How Business Ethics can Accommodate Disruptive Innovation without Devolving into Calvinball

Carson Young (Department of Business Administration) recently published a peer-reviewed commentary on “The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation.”

Abstract

Abraham Singer defends the Market Failures Approach (MFA) to business ethics from the objection that the MFA cannot account for the moral value of disruptive innovation. Singer argues that critics who attack the MFA on these grounds face a dilemma: either accept the MFA, along with its general prohibition on disruptive innovation or reject the very idea that business and market competition should be understood as rule-governed activities at all. This commentary argues that the dilemma Singer poses to MFA critics is a false one.