Joseph Heath
Biographic Data
| ID | 3672630 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph Heath |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph |
| FAMILY NAME | Heath |
| SIGNATURE | HEATH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6024-4371 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 48 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The enforcement threshold approach to harm reduction
The harm reduction approach to public policy is canonically associated with the institution of supervised consumption sites for drug users. In recent work, both Daniel Weinstock and Shannon Dea have argued that the basic structure of normative reasoning employed in this case can be applied in many other policy domains. Harm reduction, they claim, constitutes a general approach to reasoning about policy questions in deeply non-ideal circumstances.…
Intergenerational and intragenerational cooperation
This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Michael Otsuka’s book, How to Pool Risk Across Generations . Following Otsuka, one may distinguish three distinct systems of cooperation within a standard pension arrangement: the retirement system, the longevity risk pool and the investment risk pool. It is important to observe, however, that only the retirement system constitutes a genuine system of intergenerational cooperation, the other two are …
Hussain on the Market
A critique of capitalism, in order to count as such, must identify a problem that is not shared by all other feasible economic systems, for this would amount to little more than a complaint (or kvetch) about the human condition. The distinction between critique and kvetch raises the question of what constitutes a feasible alternative to capitalism. Although it sounds as though this is a pragmatic or technical question, I will argue that it is usu…
Are cooperatives more virtuous than corporations
There are several sectors of the economy in which cooperatives have flourished, competing successfully against standard business corporations. The best explanation for their success is that they provide superior benefits to their members . The question addressed by this paper is whether cooperatives also provide important benefits to society, such that non-members should prefer a cooperative economy to one dominated by business corporations. It h…
Why a UBI Will Never Be High Enough
Schemes to replace traditional welfare programmes with a universal basic income (UBI) are sometimes presented as a way to reduce overall economic inequality. But because they lower the implicit marginal taxation rate of individuals entering the workforce, they have the effect of increasing economic inequality between those who opt out of the workforce and those who choose to participate. This article examines the effect that an increase in this i…
A Harm Reduction Approach to Attitudinal Racism
Although the harm-reduction approach to policy is most familiar from debates over public health and drug abuse, it provides a perfectly general framework for thinking about normative aspects of policy in non-ideal contexts. This paper seeks to apply a generalized harm reduction approach to the problem of attitudinal racism. Psychological research suggests that racism is unlikely to be completely eradicated, as a result of which a zero-tolerance a…
The challenge of policing minorities in a liberal society
The problem with police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. Ta-Nehisi Coates To change the police without changing the police role in society is as futile as the labors of Sisyphus. John van Maanen This question is, I will argue, of considerable importance to political philosophy, because it exposes a tension in the liberal project as a whole. It has, unfortunately, been subject to relative neglec…
The violence inherent in the system
The concept of ‘the violence inherent in the system’ was famously satirized by Monty Python in their movie The Holy Grail. In order to avoid ridicule, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped using the expression. The underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase. Because of this, there has been little explicit disc…
Cooperation and Social Justice
A market failures approach to justice in health
It is generally acknowledged that a certain amount of state intervention in health and health care is needed to address the significant market failures in these sectors; however, it is also thought that the primary rationale for state involvement in health must lie elsewhere, for example in an egalitarian commitment to equalizing access to health care for all citizens. This paper argues that a complete theory of justice in health can be derived f…
Intergenerational Cooperation and the Social Contract
John Rawls made the enormously influential suggestion that society can be conceived of as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” governed by a “theory of justice,” which is a set of principles that specify an acceptable division of the “benefits and burdens of cooperation.” It follows, however, that if there are no opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation in a particular domain of social interaction, then these interactions cann…
The Failure of Traditional Environmental Philosophy
Post-deliberative Democracy
Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors hav…
Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy
Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions in order to over…
An ethical framework for global vaccine allocation
The Fair Priority Model offers a practical way to fulfill pledges to distribute vaccines fairly and equitably
The Moral Status of Profit
