Lean Out! On the Morality of Engaging in Positional Competitions

Tammy Harel Ben Shahar; Tammy Harel Ben Shahar

doi:10.16995/pp.26050

Lean Out! On the Morality of Engaging in Positional Competitions

Tammy Harel Ben Shahar

Law, University of Haifa, Israel

Philosophers have long debated issues related to the morality of markets, including moral constraints on the types of goods distributed through markets (such as human organs, or intimate relations), and moral constraints on market activities that involve oppression, discrimination or pollution. Common to all these morally problematic behaviors is that moral duties that apply to individuals and moral duties that apply to institutions overlap. In other words, when something is morally reprehensible, all agents are obligated to take part in preventing it: the state is expected to regulate the market to prevent them (and punish for infringements), and at the same time, agents participating in the market must avoid acting immorally.

This article discusses the curious case of positional competitions, in which despite the justice-related problems created by them, the literature discussing them assumes that the duty to decrease or prevent them is placed on institutions alone, and individuals are reasonable and justified in engaging (and thereby aggravating) them. In this article I investigate the possibility that this position is misguided and that agents participating in positional competitions are also, sometimes, morally obligated to resist engaging in and aggravating them, a moral obligation which I call the duty to “lean out.”¹ The article explores the possible grounds for this moral duty and its scope.

Positional goods are goods whose value is determined relatively - according to the amount or value of the good that other people possess.² When other people have more of a positional good than you do (or of better quality), the absolute value of the positional good you possess decreases. For example, the value of money in an auction is positional: whether my money can buy a painting I desire depends on how much money other bidders have. Merely increasing the parties’ absolute amount of a positional good (money in an auction), without changing the parties’ relative positions, does not change each party’s position (ability to place the winning bid).

Positional goods are quite common: K-12 education is positional since students’ relative position determines access to higher education; the quality and prestige of our lawyer affects our chances of winning a lawsuit, therefore legal representation is positional; and criminal justice regulation is positional when crime can “migrate” to neighboring jurisdictions that have more lenient policies. More abstract social rewards like esteem are also often won through positional competitions, for example, through owning luxury goods. All these cases follow a similar structure: positional goods are a means to an end: they determine – competitively - the distribution of scarce “end use goods:” the painting, triumph in court, a crime free neighborhood, and social status. Goods that are not positional to begin with can become positional, if the winner in a competition over them thereby receives access to a scarce end use good.

In the appropriate circumstances, allocating end use goods through positional competitions can escalate into arms races, namely extended positional competitions that are escalated when the competitors iteratively respond to each other.

The orthodox position in the philosophical and economic literature on positional goods is that positional competitions, and especially arms races, are socially undesirable, inefficient, and unfair. When important social rewards are allocated to those who hold positional goods, people are pushed to invest increasing resources to gain relative advantages in positional goods. This competitive behavior is wasteful; every investment is met with similar investment by others, and people’s relative position remains the same. Positional arms races are also typically unfair because they are susceptible to corruption by wealthier, or otherwise more powerful competitors. As a result, winners who gain access to the end use good, are often not the deserving party but the party who is able to invest more resources and persevere in a perpetual arms race.

Because of these negative effects, considerable attention (both by economists and philosophers) has been dedicated to explicating how institutions and regulators should act to decrease positional arms races. But while the literature is saturated with arguments directed at institutions, it has almost nothing to say about the agents engaging in positional competitions, who are considered both rational and morally justified to do so.³ Most positional transactions involve actions that are, in themselves, morally permissible, and are a part of our everyday life as consumers, business owners, students, and citizens. Everyday benign actions such as choosing schools, hiring a lawyer, attempting to boost the prestige of our business, buying clothes or cellular devices, can all be part of positional competitions, so (arguably) this is a case in which legitimate and rational individual choices lead to harmful and unjust outcomes.

This article investigates the possibility that individuals are, sometimes, morally obligated to lean out. Section I sets the stage by defining positional competitions and arms races and describing the current state of the literature. Section II provides working assumptions and hypotheticals that will be used in the argument. Section III is the heart of the article; it explores three possible arguments that might ground a duty to lean out. The first argument (Section III.A) involves “winning for the wrong reasons,” according to which engaging in positional arms races often entails receiving undeserved rewards. The second argument, detailed in Section III.B develops an argument presented by Wahid Hussain according to which in rivalry-based competitions agents disregard other people’s projects, thereby failing to act in solidarity with one another. But while Hussain, in line with the orthodoxy in the literature, places the responsibility to prevent rivalry-based competitions on institutions, this article argues that Hussain’s argument applies also to individuals, who have a moral duty to adequately regard other people’s projects. The third possible basis for a moral duty to abstain from positional competition involves coercion (Section III.C). Arms races often place unreasonable pressure on individuals to invest further resources in the competition and should therefore be viewed as a form of coercion. Although not all definitions of coercion are wide enough to include positional arms races, some definitions, arguably, are.

