Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, (...) better suited to this new commercial reality. Scholars working to understand corporate responsibility have invoked Young’s model to some good effect, though often superficially and uncritically. In this paper, we look closely at Young’s social connection model and its potential for helping us understand corporate responsibility in a radically networked world. (shrink)

This essay examines three potential arguments against high-frequency trading and offers a qualified critique of the practice. In concrete terms, it examines a variant of high-frequency trading that is all about speed—low-latency trading—in light of moral issues surrounding arbitrage, information asymmetries, and systemic risk. The essay focuses on low-latency trading and the role of speed because it also aims to show that the commonly made assumption that speed in financial markets is morally neutral is wrong. For instance, speed is a (...) necessary condition for low-latency trading’s potential to cause harm in “flash crashes.” On the other hand, it also plays a crucial role in a Lockean defense against low-latency trading being wasteful developed in this essay. Finally, this essay discusses the implications of these findings for related high-frequency trading techniques like futures arbitrage or latency arbitrage—as well as for an argument as to why quote stuffing is wrong. Overall, the qualifications offered in this essay act as a counterbalance to overblown claims about trading at high speeds being wrong. (shrink)