PART II - APPLICATION: A TYPOLOGY OF MARKET-MEDIATED COMPLICITY

Summary

Using our findings and conceptual tools from Part I, the second half of this book examines four types of market-mediated complicity: enabling wrongdoing (e.g., buying sweatshop apparel), precipitating gratuitous harms (e.g., financial speculation), leaving severe pecuniary externalities unattended (e.g., indifference to displaced workers), and reinforcing unjust or harmful socioeconomic institutions or practices (e.g., regressive credit allocation).

All four types of complicity share at least two common features. First, the resulting harm is completely unintended but foreseen. Unlike most tort cases, economic accumulative harms are not one-time events, but ongoing side-effects incurred in the course of market exchange. Hence, the causal links between individual economic choices and their ensuing harmful ripple effects are fairly well documented and widely known in the empirical literature. Second, all four cases entail a contributory fault: there is a causal contribution to the harm, the causally contributory act is faulty, and there is a link between the faulty act and the subsequent harm.

Despite their similarities, these instances of blameworthy material cooperation have significant differences. In particular, we should differentiate “hard complicity” (the first two cases) from “soft complicity” (the last two cases). First, hard complicity is preventable while the occasions for soft complicity are much more difficult to avoid. People's buying and selling decisions precipitate price changes. This is inevitable by the nature of the market. Unfortunately, such price changes reshuffle burdens and benefits within the community (pecuniary externalities), often to the further disadvantage of those who are already struggling.