Given that abstaining from competing in positional arms races has negative consequences for the agents involved, and assuming we do not expect them to sacrifice themselves for others’ sakes, we need to provide an account of when agents are expected to lean out, all things considered. Section IV discusses several factors that help delineate the scope of the duty, including the distinction between “playing to win” and “playing not to lose” (or put differently, the distinction between defensive and offensive consumption of positional goods); the stakes people have in the competition (so, for example, we might not expect gladiators to lean out); and finally, the potential for coordination between parties depending on factors such as the size of the association or community and proximity between its members.

Before laying out the argument, one further introductory comment is due. When considering the duty to lean out, the article focuses on individuals. Institutions are viewed, in line with most of the literature, mainly as potential regulators of positional competitions and as “upstream agents” who can shape the competitions’ conditions and rewards.⁴ But institutions are also often positional competitors. The term “arms race” itself describes a positional competition between enemy states. States also engage in race to the bottom tax competitions, in which they “find themselves forced to react […] in order to prevent substantial capital outflows,”⁵ and the need to prevent crime migration drives neighboring jurisdictions to toughen their crime prevention policies in response to one another.⁶

While the dynamics that drive positional competing apply to competitions involving natural persons and institutions alike, some important normative differences obtain that affect the potential duty to lean out. The kind of harms and injustices resulting from the competition may be different (to the institutions themselves, and to people that comprise them); the availability and effectiveness of regulation mechanisms at the institutional level may differ from those that can be found among individuals thereby affecting moral obligations;⁷ and importantly, some of the moral justifications that underlie the duty to lean out may apply to individuals and not to institutions, or the other way around. For example, institutions may have specific duties that derive from their public role and affect how they are required to act, all things considered. Due to these differences and seeing that existing literature has paid institutions much more attention than individuals, this article will focus exclusively on the latter, and a full analysis of the duty to lean out as it applies to institutions will have to wait for another day.

I. POSITIONAL ARMS RACES: THE ORTHODOX APPROACH

As described above, positional goods’ absolute value is determined relatively, giving rise to competitive consumption. When the circumstances are right, positional competitions can develop into arms races. As opposed to an arms race, a “simple” positional competition is static: competitors are rewarded by their relative holding of a positional good, and they cannot improve their position in response to their rival’s actions. To illustrate, think of two children separately collecting seashells at the beach. When they get back to the beach-house they compare how many seashells each has collected, and their father declares that the winner will decide what they have for lunch. Neither of the children can improve their position in response to finding out the other’s and the end use good, namely the power to decide, is distributed to the child with preferable position. For a positional competition to escalate into an arms race, it must lack such stability and satisfy three conditions. First, it must be extended over time rather than be a one-shot event. Second, parties to the competition must be able to change their holdings of the positional good over time, thereby improving their position in the competition. Third and relatedly, competitors must have some knowledge, or assumed knowledge, concerning other competitors’ actions and positions. This knowledge, or suspicion, that other competitors have improved their position is what motivates competitors to do the same (the second characteristic). Full knowledge, on the other hand, hinders positional arms races, since competitors would not be inclined to invest repeatedly in competing over an end use good when they know their competitor is more likely to prevail.⁸ The three conditions together are what create the iterative and escalating nature of an arms race.

Some arms races don’t involve just two competing parties, responding iteratively to one another. Arms races can be complicated social phenomena involving multiple parties over many years, in which case the iterative dynamic works slightly differently. In the educational arms race, for example, individuals make their educational decisions based on their evaluation of the condition of the arms race, or in other words, what credentials are currently needed in the job market. The iterations are typically not performed repeatedly by the same individuals, as is the case in the bipartite arms race, and each individual decision typically does not trigger a positional response by specific others. Instead, escalation of social arms races is the gradual product of the combined decisions of countless people (and employers’ reactions to the gradual changes in the workforce) over many years.

Positional competitions, and especially positional arms races, give rise to various challenges in terms of efficiency and fairness. Since each investment is matched by one’s opponent, arms races are wasteful, and participants who are scrambling anxiously to get ahead would typically prefer not to engage in them at all.⁹ When everyone stands on tiptoe, as Hirsch famously wrote, no one can see any better.¹⁰

More alarmingly, positional competitions are often unjust; attending a prestigious private school unfairly advantages youngsters in access to higher education compared to equally promising individuals who attended a run-down public school; having inferior legal representation decreases one’s chances of winning a lawsuit, even if their case has the merits, and unequal campaign funding can corrupt political processes.

Additionally, positional competitions force individuals to invest in what counts toward the reward, regardless of its intrinsic importance, at the expense of other things that potentially have more value. Educational arms races, for example, pressure schools and individuals to focus on learning to the test and accumulating credentials, decreasing engagement in intrinsically valuable educational content that cannot easily be measured and signaled.¹¹

Finally, positional competitions have negative consequences in terms of the relations created in the community. Like gladiators in an arena, competitive institutions “pit people against each other,”¹² forcing people to disregard one another’s projects since one person’s success necessitates the other’s failure.