There is a common fallacy, among critics of capitalism, that because firms are licensed to pursue profits, the purpose of the economic system as a whole must be to facilitate the realization of such profits. This is manifestly not the case, because the design of markets, including the insistence on competition between firms, is intended to bid profits down to zero. The lure of profit is what leads firms to compete with one another, which creates …
On the Very Idea of a Just Wage
The way that wages are determined in a market economy produces results that strike most people as morally counterintuitive, if not positively unjust. I argue that there is an important and easily defensible principle underlying the system—it is designed to channel labour to its best employment, the way that it does any other resource. But many consider this defence too minimal, and so strive to find a thicker, more robust moral principle that can…
Morality, Competition, and the Firm
"In this collection of provocative essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations that private actors in a market economy have toward each other and to society. In a sharp break with traditional approaches to business ethics, Heath argues that the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the…
Rebooting discourse ethics
In this article I argue that the conception of discourse ethics that Jürgen Habermas advances in his seminar paper, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, is subject to significant revision in later work. The central difference has to do with the status of the universalization principle and its relationship to the ‘rightness’ validity claim. The earlier view is structured by a desire to provide a weak-transcendenta…
Habermas
This article is a review of Hugh Baxter’s book, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. The book is applauded for its accurate presentation of Habermas’s philosophical system, as well as its sophisticated treatment of the distinction that Habermas draws between system and lifeworld. Reservations are expressed, however, about Baxter’s willingness to jettison that distinction entirely, in favour of general systems theory
Responses to ‘The academic rat race
Responses to ‘The academic rat race: dilemmas and problems in the structure of academic competition’, published in Learning and Teaching 5.2 from Mary Taylor Huber, Joseph Heath, Rebecca Boden, John Craig and Christopher Newfield
Ideal theory in an n th-best world
One of the most troubling features of international trade is that it often involves exchange between individuals facing dramatically different life circumstances, who therefore derive different levels of benefit from the exchange. Most obviously, wages are extremely low in underdeveloped countries. However, the principle underlying these wages is the same as the one the dictates wage levels in wealthy countries. It is, therefore, difficult to cri…
The Structure of Intergenerational Cooperation
Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason
Jürgen Habermas
The significance of Kant s thought is matched by its complexity. His revolutionary ideas are systematically interconnected and he presents them using a forbidding technical vocabulary. A careful investigation of the key concepts that structure Kant s work is essential to the comprehension of his philosophical project. This book provides an accessible introduction to Kant by explaining each of the key concepts of his philosophy. The book is organi…
The Benefits of Cooperation
The Structure of Intergenerational Cooperation
Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior
Following the Rules
For centuries, philosophers have been puzzled by the fact that people often respect moral obligations as a matter of principle setting aside considerations of self-interest. This text shows how rule-following can be understood as an essential element of rational action
Dworkin’s auction
Ronald Dworkin’s argument for resource egalitarianism has as its centerpiece a thought experiment involving a group of shipwreck survivors washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who decide to divide up all of the resources on the island equally using a competitive auction. Unfortunately, Dworkin misunderstands how the auction mechanism works, and so misinterprets its significance for egalitarian political philosophy. First, he makes it seem as t…
Post-deliberative Democracy
Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors hav…
Liberalization, modernization, westernization
This paper distinguishes three distinct processes of change that a system of values can undergo: modernization, liberalization and westernization. Modernization refers to the changes needed to establish compatibility with science and technology, along with the functional demands of a capitalist economy. Liberalization refers to the changes needed to bring values into alignment with the requirements of a bureaucratic nation-state, along with the s…
Rational choice as critical theory
Habermas has argued that many of the endemic socio- economic problems of Western society are either symptoms or prod ucts of a 'lopsided' process of cultural rationalization, one that has emphasized instrumental forms of rationality over communicative. But other than presenting a rather general typology of lifeworld pathologies, Habermas has not done much to specify what these problems might be, nor has he provided any 'middle-range' analysis of …
What is a validity claim
Even though the concept of a 'validity claim' is central to Habermas's theory of communicative action, he has never given a precise definition of the term. He has stated only that truth is a type of validity claim, and that rightness and sincerity are analogous to truth. This paper explores the basis of this analogy, arguing that rightness and sincerity must share at least two characteristics with the truth predicate: each must be the designated …
