weber, and elaborated by authors such as Walzer. Second, we argue that each separate social domain has a specific value (or set of values) to it. Some of these values will play a role in more than one social domain, but each domain will have its own characteristic configuration of values. Third, we argue that individual values will each be supported by their own mechanism(s). The result of applying this new scheme is that the recent discussion about markets infringing upon ever more new areas of society needs to be conducted more in regard to values such as efficiency, freedom ...