Positional arms races are, therefore, undesirable, and different suggestions have been put forward to contend with them. Most of the literature has focused on one of two strategies: either restricting the consumption of positional goods, or changing the way end use goods are distributed, to decrease incentives for positional competing. For example, alleviating educational arms race requires either restricting advantage-gaining behavior (such as banning private schooling)¹³ or reforming higher education admission policy to eliminate the incentive to gain positional advantage in K-12.¹⁴ Similar discussions have been put forward in various domains including limitations on private donations for political campaigns,¹⁵ taking the allocation of legal representation out of the market,¹⁶ and changing incentive structures to decrease positional consumption,¹⁷ for example by taxing employers who hire candidates with “surplus educational credentials.”¹⁸

The literature has not extended these duties and policies to apply to agents who potentially engage in, and aggravate, positional competitions. There are several possible explanations for this neglect. First, prototypical examples of positional arms races, such as education or luxury goods, are cases of large markets in which knowledge is partial and coordination is difficult. Positional competitions are characterized as market failures, in which coordination is impossible or unlikely and regulation is needed to ensure efficiency. An individual parent deliberating which school to choose for their child, for example, does not know, let alone can influence, what thousands of other parents will decide. In the absence of centralized regulation, therefore, it is ineffective and unfair to expect parents to lean out of the competition. Given the significance (or at least perceived significance) of education for the child’s future opportunities, it is common to think that parents should optimize their child’s position in preparation for the future competition over university admission or jobs.¹⁹

Yet this description is partial and, as I demonstrate later, not all positional arms races involve thousands of individuals who cannot coordinate. Additionally, positional competitions result not only in inefficient market failures but also in unjust allocations, which individuals may have moral responsibility to prevent or alleviate.

Another possible explanation for the lack of discussion of individuals’ obligations vis-a-vis positional arms races, concerns the influential Rawlsian approach that duties of justice apply to the basic structure of society whereas individuals are only obligated to support just institutions.²⁰ Relying on institutions to attend to justice, while individuals have no direct duty to do so, an approach sometimes referred to as dualism, is explained by Rawls as more effective, since institutions are better positioned to promote justice. Dualism also promotes the flourishing of diverse conceptions of the good, because it frees individuals from the need to constantly consider how well others are doing, allowing them to devote their concern to their own affairs. But many philosophers have since criticized Rawls’s view on the division of labor for various reasons, including that the basic structure is, on its own, incapable of correcting for all individual self-interested decisions,²¹ or that dualism is implausible because it entails that individuals who could promote justice in a non-ideal world are under no duty to do so.²² And more generally, while considerations of effectiveness, freedom to pursue one’s life plans, and over demandingness are clearly potent challenges that may restrict the scope of agents’ duties to promote distributive justice, they do not entail that they are never under the duty to directly promote justice.

A noteworthy exception to the orthodox position described above involves Adam Swift’s “How not to be a Hypocrite”²³ which discusses school choice from the parents’ perspective. Swift stresses that parents are under a prima facie obligation to attend local comprehensive schools rather than private or selective schools (or, in my terminology, to lean out) but also stresses that there are various exceptions to that duty. For example, when the local comprehensive school is not only inferior to the private school but objectively inadequate, or if a child is bullied at the public comprehensive school, parents may be permitted, all things considered, to “go private.”

This article endorses Swift’s position on education and aims to put forward a general theoretical argument against the orthodox position that individuals are morally justified in engaging in positional behavior. Institutions that regulate markets or determine the way in which end use goods are distributed surely have an important role in constraining positional arms races, and given problems of coordination and the stakes in question, leaning out is sometimes overdemanding. But it does not logically follow that individuals can always wash their hands clean of their actions when responding to positional competition. In fact, I argue that individuals almost always have a prima facie moral duty to lean out, that exists alongside the obligation of institutions to prevent positional arms races. But what that duty consists in (namely what actions are individuals required not to do), as well as whether individuals are indeed required to lean out, all things considered, depends on various factors.

First, the actions that an individual would have to avoid when they act on their duty to lean out depends, naturally, on the specific competition. In some competitions, leaning out consists in one possible action only – such as not upping one’s bid in an auction. But many competitions are more complex, and a variety of behaviors can escalate them, in which case the duty to lean out, too, could be discharged in various ways. Leaning out can also be performed partially, by decreasing rather than completely avoiding competitive behavior, or choosing a particular type of competitive behavior and avoiding others. For example, leaning out of status competitions in luxury goods can be expressed in various ways: one could avoid consumption altogether, but one could also decrease the amount and frequency of consumption, or “trade down” from premium, high-end brands to cheaper brands. All of these involve leaning out, and one’s choices regarding each of these will determine the extent to which one leans out. That choice, ideally, should be based on moral considerations such as which actions are especially effective in decreasing the bads associated with the arms race, which may have redeeming value or positive externalities, avoiding over-demandingness, etc. The ultimate content and scope of the duty, therefore, is something that requires case to case consideration. More about this will be said in Section IV.

In addition to the value of correcting a mistaken assumption in the literature, highlighting individuals’ moral duty to lean out is important because preventing and regulating positional arms races through institutions has proved ineffective. In his groundbreaking book, Fred Hirsch admits that the design of a satisfactory program to ensure cooperation to prevent positional arms races is a “large and mostly unresolved question.”²⁴ Fifty years and hundreds of studies later, the problem is still surprisingly tenacious. Although positional goods are too varied a category to provide a comprehensive explanation for this difficulty, here are few short gestures at one.