The challenge of policing minorities in a liberal society
The problem with police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. Ta-Nehisi Coates To change the police without changing the police role in society is as futile as the labors of Sisyphus. John van Maanen This question is, I will argue, of considerable importance to political philosophy, because it exposes a tension in the liberal project as a whole. It has, unfortunately, been subject to relative neglec…
The problem of foundationalism in Habermas's discourse ethics
L'A. etudie le probleme du fondationnalisme dans la theorie de l'argumentation morale developpee par J. Habermas. L'A. defend la these selon laquelle une telle conception du discours pratique implique le recours illegitime, mais necessaire, a un mode fondationnaliste de justification. L'A. montre que le principe fondamental d'argumentation applique par Habermas (sous la denomination U) releve d'une erreur d'ordre naturaliste et psychologique
Are cooperatives more virtuous than corporations
There are several sectors of the economy in which cooperatives have flourished, competing successfully against standard business corporations. The best explanation for their success is that they provide superior benefits to their members . The question addressed by this paper is whether cooperatives also provide important benefits to society, such that non-members should prefer a cooperative economy to one dominated by business corporations. It h…
Rebooting discourse ethics
In this article I argue that the conception of discourse ethics that Jürgen Habermas advances in his seminar paper, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, is subject to significant revision in later work. The central difference has to do with the status of the universalization principle and its relationship to the ‘rightness’ validity claim. The earlier view is structured by a desire to provide a weak-transcendenta…
Ideal theory in an n th-best world
One of the most troubling features of international trade is that it often involves exchange between individuals facing dramatically different life circumstances, who therefore derive different levels of benefit from the exchange. Most obviously, wages are extremely low in underdeveloped countries. However, the principle underlying these wages is the same as the one the dictates wage levels in wealthy countries. It is, therefore, difficult to cri…
Habermas and analytical Marxism
John Roemer once described the ‘intellectual foundations’ of analytical Marxism as the recognition that, despite having a valid core, Marxism rested upon outdated social science. The solution, he believed, was to update the theory ‘using state-of-the-art methods of analytical philosophy and “positivist” social science’. If one takes this definition literally, Jürgen Habermas’ early work qualifies as that of an analytical Marxist. Yet although he …
The Transcendental Necessity of Morality
David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational ch…
Culture
Inscriptions of Exile
The body is an overdetermined concept, burdened with religious and philosophical as well as psychoanalytic, sexual and racial meanings. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, when its beauty and health were emphasized by the sculptors, the body has occupied an important place in Western culture. In the Christian era, the symbolism of the body undergoes a profound transformation; now it is the wounded and suffering body (emblematically presented in the form…
Inscriptions of Exile
The body is an overdetermined concept, burdened with religious and philosophical as well as psychoanalytic, sexual and racial meanings. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, when its beauty and health were emphasized by the sculptors, the body has occupied an important place in Western culture. In the Christian era, the symbolism of the body undergoes a profound transformation; now it is the wounded and suffering body (emblematically presented in the form…
The problem of foundationalism in Habermas's discourse ethics
L'A. etudie le probleme du fondationnalisme dans la theorie de l'argumentation morale developpee par J. Habermas. L'A. defend la these selon laquelle une telle conception du discours pratique implique le recours illegitime, mais necessaire, a un mode fondationnaliste de justification. L'A. montre que le principe fondamental d'argumentation applique par Habermas (sous la denomination U) releve d'une erreur d'ordre naturaliste et psychologique
Rational choice as critical theory
Habermas has argued that many of the endemic socio- economic problems of Western society are either symptoms or prod ucts of a 'lopsided' process of cultural rationalization, one that has emphasized instrumental forms of rationality over communicative. But other than presenting a rather general typology of lifeworld pathologies, Habermas has not done much to specify what these problems might be, nor has he provided any 'middle-range' analysis of …
A Multi-Stage Game Model of Morals by Agreement
If there is one aspect of David Gauthier's program for a contractualist morality that has been most sceptically received, it is his view that instrumentally rational agents would choose to adopt a disposition that would in turn constrain their future choices. Instead of remaining “straightforward maximizers” caught in a suboptimal state of nature, they would become “constrained maximizers” who could avoid prisoner's dilemmas (PDs) by engaging in …
What is a validity claim
