- The corporate social assessment: Making public purpose pay (with Rutger Claassen), Review of Social Economy (Published Online 29 November 2023)
- Wealth and power: Philosophical perspectives (ed., with Huub Brouwer & Rutger Claassen) New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.
- Introduction: The wealth-power nexus (with Rutger Claassen & Huub Brouwer) in Wealth & power: Philosophical perspectives, ed. Michael Bennett, Huub Browuer & Rutger Claassen (Routledge 2023) pp. 1-22.
- Taming the corporate leviathan: How to properly politicize corporate purpose? (with Rutger Claassen) in Wealth & power: Philosophical perspectives, ed. Michael Bennett, Huub Browuer & Rutger Claassen (Routledge 2023) pp. 145-165.
- Managerial discretion, market failure and democracy Journal of Business Ethics 185, no. 1 (1 June 2023): 33–47.
- The corporate power trilemma (with Rutger Claassen) Journal of Politics 84, no. 4 (2022)
- The capital flight quadrilemma: Democratic trade-offs and international investment Ethics & Global Politics 14(4): 199–217 (12 October 2021).
- An epistemic argument for an egalitarian public sphere Episteme (26 October 2020).
- The choice of efficiencies and the necessity of politics Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (29 July 2020) .
- Experiments in distributive justice and their limits Critical Review 28(3–4): 461–483 (October 1, 2016).
Abstracts
The corporate social assessment: Making public purpose pay
(with Rutger Claassen), Review of Social Economy (Published Online 29 November 2023)
Corporations can be powerful engines of economic prosperity, but also for the public good more broadly conceived. But they need to be properly incentivized to fulfil these missions. We propose an innovative plan called the Corporate Social Assessment (CSA). Every four years, a randomly selected Citizens’ Assembly will meet to decide a grading scheme for assessing companies’ conduct. At the end of the cycle, a professional assessment body will grade the companies and rank them. The ranking will be the basis for subsidies to higher-tier companies, to be paid out of a fund to which all companies will contribute, to create a race to the top which financially rewards corporations taking public concerns seriously. The CSA radicalizes the corporate license to operate. To retain legitimacy in the eyes of wider segments of society, the proposal aims to democratize the way we hold corporations accountable for the power they wield.
Keywords: Corporate accountability; democracy; corporate social responsibility; citizen juries; corporate governance
Wealth and power: Philosophical perspectives
(ed., with Huub Brouwer and Rutger Claassen) New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.
Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it. Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism. Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations. Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying.
Introduction: The wealth-power nexus
(with Rutger Claassen & Huub Brouwer) in Wealth & power: Philosophical perspectives, ed. Michael Bennett, Huub Browuer & Rutger Claassen (Routledge 2023) pp. 1-22.
This introductory chapter provides a general framework for thinking about the relationship between wealth and power. It begins by situating the topic in the history of political thought, modern social science, and recent political philosophy, before putting forward an analytical framework. This has three elements: first, the idea of liberalism's public/private divide: a division between a power-wielding state from which wealth should be absent, and a market economy from which power should be absent; second, the two ways the division can be transgressed by the power of the wealthy: by the wealthy subverting the power of the state and by directly exercising power within the economy; and third, the four different approaches to responding to the transgression, either aiming to reassert the public/private divide or to move beyond it.
Taming the corporate leviathan: How to properly politicize corporate purpose?
(with Rutger Claassen) in Wealth & power: Philosophical perspectives, ed. Michael Bennett, Huub Browuer & Rutger Claassen (Routledge 2023) pp. 145-165.
Corporations are increasingly asked to specify a ‘purpose.’ Instead of focusing on profits, a company should adopt a substantive purpose for the good of society. This chapter analyses, historicises, and radicalises this call for purpose. It schematises the history of the corporation into two main purpose/power regimes, each combining a way of thinking about corporate purpose with specific institutions to hold corporate power to account. Under the special charter regime of the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, governments chartered companies to pursue specific public purposes. Under criticism for corruption and lack of competition, the special charter regime gave way to the contemporary general incorporation regime, under which no particular purposes are demanded of corporations, and profit-seeking has become the norm. This regime has now come under criticism, with calls for a new social purpose regime. The analysis of these three regimes focuses on politicisation. The chapter argues that orienting companies to substantive social purposes requires politicising the business corporation, creating meaningful accountability mechanisms to align companies with the goals of the public. The purpose paradigm must overcome its political timorousness and be more institutionally radical. The difficulty is doing this without unacceptable corruption and inefficiency. A form of ‘proper politicisation’ is needed. At the end of the chapter, some directions for reform are discussed, which may deliver on that desideratum.
Managerial Discretion, Market Failure and Democracy
Journal of Business Ethics 185, no. 1 (1 June 2023): 33–47.
Managers often have discretion in interpreting their ethical requirements, and they should seek democratic guidance in doing so. The undemocratic nature of managerial ethical discretion is shown to be a recurring problem in business ethics. Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) is introduced as a theory better positioned to deal with this problem than other views. However, due to epistemic uncertainty and conceptual indeterminacy, the MFA is shown to allow a much wider range of managerial discretion than initially appears. The paper explores how this range can be narrowed down with democratic input, comparing models based on formal state institutions and on the informal public sphere. A case study from the pharmaceutical industry illustrates the merits of the informal public sphere approach.