First, positional competitions, especially those meant to signal status, tend to “migrate” in response to regulation, making them difficult to effectively restrict.²⁵ Some types of restrictions on positional goods may even be counter-effective: consuming luxury goods is meant to signal wealth, therefore taxing them, making them even more expensive, increases their signaling power as well as the motivation to acquire them.²⁶ Furthermore, positional competitions are located on all levels of consumption rather than in luxury goods, meaning that restricting positional consumption in gadgets, designer clothes, etc. may be overly restrictive, if not wholly impossible. Finally, competitions are not always socially bad, all things considered. They may have positive externalities, and they may form in socially beneficial practices that we may not want to restrict, such as the competition over good mothering or philanthropical giving.²⁷

There are various possible responses to the challenges in regulating positional goods, but the important thing for our discussion is that the moral duty to lean out is less susceptible to them than regulation is. Since it applies to agents who are making the consumption choices it can capture, with better nuance, the relevant moral considerations: people know, from the inside, if their behavior is motivated by positional competition or by intrinsic values; they can best judge whether they are acting defensively or offensively; they also know what the stakes of competition are for them, and whether cooperation is possible and not too risky. As a result, they are best placed to identify the cases in which they should, in fact, lean out. And while this does not promise compliance, nor an easy way for evaluating people’s behavior “from the outside,” the attempt to delineate the boundaries of the moral duty to lean out can contribute this important and largely overlooked angle to the positional goods scholarship.

II. A MORAL DUTY TO LEAN OUT? WORKING ASSUMPTIONS AND HYPOTHETICALS

In this section I briefly describe four hypothetical cases that will help us think about the moral wrongness of positional competitive behavior. All four hypotheticals involve positional competitive behavior that is otherwise permissible, so that if there is anything wrong or impermissible in their behavior, it is wholly in virtue of the positional competition.

A. Working Assumptions

I propose the following four working assumptions that apply to these cases.

i. The Action that Is Driving the Arms Race Is Not, Itself, Immoral

In discussing competitive behavior in education, Adam Swift gives an example of a mother who is trying to help her daughter get into the cheerleading team. To achieve her goal, the mother can hire a tutor to provide her daughter with extra practice, which is morally benign, but she could also plot to murder her daughter’s rival which, obviously, is not. In what follows, I am interested only in cases in which the action itself (putting aside its competitive nature) is morally permissible. Therefore, if the behavior is morally blameworthy, the blameworthiness is vested in the action’s effect on positional competitions alone.

ii. The Action Is Legally Permissible and Not Prohibited under Other Normative Systems

In a similar vein, I put aside cases in which the action is prohibited by law or is in discord with any other rule, regulation or institutional norm (legal, ethical, professional, rules in sports, etc) that may apply in the domain in which the competition is set. I seek only cases in which actions are permissible according to all relevant rules and norms.

iii. The Wrongness Is Not Vested in the Agent’s Lack of Virtue

We may think that engaging in positional competitions expresses vanity, lack of self-restraint, lack of humility or simplicity, and is therefore a fault in an agents’ character. While this may be the case, I am not interested in whether people who lean out are virtuous, but only in whether they are morally required to do so. Therefore, I put aside any possible virtue-related evaluation of agents’ behavior.

iv. The Wrongness Is Not Vested in People’s Subjective Feelings

Competitions (especially losing in them) often elicit strong emotions in agents: envy, disappointment, humiliation, indignation, and more. However, the harm created by losing positional competitions does not depend on the manifestation of any of these feelings. In fact, losers in positional arms races can be harmed even when they are unaware that a competition took place, or of their relative position in it. When someone pays to jump the organ donation queue, the person being pushed back in line is harmed (waiting time goes up, risk of health deterioration and death increases) even if they are not cognizant of the delay or its cause. So, while hurting people’s feelings and causing emotional suffering is often morally blameworthy, this is not the type of immorality I am interested in.

B. Hypotheticals

Taking into consideration these four working assumptions, I now set up three original hypotheticals, as well as a fourth based on Adam Swift’s work. These hypotheticals will serve as working examples that will help us examine whether we have a moral duty to lean out.

i. INTERN

A law firm hires 20 law students for a summer internship. Summer internships are known to be the most important gateway toward being hired as an associate lawyer, so the interns treat this as an important opportunity, and they will go to great lengths not to blow it, including working hard and putting in long hours. Adam, all too aware of the competition, begins coming in over the weekend, gaining praise from the odd partner who happens to be in the office. His fellow interns are furious, saying that his behavior is not collegial, and unfair. Are they right? What, if anything, is wrong with Adam’s behavior?

Adam would argue, no doubt, that the competition is already going on, everyone is in it, and there is no reason why he shouldn’t do whatever he can to win it. He hasn’t cheated or spoken ill of any of the other interns; he simply worked more hours. If others want to shine, they can go ahead and do whatever they think will make them stand out.