Even though the concept of a 'validity claim' is central to Habermas's theory of communicative action, he has never given a precise definition of the term. He has stated only that truth is a type of validity claim, and that rightness and sincerity are analogous to truth. This paper explores the basis of this analogy, arguing that rightness and sincerity must share at least two characteristics with the truth predicate: each must be the designated …
Culture
Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior
Communicative Action and Rational Choice
In this book Joseph Heath brings Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas's use of speech act theory to explain social order and outlines a multidimension…
The Transcendental Necessity of Morality
David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational ch…
Response to Narveson
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The Rebel Sell
Nation of Rebels
In this wide-ranging and perceptive work of cultural criticism, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter shatter the most important myth that dominates much of radical political, economic, and cultural thinking. The idea of a counterculture -- a world outside of the consumer-dominated world that encompasses us -- pervades everything from the antiglobalization movement to feminism and environmentalism. And the idea that mocking or simply hoping the system w…
Liberalization, modernization, westernization
This paper distinguishes three distinct processes of change that a system of values can undergo: modernization, liberalization and westernization. Modernization refers to the changes needed to establish compatibility with science and technology, along with the functional demands of a capitalist economy. Liberalization refers to the changes needed to bring values into alignment with the requirements of a bureaucratic nation-state, along with the s…
Dworkin’s auction
Ronald Dworkin’s argument for resource egalitarianism has as its centerpiece a thought experiment involving a group of shipwreck survivors washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who decide to divide up all of the resources on the island equally using a competitive auction. Unfortunately, Dworkin misunderstands how the auction mechanism works, and so misinterprets its significance for egalitarian political philosophy. First, he makes it seem as t…
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism
In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political the…
Rawls on Global Distributive Justice
Critical response to John Rawls's The Law of Peoples has been surprisingly harsh) Most of the complaints centre on Rawls's claim that there are no obligations of distributive justice among nations. Many of Rawls's critics evidently had been hoping for a global application of the difference principle, so that wealthier nations would be bound to assign lexical priority to the development of the poorest nations, or perhaps the primary goods endowmen…
Response to Critics
Like most books in philosophy, Communicative Action and Rational Choice contains a large number of arguments (six big ones, by my count, plus dozens of smaller ones). Each of these arguments I adhere to with a greater or lesser degree of conviction. Some of them I think are pretty decisive. In other cases, I was doing the philosophical equivalent of throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks. Of course, I did not present things that…
The Benefits of Cooperation
Political Egalitarianism
Following the Rules
For centuries, philosophers have been puzzled by the fact that people often respect moral obligations as a matter of principle setting aside considerations of self-interest. This text shows how rule-following can be understood as an essential element of rational action
Habermas and analytical Marxism
John Roemer once described the ‘intellectual foundations’ of analytical Marxism as the recognition that, despite having a valid core, Marxism rested upon outdated social science. The solution, he believed, was to update the theory ‘using state-of-the-art methods of analytical philosophy and “positivist” social science’. If one takes this definition literally, Jürgen Habermas’ early work qualifies as that of an analytical Marxist. Yet although he …
Three Evolutionary Precursors to Morality
Recent evolutionary thinking suggests that morality may have three distinct roots, corresponding to the three “master concepts” in the history of philosophical ethics: sympathy, virtue, and duty. Evolutionary biologists are nearly unanimous in the view that there are two distinct mechanisms that can generate altruism in other animal species, and there is increasing recognition that there must be a third mechanism at work among humans. Altruism in…
Comment on Andreou
This comment takes issue with the opposition that Andreou draws between the “exalted” and the “worldly” view. It argues instead for a distinction between “miswanting” and “competitive consumption” as rival explanations for the failure of economic growth to increase average levels of subjectively reported happiness in developed nations. It ends with a caution against over-reliance upon happiness research as an argument for environmentally-motivate…
Jürgen Habermas
The significance of Kant s thought is matched by its complexity. His revolutionary ideas are systematically interconnected and he presents them using a forbidding technical vocabulary. A careful investigation of the key concepts that structure Kant s work is essential to the comprehension of his philosophical project. This book provides an accessible introduction to Kant by explaining each of the key concepts of his philosophy. The book is organi…
Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (13 works) · Law (10 works)