The legal and moral constraints that apply to markets are oriented principally towards the identifiable harms of individual actors within the market. But the causally significant behavior of markets, taken as a whole, is often constituted by individual behaviors which are themselves not causally or morally significant.
Michael Fuerstein
St. Olaf College
Michael Fuerstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. His research focuses on the norms and practices that facilitate knowledge in social and political contexts. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2009 and, following that, held a post-doc at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. For the 2016-17 year he is a visiting scholar at INSEAD. He has been a recipient of grants/fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the DeKarman Foundation, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the Institute for Humane Studies. His work has been published in a range of venues, including The Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, and Episteme, and he will be joining the editorial board for the Journal of Political Philosophy in January 2017. A current book project – tentatively titled Democratic Experiments – seeks to model the role of democracies in advancing moral knowledge. As an undergraduate, he completed a dual-degree program at Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied jazz saxophone. He continues to perform actively as a musician.