PHIL 270 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Expressivism, John Locke, Yelp
4 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Business Ethics
4.19 Lecture Notes – Product Safety and Affirmative Action
Hasnas
· Two reasons for manufacturers not having a duty for product safety
o Subjectivity of safety
▪ Tradeoffs between cost and safety
▪ We want to avoid paternalism, which is often going to be misguided because regulators
will not have the relevant information
▪ The bigger the information asymmetry, the more regulation we need right?
▪ No! Hasnas thinks the more asymmetrical, the more robust the market is for providing
information
• Exceptions – when then information cannot be brought about via independent
testing
• Not a lot of profit/incentives for firms to pop up who provide information
because information is non-excludable
o But maybe allowed to exclude people from having proprietary
information about your car history or your genome, etc.
• We should always compare the regulated market to the unregulated market
• Market for the market for information?
▪ Using the example of Yelp may not be perfectly analogous with reviews about safety
• Who is going to enter the market for safety information? Are there going to be
enough people who are willing to write reviews about safety? Do we have to pay
people to do it? Is that inefficiency more inefficient than just having a single
regulatory standard?
• Polarized reviews?
▪ Rights-based approach is interesting
• If you are worried about protecting the vulnerable from being exploited, you can
justify regulation (as opposed to libertarianism) consistent with Lockean views
ee though Hasas does’t thik so
• Lockeans can go both ways – regulation/non-regulation
Affirmative Action
Thom Hill
· Forward-looking (utilitarianism) – maximize social welfare going forward
o If the benefits exceed the costs, great, we go with the policy
o Ease racial tensions and will make groups that were discriminated against in the past better off
going forward
· Backward-looking (deontological) – justified purely because of a past injustice
o People’s rights i the past ere iolated ad o they are owed some sort of compensation
o Hard to identify the specific victims and perpetrators of rights-violation, so we create group-
based policies
· Backward looking can be forward looking?
o All harms and benefits in society are probabilistic
o One reason to punish someone is not merely consequentialist, but going forward it minimizes
the probability that they ill iolate soeoe else’s rights to life, etc.
o Lockean deontological view?
· Repayment of tangible debts but also a message to counter the deep insult inherent in racism and
sexism
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