Abstract
This article argues that the price obtainable in an open market provides the best standard for determining the justice or injustice of the price of a product. The article argues that this standard, which is closely related to positions which have been held for hundreds of years, is superior to several alternative conceptions of the just price that have been put forward in recent years and is not subject to fundamental criticisms which can be addressed to them. The article also shows how this standard is grounded in more fundamental principles of justice such as desert and equality.
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Notes
Another statement of Zwolinski in the same article seems to show greater confidence in the notion of fair prices: “[W]hat is clearly morally required in this situation is rescue at a fair price, even if what exactly constitutes a fair price is not itself entirely clear” (Zwolinski 2008: 366). Still, he gives no indication, however general, of what that fair price might be.
I do not discuss in this section Christian Michael’s article in which he defends the thesis that a just price is “one that is agreed upon in the course of a voluntary transaction” (Michel 1999:193). This thesis is sufficiently criticized in Wertheirmer (1996) and Elegido (2009). Ultimately, as Michael Sandel has pointed out, “of any contractual agreement, however free, it is always intelligible and often reasonable to ask the further question, ‘But is it fair, what they have agreed to?’, where this question cannot be translated to the merely vacuous question, ‘But is it what they have agreed to?’ What makes it fair is not just that it was agreed to, but is a further question.” (Sandel 1982: 106). I do not discuss either Walsh and Lynch’s thesis that “[p]ricing is unjust when the profit motive plays an undue role in the all-things-considered determinations of vending agents, when it is overly-determining at the expense of significant other-regarding moral considerations” (Walsh and Lynch 2002: 19). The reason why I do not discuss it is that the issue that interests me in this paper is whether the injustice of the price, considered in itself, can ever be one of those considerations and this is not a topic that they discuss in detail, except for the purpose of criticizing the view they call “market conventionalism.” The criticisms they address to this view (excepting the last one in p. 14 of their article, which is sufficiently addressed in Elegido 2009) are not relevant to an assessment of the open market standard
In the following paragraphs, I focus on my disagreements with Koehn and Wilbratte. My discrepancies with Meng are narrower in scope. I very much like the way in which he relates his thesis on pricing to basic human goods. Where we part ways is not at the level of ultimate principles, but in the application of these principles to the complexities of economic life. In the first place, I would stress that selling or buying at the just price promotes the good of just interaction among members of a community and not just the specific goods (e.g., health or knowledge) that the buyer is trying to foster in buying a specific product. Where the seller sells for what the good is worth (as determined by the criteria I identify below) she cooperates with the buyer for their mutual benefit and that in itself is an intelligible good even if, because of her competing responsibilities, she is not able to help the buyer in promoting better the concrete goods that motivated him to make that purchase. Secondly, while Meng acknowledges the important role of competing responsibilities in identifying our concrete ethical responsibilities, in applying this concept to economic exchanges the only concrete competing responsibility that he identifies is ensuring the survival of the firm. But the concrete responsibilities of the managers of most business firms are much wider than this and require more resources than those sufficient to ensure the survival of the firm.
I do not exclude that on further discussion and investigation it may be established that the standard does not apply to some additional cases. For that matter, I do not exclude either that on further investigation it may turn out that this standard is faulty after all. The point is that I am making a definite claim about the applicability of the standard and that this is obviously preferable to a situation where no claim about that is even made.
It is in fact well known that the laws of many countries make use of precisely this standard without any further epistemological agonies. Many references can be found in Eisenberg (1982).
As opposed to those people who are willing to help coffee growers by paying a premium price for fair trade coffee.
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Elegido, J.M. The Just Price as the Price Obtainable in an Open Market. J Bus Ethics 130, 557–572 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2240-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2240-6