Gregory Robson (Iowa State University), "Can We Assess Society-Wide Systems of Firms and Markets?"
Forthcoming, Journal of Business Ethics
Can We Assess Society-Wide Systems of Firms and Markets?
We often ask whether a whole system of political economy is just. To ask this is to assume one is in good epistemic position to answer. Is the question, “Is capitalism (socialism, distributism, etc.) just?”, a question we can answer?
A key theme of my research is how and how far we can understand and morally assess large and diverse societies, especially their political-economic systems. Consider the United States, with its 32 million firms, from multinational corporations to sole proprietorships, and 334 million people. Can we morally assess the whole system of political economy in such a diverse and populous society? If so, how exactly? Or consider the world’s largest democratic society, India, which is rather diverse and would have a billion people even if one numerically subtracted the entire population of the United States from its own. How well can we morally assess India’s whole system of political economy?
In “How to Object to the Profit System (and How Not To),” (2023, Journal of Business Ethics), I consider the practice of morally objecting to complex decentralized systems of political economy. I argue that successful objections usually require (a) a representative sample of activity in the system and (b) a reliable judgment that the sample is unethical. I show why (a) and (b) are often not easy—or even impossible—to obtain. This seems true at least for systems that do not obviously involve widespread violations of fundamental rights.
Influential scholars who argue for the immorality of whole systems of political economy, however, tend to overlook the need to satisfy both (a) and (b). The scholars commonly adduce strong evidence of injustice in particular cases. Their analyses face a key danger, however. The danger is to proceed as if a set of particular immoral cases were plainly sufficient to ground a moral indictment of a whole system of millions of firms and countless exchanges. Careful analysis seems to require not moving fast from moral verdicts about particular firms or market activities to verdicts about whole, massively complex systems of firms and markets. Doesn’t it?
An influential recent account I focus on is Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, 2017). Anderson provides substantial evidence of abuse—even grievous abuse that should cease and be remedied immediately. Yet, discussing the machinery of her argument in detail, I argue that even the vivid cases and statistics Anderson provides do not together constitute a representative sample of “dictatorship” in the workplace. And without a representative sample, we cannot rationally sustain a system-level moral assessment with much confidence.
While markets surely have morally concerning elements (like all human institutions, they rely on morally imperfect people), system-level criticism of markets is subject to epistemic overreach. Understanding and assessing individual firms alone can be no easy task (e.g., multinational corporations such as Walmart, with its 2.2 million employees). Morally assessing whole systems of millions of diverse and complexly related firms is exponentially more difficult.
Would you like to join me in considering the promises and perils of moral assessments of capitalism, socialism, and other political-economic systems? If so, have a look at my paper and feel free to reach out any time.
Gregory Robson
Iowa State University and
University of Notre Dame
gjrobson.wordpress.com
January 2023