PHIL 270 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Price Gouging, Moral Authority, Public Choice
4 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Business Ethics
4.12 Lecture Notes – Price Gouging & Paid Research
· Thesis: Price gouging is a specific failure of respect for persons by undercutting equitable access to
essential goods.
· Maket’s aility to sole the pole
o Time lag
o Does’t dispute that the market is the most effective
o But the time lag may be too long for some people – the poorest
o All parties must worry about that
· Post-disaster, people are not merely traders in a market
o Inequality – change in the status of people as traders
o Under non-disaster circumstances, people who participate in market exchanges have the choice
to exit and still not be worse off
o Power inequality among people, temporarily a monopoly
o Raises uestio of hethe playes ae tadig o hethe the tasatios ae existing within
a non-market setting
· Vendors have duties
o Given the change of market conditions, vendors have new responsibilities to other humans
o Moral duty of beneficence
o People have a positive duty to pursue a good life
o Vendors have a moral duty not to gouge customers
o Why do vendors have a moral duty?
▪ Produces good consequences?
▪ Produces good character traits?
o Rations scarce goods for the highest purpose
▪ Ice for beer v. ice for medicine
▪ Zwolinski – this depends on the range of alternatives available to the vendors
• Ice vendor is in a position to make more choices
• Can charge at different price points – 10% more than pre-disaster price, 20%,
30% and so on?
• Inelastic demand
▪ Non-worseness objection: you’e ette off ith the tasatios tha you ae ithout it
▪ The buyer and vendor are both better off
▪ The vendor who chooses not to sell resources in the disaster area – e do’t fid people
who do nothing to be morally reprehensible
▪ In France, there are Good Samaritan laws
▪ Arguing that if you blame the price gouger, you must also equally or more so blame the
peso ho does’t do aythig
▪ Pie gouges ae apitalizig o othe people’s despeatio
• “yde says: it’s depedet o the alteaties aailable and the intentions
• I these situatios, e’e oyig aout people takig adatage of people of
vulnerable situations
• Zoliski outes: so it’s ot the pole of aisig pies itself, ut the oal
character of the people involved
· Case 1 – by the system of IP, we will occasionally have a situation in which an important drug is owned
by one person/company, in which they can raise prices 10% or up to 5000%
· Moral outrage is not coming from the act of price raising, but from the intentions of the players
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Document Summary
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