Keywords: Market failures approach; Political Corporate Social Responsibility; Business ethics and democracy
The corporate power trilemma (with Rutger Claassen)
Journal of Politics 84, no. 4 (2022).
Authors critical of corporate power focus almost exclusively on one solution: bringing it under democratic control. However important this is, there are at least two other options, which are rarely discussed: reducing powerful firms’ size and influence, or accepting corporate power as a necessary evil. This paper provides a comparative perspective for evaluating all three options. It argues that the trade-offs we face in responding to corporate power have a trilemmatic structure. The pure strategies of accepting powerful firms, breaking them up, or rendering them more accountable are each incompatible with one of three important values: power balance, economies of scale, and minimising agency costs, respectively. While the latter two concepts are purely economic and efficiency-based, the value of power balance can be grounded in a variety of reasons. Different normative interpretations of power balance are discussed, along with their implications for policy choices within the trilemma.
The capital flight quadrilemma: Democratic trade-offs and international investment
Ethics & Global Politics 14(4): 199–217 (12 October 2021).
This article argues that capital flight of real investment presents governments with a quadrilemma. First, governments can tailor their policies to attract investors – but this is incompatible with a whole range of alternative policy choices. Second, they can simply accept capital flight – but this is incompatible with a robust capital stock and tax base. Third, they can harmonize its taxes and regulations with other states – but this is incompatible with international independence. Fourth, they can impose capital controls – but this is incompatible with international capital mobility. These incompatibilities make up four different goals, the value of which are described. Strategies may be mixed, but the pursuit of any three goals must always come at the expense of the fourth.
Keywords: Capital flight; Tax competition; Capitalism and democracy; Foreign direct investment; Global economic governance; International tax policy.
An epistemic argument for an egalitarian public sphere
Episteme (26 October 2020).
Abstract: The public sphere should be regulated so the distribution of political speech does not correlate with the distribution of income or wealth. A public sphere where people can fund any political speech from their private holdings is epistemically defective. The argument has four steps. First, if political speech is unregulated, the rich predictably contribute a disproportionate share. Second, wealth tends to correlate with substantive political perspectives. Third, greater quantities of speech by the rich can “drown out” the speech of the poor, because of citizens’ limited attention span for politics. Finally, the normative problem with all this is that it reduces the diversity of arguments and evidence citizens become familiar with, reducing the quality of their political knowledge. The clearest implication of the argument is in favour of strict contribution limits and/or public funding for formal political campaigns, but it also has implications for more informal aspects of the public sphere.
Keywords: Money in politics; Campaign finance; Capitalism and democracy; Epistemic democracy; Deliberative democracy; Public sphere
The choice of efficiencies and the necessity of politics
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (29 July 2020) .
Abstract: Efficiency requires legislative political institutions. There are many ways efficiency can be promoted, and so an ongoing legislative institution is necessary to resolve this choice in a politically sustainable and economically flexible way. This poses serious problems for classical liberal proposals to constitutionally protect markets from government intervention, as seen in the work of Ilya Somin, Guido Pincione & Fernando Tesón and others. The argument for the political nature of efficiency is set out in terms of both Pareto optimality and aggregate welfare maximisation, and similar arguments can be generalised to other social values.
Keywords: Efficiency; Constitutionalism; Circumstances of politics; Markets; Ilya Somin; Classical liberalism
Experiments in distributive justice and their limits
Critical Review 28(3–4): 461–483 (October 1, 2016).
Abstract: Mark Pennington argues political systems should be decentralized in order to facilitate experimental learning about distributive justice. Pointing out the problems with Pennington’s Hayekian formulation, I reframe his argument as an extension of the Millian idea of “experiments in living.” However, the experimental case for decentralization is limited in several ways. Even if decentralization improves our knowledge about justice, it impedes the actual implementation of all conceptions of justice other than libertarianism. I conclude by arguing for the compatibility of egalitarian redistribution with the epistemic virtues of markets pointed out by Hayek.
Keywords: decentralization, epistemic democracy, experiments in living, distributive justice, knowledge problem, liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, Mark Pennington, moral epistemology, rational ignorance
Under review
Workplace democracy as distributive justice
This paper sets out the conditions under which state promotion of workplace democracy advances distributive justice. The standard argument for promoting workplace democracy has been to focus only on the equal distribution of the good of power within the firm, ignoring the wider picture. I show that it does not straightforwardly follow that requiring workplace democracy would improve the position of workers, but sketch when this is likely to be true. I conclude by examining potential impacts on third parties in order to explain when promoting workplace democracy can make a positive contribution to the pursuit of distributive justice more generally.
Neutral instrumentalism: Motivating epistemic democracy
Normative epistemic approaches to democracy require a stance I call ‘neutral instrumentalism’. Regimes must be assessed instrumentally, according to the quality of their outcomes. However, to make sense of focusing on the epistemic properties of institutions (rather than just observing empirically which kinds of institutions tend to produce one’s preferred outcomes), instrumentalism must be side-constrained by a principle of neutrality. This requires that we assess political institutions without relying on any particular conception of justice or controversial beliefs about how the world works. Taken together, instrumentalism and neutrality recommend features of political systems that people can agree will lead towards better decisions, regardless of their first-order political disagreements. I argue for the coherence of this stance, assess its implications, and give reasons why one might adopt it.
This page last updated January 2024.