We can sympathize with Adam’s claim. We might think that if someone is to blame, it isn’t Adam, but rather the firm and its partners, who could have regulated the rules of the game to prevent healthy competition from escalating into a full-blown arms race. But this response does not seem fully persuasive, and Adam’s friends’ anger does not seem completely unwarranted. Apart from the obvious conflict of interest that makes it unlikely that the firm will limit interns’ working hours, it simply doesn’t follow from the fact that the firm should have prevented the competition, that Adam is under no moral obligation toward his fellow interns.

ii. LEGAL REPRESENTATION

Brenda has a dispute with her neighbor Ben, who claims her dog ruined his garden. Ben consults ChatGPT and writes a lawsuit which he files on his own. Soon after the lawsuit is filed, Ben receives a letter from Brenda’s lawyer. It turns out that Brenda has hired a reasonably well-known lawyer from a local law firm to represent her. Worried that without a lawyer his chances of winning the case are dim, Ben turns to a top-notch law firm from the city who will represent him in court. The legal fees he will pay more than double those paid by Brenda.

Is there anything wrong with Ben’s behavior? After all, there can only be one winner in the lawsuit, and if he is not lying in court, or bribing the judge, he should be allowed to do all he can to win. Can Brenda still claim that Ben should have chosen a mid-range priced lawyer like she did, instead of hiring the big firm from the city?

iii. DESIGNER CLOTHES

Claire, originally from a modest background, recently graduated from an ivy league business school, and has just landed a job at a prestigious financial corporation. When interviewing for the job, Claire was painfully aware that her suit, purse and shoes, though new and respectable, were a far cry from the norm at the firm. Claire scrapes together some resources to buy at the discount racks at Gucci and Jimmy Choo and shows up at the office feeling relatively good about herself. But it takes only a few weeks for her to realize that buying last season’s clothes is not going to cut it, and that if she wants to be treated like a successful and respectable businesswoman, she needs to keep up with the latest fashion, which seems to renew constantly. Claire is frustrated because of how much she is going to have to invest in something that she doesn’t really care about and feels angry at her colleagues for putting her in that position. But, putting aside the environmental aspect, is buying expensive clothes morally blameworthy? Is Claire justified in finding fault with her colleagues?

iv. PRIVATE AND SELECTIVE SCHOOLS

The final example is based on Adam Swift’s discussion.²⁸ Daniel is contemplating whether to enroll his daughter Debra in the local comprehensive school, or to try to get her into a private selective school. Admission to elite universities has become extremely competitive, and Daniel knows that attending this private school will increase his daughter’s chances. By attending a private school Debra, and other children as lucky as her, are pushing other, equally deserving students who attend local comprehensive schools, back in line. But Daniel could claim that he has a duty to take care of his daughter, and in any case, if she doesn’t attend the school the spot will immediately be taken by someone else, so there is no point in denying Debra the benefits of private education. Is Daniel right or does he have a responsibility not to provide Debra with unfair educational advantages?

III. THREE ARGUMENTS FOR A MORAL DUTY TO LEAN OUT

I argue that in all the hypotheticals above, as well as in other positional competitions, individuals have a prima facie duty to lean out. The following three arguments substantiate this duty.

A. Winning for the Wrong Reasons

Engaging in positional competitive behavior, when successful, has the effect of winning the race, and inevitably-of other people losing. This alone, doesn’t seem morally problematic, let alone a good enough reason to quit the race. Competitions, despite their exclusiveness, are often morally permissible.

The problem with positional competitions, then, is not that the agent’s behavior results in someone else losing, but rather that they are more likely to lose for the wrong reasons. Some positional competitions enable people to improve their chances of winning a reward through behavior that is not rationally related to the official criteria (typically investing money, but there may be other behaviors, such as investing time). In those cases, engaging in the competition means that agents are, in a sense, cheating, robbing the rightful winner of the reward they deserve.

This argument sits nicely with the hypotheticals provided above and suggests that the agents in all four of them are morally blameworthy. Let’s start with INTERN: the permanent job in the firm should (arguably) be offered to the best intern,²⁹ and the number of hours spent in the office is (arguably) not the right criterion for determining who that is. Instead, the best intern is the one with legal knowledge and skills such as research, writing, and reasoning. By coming in over the weekend Adam is, therefore, increasing his chances of winning the competition for the wrong reasons.

One might argue, however, that Adam’s willingness to work hard and long indicates his motivation and dedication, which is a relevant criterion. Working many hours probably also entails accumulating more experience and honing one’s legal skills. If these considerations are what sealed the deal, Adam would be winning for the right reasons, and his fellow interns might have little basis for complaint (there may be other reasons to take issue with his actions, but they are not related to winning for the wrong reasons).

What seems to be wrong with his behavior, however, is the conspicuous nature of Adam’s action, in other words that it sends a visible signal of abilities and motivation, that doesn’t necessarily correlate with its actual value. In as much as it is this signal that affects the decision, rather than his skills, Adam is morally culpable. To drive the point home, lets adjust the hypothetical slightly, so that instead of coming into the office, Adam spends all his weekends at home reading legal textbooks and case law. As a result, his performance improves as do his chances of being chosen for the job. This case is not similarly disturbing. Like a devoted athlete practicing for longer hours (whether or not the coach is around), if Adam wins, he is winning for the right reason.

