Business owners sometimes refuse to transact with certain customers on principle, given some normative (political, personal, moral, or religious) commitment which they hold. I call such refusals ‘conscientious refusals.’ Evaluating two possible positions on the permissibility of vendor conscientious refusals, I argue in favor of an impersonal market in which vendor conscientious refusals are generally not justified. I argue impersonal norms, which crowd out conscientious considerations, support pluralist, healthy markets from which we reap individual and communal benefits; further, impersonal markets (...) buttress individual freedom by providing a distinctive sphere of activity characterized by norms of radical inclusivity. These considerations constitute a strong case that vendor conscientious refusals are ceteris paribus unjustified. I conclude by addressing several potential objections to this view. (shrink)

Managers often have discretion in interpreting their ethical requirements, and they should seek democratic guidance in doing so. The undemocratic nature of managerial ethical discretion is shown to be a recurring problem in business ethics. Joseph Heath’s market failures approach (MFA) is introduced as a theory better positioned to deal with this problem than other views. However, due to epistemic uncertainty and conceptual indeterminacy, the MFA is shown to allow a much wider range of managerial discretion than initially appears. The (...) paper explores how this range can be narrowed down with democratic input, comparing models based on formal state institutions and on the informal public sphere. A case study from the pharmaceutical industry illustrates the merits of the informal public sphere approach. (shrink)