Joseph Heath

Heath’s market failures approach follows from his work in political economy. According to Heath, the market is not a system of natural justice. Rather, it is an imperfect but efficient institutional arrangement designed to maximize social welfare by way of an unresolved collective action problem. In other words, markets are "special-purpose institutions designed to promote efficiency", that need to be "embedded within the broader context of a welfare state, which engages in both market-complementing and redistributive policies to claim to be just."

Heath further explains the "public-economic" model this way : "The “classical liberal” state creates the market economy through the institution of property rights and civil contract. The “welfare state” then emerges in those areas where liberal markets fail to produce optimal outcomes. This can take the form of regulatory agencies (in cases where the rules of marketplace competition need to be adjusted), state-owned enterprises (typically in sectors where efficient competition cannot be organized), and public services (in cases where a system of effective property rights cannot be instituted, or where the transaction costs associated with a system of voluntary exchange would be prohibitive). According to this view, the welfare state essentially does the same thing as the market – both are in the business of enabling mutually beneficial forms of cooperation to emerge – it merely organizes the transactions under somewhat different terms. […] The economic model of the welfare state should therefore be interpreted as the view that the state should strive to resolve collective action problems in cases where it can do so more efficiently than other institutional forms." Heath advances that this model has "considerable explanatory power" for these state activities : 1) control of natural monopolies, 2) control of imperfections in existing markets, 3) public provision, 4) the social safety net, 5) minority public goods and 6) governance failures.

Heath is the recipient of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2012). In 2013, Heath was named to the Royal Society of Canada. His popular book Enlightenment 2.0 won the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Joseph Heath FRSC (born 1967) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. He received his Bachelor of Arts from McGill University in 1990, where his teachers included Charles Taylor, and his Master of Arts and doctor of philosophy (1995) degrees are from Northwestern University, where he studied under Thomas A. McCarthy and Jürgen Habermas. He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice theory, action theory, and critical theory.