Moving on to LEGAL REPRESENTATION, engaging in positional competitions increases the likelihood that Ben will win the lawsuit for the wrong reason. A lawsuit should be decided on the merits, namely, the facts and the legal rights and obligations of the parties, and not the prestige of the lawyer. Admittedly, the quality of one’s lawyer can help ensure that the merits of the case are presented properly, but unequal legal representation might distort the legal and factual picture leading to injustice. What makes things worse is that the prestige and size of the legal team in itself affects parties’ chances of winning. More resources entail better ability to dig up evidence and relevant cases, judges and juries may be more attentive to well-known lawyers, and the other party may be intimidated by them. Comparable legal representation (at any level above adequate) neutralizes these effects and increases the chances of the lawsuit being determined on its merits. Therefore, increasing one’s chances of winning by paying more for representation can also be characterized as winning for the wrong reasons.

The remaining two examples also constitute cases of people winning for the wrong reasons. People’s professional and social status should not be decided according to the brands they wear, but by their behavior, values, professional performance, etc. And finally, coveted spots at elite universities should, arguably, distributed according to candidate’s talents and motivation, and wealthy parents’ ability to improve their children’s chances in discord with those criteria constitutes winning for the wrong reasons.³⁰

This explanation of the wrongness of engaging in positional competitions helps us distinguish between competitions that are morally objectionable and those that are not: when competitions measure the “right” thing, they are morally permissible. Losing a sports competition, for example, has harsh consequences for an athlete, often worse than losing a small lawsuit or a specific job opportunity, but most people don’t find it morally disturbing when athletes out-train each other to win a competition. The intuition that we felt regarding education, intern, legal representation, and status, according to which competing is morally blameworthy, is quite absent in these cases because people are rewarded for the right reasons.

Admittedly, people can win for the right reasons while having enjoyed unfair advantage in their ability to develop those abilities. A wealthy athlete, for example, may have better opportunities to train than a poor athlete. But while these cases are indeed problematic in terms of fairness (and therefore might justify intervention), they are not the kind of phenomenon explored here, because they do not violate the integrity of the competition itself as the four hypothetical cases do.

The fact that some positional competitions reward people for the wrong reasons, arguably gives us a good reason to oppose positional competitions. But does this argument necessarily entail that individuals must lean out? One might think that expecting agents to lean out, and thereby increasing their own likelihood of losing, is overly demanding. I disagree. We are quite accustomed to think that athletes should risk losing rather than take chemical enhancements or otherwise cheat. Other positional competitions should have the same constraints.

An important objection, however, is that while some people may indeed engage in positional competitions so that they can get an (unfair) leg-up in the race, many times the motivation is quite different. Some agents engage in positional competitions with a defensive motivation: to make sure they are not “left behind”; or in other words to see that they do not lose for the wrong reasons. To make things even more complicated, when positional competitions are large scale (such as educational arms races, for example), people often have imperfect knowledge regarding their competitors’ actions and intentions, so defensive motivation can entail unlimited consumption even without the competitors doing so first.³¹

While this objection is persuasive, it does not refute the argument; rather it elucidates when positional competing may be justified, namely when it restores fairness to the competition rather than corrupting it. This point will be discussed further in Section IV.

Another possible objection concerns the fact that positional competing provides agents with an opportunity to compensate for other disadvantages. For example, the less talented, through no fault of their own, have much smaller chances of accessing higher education, and therefore they invoke other advantages they have, such as financial advantage, to gain access. In status competitions, people who are physically unattractive, or lack charisma, for example, can buy designer clothes to improve their position. Limiting positional competitions is unfair because it bars additional pathways for obtaining valuable end use goods.

This claim, though initially attractive, is confused. Our sympathy toward those who are less talented, or our (justified) criticism of the unfair exclusivity of higher education should not translate into support for positional competitions. By allowing positional competitions, the critics accept current admission practices as inevitable, allowing cheating to compensate for disadvantage. However, current practices are not inevitable, and injustices can and should be addressed by changing them. For example, unjust allocation of higher education should be addressed by aligning admission policy to our preferred conception of justice. And in any case allowing people to gain access by engaging in positional competing is only partly helpful, because although positional competitions do open an additional pathway to obtaining the end use good, it too is limited to some (typically the wealthy) and leaves many other deserving individuals behind.

When we think of another example, LEGAL REPRESENTATION, it is easy to see why “enabling alternative pathways to success” is a bad justification for allowing positional competitions. Assume that Ben has a weaker legal case than Brenda, because Ben is in fact, responsible for the mess in his garden, and not Brenda. It would be ludicrous to say that the fact that he has smaller chances to win is unfair and that he should, therefore, be allowed, as a matter of justice, to reinforce his chances in court in alternative ways (by hiring an expensive lawyer).

B. Estrangement: Showing Disregard for Other People

The second possible grounds on which agents’ engagement in positional competitions is immoral does not rely on the results of the competition, but rather on the way competing makes us behave toward one another. Specifically, that it makes us disregard other people and their projects.

