Business Ethics and Eleven Categories of Merit Goods

Wilfried Ver Eecke ()
Additional contact information
Wilfried Ver Eecke: Georgetown University

Chapter Chapter 4 in Ethical Reflections on the Financial Crisis 2007/2008, 2013, pp 45-82 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In this chapter I add the concept of merit goods to the concepts of public goods and the free rider problem as one more economic concept that can be useful in the vocabulary of business ethics. Musgrave defines merit goods as goods that are so meritorious that the government has the right to interfere with consumer preferences. Thus the government can subsidize education and even make it obligatory. Musgrave (and I agree) stresses the fact that the concept of public goods is quite different in that in the provision of public goods the government intends to respect the wishes of consumers. I then produce a Kantian argument to justify and limit merit goods and I defend eleven categories of merit goods. I provide an example of a failed merit good implementation. The food business was successful in preventing the government’s implementation of the merit good program for breast feeding. Our question is whether, and when, business leaders have the obligation not to try to stop the implementation of a proven merit good. At the end of the chapter I argue that the idea of merit good expands the notion of stakeholder beyond what the concept of public good is doing.

Keywords: Business ethics; Financial crisis 2007–208; Breast feeding; Ethical conflicts; Public goods; Categories of merit goods; Property rights; Economic efficiency; Education; Safety net; Public health measures; Well-functioning social contract; Transparency; Strategic planning; Environmental protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:spbchp:978-3-642-35091-7_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642350917

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-35091-7_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in SpringerBriefs in Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().