What is the Price of Freedom for Workers?
Date and Time
About the Lecture:
Philosophical discussions of market failure typically focus on three canonical causes: externalities, information asymmetries, and insufficient competitiveness. These three causes are important in part because of their generality, since the defects in question can arise in any market. There is, however, another extremely important source of market failure, which is sometimes overlooked because it lacks the same generality. The market failures in question arise from the non-alienability of labor (or the constraint that human capital can only be rented, not purchased). Non-alienability is institutionalized through a set of constraints on contracting, which directly inhibit the formation of certain markets. But these constraints also have downstream effects, causing other markets to fail. This paper describes these effects in the markets for education and training, credit and investment, and childrearing services. Understanding these market failures, in turn, helps us to better understand the various non-market institutions that have arisen in order to address these problems.
About Joseph Heath:
Joseph Heath is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has worked extensively in the field of critical theory, philosophy and economics, practical rationality, distributive justice, and business ethics. His papers have been published in academic journals such as Mind, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He is a fellow the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation as well as the Royal Society of Canada. Heath is the author of several books, both popular and academic. His most recent is Ethics for Capitalists (Friesen), which provides an articulation and defense of the “market failures approach” to business ethics. His book The Machinery of Government (Oxford) won the Donner Prize for Best Book in Public Policy in Canada in 2021, while his popular book, Enlightenment 2.0 (HarperCollins) won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2015. His first book, Communication Action and Rational Choice (MIT Press) won the Canadian Philosophical Association biannual book prize in 2003. Heath is also the co-author, with Andrew Potter, of the international bestseller The Rebel Sell (HarperCollins). His books have been translated into over a dozen languages.
About the Kissel Lecture:
The Annual Lester Kissel Lecture in Ethics is named for the late Lester Kissel, a graduate of Harvard Law School and longtime benefactor of Harvard University's ethics programs and activities.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.