In his article, “Pitting People Against Each Other,” Wahid Hussain develops the “estrangement account,” according to which public institutions in a liberal democracy are responsible for structuring relationships between individuals in ways that are “appropriate to solidaristic partnership among citizens.”³² Endorsing a relational account of justice, he argues against responding to scarcity with “rivalry defining arrangements,” namely arrangements in which fulfilling one agent’s aspirations in compliance with the rules entails ruling out the possibility of another agent successfully carrying out their plans. Instead, scarcity should be dealt with in other ways that do not cause such “estrangement.” Thus, a scarce organ should not be distributed among those in need of transplantation through a competitive tennis match (or a bidding process), in which each agent must act to thwart the chances of others. Drawing a lottery to determine who gets the organ for transplantation is preferable, according to Hussain, because agents cannot affect the result, and rivalry between agents is prevented. Social institutions turn scarcity into rivalry when they design the allocation of scarce resources more like the tennis match than the lottery.

Importantly, the wrongness of rivalry is not vested in people’s feelings, nor in the distributive inequality inherent to them. Rather, what is doing the moral work, according to Hussain, is that the decision-making mechanism is structured in a way that candidates must act to “foreseeably crush each other’s dreams to get ahead.” It is the estrangement, namely the fact that people in a solidaristic relationship fail to demonstrate the required concern for each other, that is defective.

Hussain limits his argument to nonvoluntary, solidaristic associations, contexts in which people are, largely, unable to leave. There are different kinds of solidaristic associations, each entailing different levels of duties. People hold minimal duties toward their fellow humans (that would rule out gladiator fights, for example), stronger duties toward compatriots, and even stronger duties toward members of closer associations. Hussain’s argument points to institutions as responsible for structuring non-rivalry ways to deal with scarcity, whereas individuals, on his account, have no moral duty to refrain from competing. In fact, rivalry defining arrangements are set up in his theory in a way that leaves participants with little agency, and therefore they cannot be expected to lean out.

Endorsing the fundamental idea in Hussain’s account, I argue that agents are also under a moral duty, at least sometimes, not to act with disregard to others. While all positional competitions create rivalry, they do not always signal the immediate end of all solidaristic duties; we owe some duties of solidarity even to people we are in competition with. This depends on the type of relationship we have with them, as well as the nature of the contest.

Starting with the type of relationship: assume that the rival gladiators are father and son, for example. The nature of that relationship and the duties we have toward our children and parents would surely affect the moral duties within the contest, probably casting doubt on the conviction that gladiators have no moral duties toward one another. On the other hand, competitions can also change the nature of relationships, affecting the duties of solidarity parties may have toward one another. A legal dispute, for example, may represent a crisis in a relationship, meaning that the strength of the solidarity commanded toward our opponent may decrease.

The nature of competitions also affects the kind of solidaristic behavior we might be expected to demonstrate. Some competitions are inherently designed to involve a clash between competitors (what Shai Agmon calls “friction competition”).³³ In a boxing match, for example, victory is obtained through physically overcoming the opponent and thwarting their moves. They can’t win by merely “doing their own thing,” they must run their opponent down. Other competitions, high pole jumping for example, do not involve direct conflict between competitors and each has a separate pathway through which they can perform (“parallel competition” according to Agmon’s conceptualization). This distinction, and perhaps other characteristics of competitions, might have bearing in terms of the duty to avoid estrangement.

And finally, not all competitions involve gladiator-like consequences, when leaning out means losing one’s life. When the stakes are lower, people retain their agency and might be expected to act with proper regard to others and to their projects. Hopeful interns can strive to get picked for the permanent job, and litigants can try to strengthen their legal case, but the estrangement account suggests that when the risk is not too high, when the competition is parallel, and the solidaristic association is appropriately close-knit, their attitude toward their opponent should not involve estrangement, and might require leaning out.

C. Coercion

The third possible explanation for the intuition that people are expected not to engage in positional competitions involves the pressure it places on other people to behave in ways they do not want to. In at least some of the hypothetical cases, it seems that the specific wrong taking place is not only related to the result (winning for the wrong reason), or the type of regard toward others (estrangement), but to how the agents’ actions affect their competitors’ behavior.

Take INTERN, for example. In addition to the question of who will ultimately get the job, Adam’s action (and the actions of others who contributed to the arms race before him) raises the bar, thus forcing everyone else to work longer hours than they want to (or think they should). It seems plausible that this is at least partly what enraged his fellow interns, that they are now compelled to follow his lead and give up even more of their free time. The same seems to apply in DESIGNER CLOTHES, in which Claire feels compelled to buy clothes she doesn’t really want, just to fit in.

Competitors in positional arms races are compelled to make inauthentic choices and iteratively invest resources to “keep up” with their competitors, although they would assumedly prefer not investing in such a futile endeavor. And although people can surely stand up for their authentic desires, resisting arms races often comes at a high price.

Given this description, can we say that competitors engaged in positional arms racing are subjected to coercion? This would depend, of course, on the definition of coercion. Positional arms races, as we defined them, do not typically involve physical coercion, violence or threat of violence, so narrow accounts of coercion that require actual physical coercion or threats of violence would not apply to positional competitions. Also, moralized theories of coercion, in which the categorization of an action as coercive depends on a prior negative moral judgement relating to the action performed (by either coercee or coercer), or that the coercive offer violates the coercee’s all things considered rights would typically exclude positional arms races.³⁴ The working assumptions in the article explicitly exclude such cases, and more generally, the types of actions performed while engaging in positional arms races are typically not bad in the relevant sense, whether performed by the coercer or the coercee. When arms races develop in goods that are intrinsically valuable like education, such accounts of coercion become even less plausible.

