HRM AND THE ETHICS OF COMMODIFIED WORK 107market there will be a strongtendencyfor that thing no longer to be valued
intrinsically. The Corrosion Thesis says that there is a tension between market
institutions and intrinsic valuation such that intrinsic valuation tends to be
evacuated when the two encounter one another. Market institutions, such as
price, corrode our capacity to value goods intrinsically.
In illustrating the difference it is useful to think of the Corrosion Thesis
analogously in terms of the medical model of diseases such as cancer, wherein
alleged causal factors like smoking are understood not as fully determining but
rather as providing predisposing factors towards the disease. Equally, market
institutions provide predisposing factors towards evacuation. Moreover, as
in the medical model, asinglecounterexample will not disprove the case.
Thus, with regards to the putative relationship between smoking and cancer,
a single counterexample—such as a healthy octogenarian who has smoked
heavily for all of his adult life—does not prove no causal relationship exists.
In a similar vein, the presentation of a single counterexample where market
institutions and intrinsic valuation coexist will not prove the falsity of the
Corrosion Thesis. Nor do logically possible, but physically impossible, coun-
terexamples disprove the Corrosion Thesis any more than they would in the
medical case. Hence, rather than being a sufficient condition, incorporation
into the market is best thought of as apredisposing factorfor the evacuation
of value.
Perhaps even more controversially, I propose that market institutionstend
to corrodeintrinsic valuation. It would, of course, be possible to have predis-
posing factors for outcomes that rarely or typically did not eventuate. But
the norms associated with market institutions are not like that. When we
commodify goods—and in turn adopt market norms—commodities tend
to become mere commodities. If this is true, and if market institutions do
provide predisposing factors, then we should be particularly wary of buying
and selling anything we regard as intrinsically valuable.
What we have here then is a shift fromnecessitytocontingency. Applied to
work undertaken for remuneration, the claim becomes that there is a strong
tendency for those operating in this context to take a purely instrumental
attitude towards their counterparts on either side of the wage–labour contract.
For employers the tendency is to regard their workers as mere means to profit.
For employees it is to regard their employers as mere means to wages. So
while the compatibilist option is available to both sides of the workplace,
there is a strong tendency for such relationships to be understood in purely
instrumentalist terms.
We might say then that the economic structure of the workplace provides
amoral hazard; that is, it provides a set of circumstances in which occasions
for the performance of morally pernicious attitudes and behaviour are placed
before agents. In this case the moral hazard involves the temptation to regard
one’s employer or employee as a mere means. And here the moral hazard is
more significant for those on the side of the employers since the consequences