Other approaches to coercion, however, may be wide enough to accommodate the intuition that positional arms races are coercive. Mark Fowler, for example, suggests a practical reason account of coercion,³⁵ according to which when we say that the coercer leaves the coercee “no choice,” we don’t necessarily mean that she is literally unable to choose, but rather that for her to choose otherwise would be contrary to prudence. In Fowler’s words, “to force an individual to take action means to shape his situation such that it becomes a requirement of practical reason that he perform that action.”³⁶

Under this definition, positional arms races can be considered coercive, at least when the degree of pressure imposed on the agent is such that it would be unreasonable to do otherwise. This would depend on facts such as the stakes involved, other options the agent has, and the resources required to continue competing.

A reasonable objection at this point would be that this account of coercion, or its application to positional arms race, is too inclusive. People are often pressured into doing things they don’t want to do; condemned to eating bread by the sweat of our brow, millions of people work hard in unfulfilling jobs, put aside their authentic desires and aspirations in favor of putting food on their table. An account of coercion that includes so many everyday human actions is not an attractive one. In response, Fowler insists that coercion does not include all cases of people acting against their preferences. Rather, coercion obtains when we are compelled to perform an undesirable action to prevent harms to ourselves that we perceive as “grave evils” such as death, illness, pain, loss of loved ones, economic insecurity, destruction of reputation, and so forth. It is the dread of having these grave evils occur that thwarts people’s autonomy, rather than the worry that one’s preference will be frustrated.

Positional competitions, at least sometimes, can be coercive in this way. In some positional arms races the prices of being “left behind” are severe enough to count as “grave evils”: being barred from access to adequate employment, losing an important lawsuit that can affect one’s liberty or reputation, might be seen as such cases. On the other hand, we should avoid trivializing the kind of harms that would suffice for a situation to be coercive. So, losing a minor lawsuit, or some social status would unlikely be considered as “grave evils” that trigger the prudential considerations Fowler describes.

But there are two further objections that question the possibility of seeing positional arms races as coercive. First, most accounts of coercion, including Fowler’s, require direct contact between coercer and coerce. The coercer must threaten the coercee directly, with the intention of making him act in a certain way, and typically, the harm that might follow if the coercee fails to obey follows is brought about by the coercer.³⁷ Participants in positional arms races, on the other hand, do not necessarily engage with each other in this way. Moreover, in typical cases of coercion the coercer wants the coercee to perform the action, whereas in positional arms races the coercer strongly prefers other players not to perform the action, because by doing so they eliminate the coercer’s positional advantage. And finally, the bad consequences that will be inflicted upon the coercee in a positional arms race are typically not inflicted by the coercer, but rather by a third party (university admission committee; a potential employer).

Widening coercion to include social coercion, is a possible response to these challenges. Fowler discusses John Stuart Mill’s position according to which women are coerced by the accumulative effects of individual behavior that translates into social pressure, creating prudential imperatives. A theory of social coercion can help us describe positional competitions as coercive, but is unhelpful for my purposes in this article, because it does not trace moral responsibility for this coercion back to individual agents. It provides normative grounds for social critique or for decreasing culpability for actions performed under coercive threats, but it says nothing about how individual members of that society must behave to decrease social coercion.

The second significant challenge is that while coercion offers us a theory of the wrong perpetrated against people in positional arms races, it also offers a defense for the alleged perpetrator who, arguably, cannot be held fully responsible for their action.³⁸ In other words, arms races are perpetuated and aggravated by the actions of participants who are, themselves, both victims and perpetrators: their actions place unreasonable pressure on others to act, and at the same time those same actions are the reasonable reaction to the same kind of pressure placed on them. So, if positional competitions are coercive, they are coercive for all participants.

But this last claim is true only if all participants are equally coerced, or in other words if they would all be equally unreasonable not to compete. And while there are many situations in which all participants are powerless to object to the positional competition, this is not always the case. Different agents often have different stakes in the competition, different resources and opportunities, and therefore it may be the case that for some, it is not “a requirement of practical reason” that they engage in positional competing. The next section, which discusses the scope of the duty to lean out, provides more details on this point.

To conclude, despite the various difficulties raised above, at least some cases of positional competitions can involve coercion, and when some of the agents involved do not face a similar threat of grave evil, they are under a duty to refrain from engaging in positional competition that coerces others.

This concludes the three arguments for a moral duty to lean out. If any of the three arguments are persuasive, and people have a prima facie duty to lean out, the next important question concerns the scope of that duty. I discuss this now.

IV. WHEN ARE PEOPLE EXPECTED TO LEAN OUT?

In his account of educational arms races, Adam Swift provides that while parents should, generally, enroll their children in local comprehensive schools, they are not always required to do so, all things considered. External considerations, that are not related to the competition and its goals, can override the duty. For example, if a child is being bullied at school, enrolling them in a private school might be justified on grounds of their wellbeing, despite the unfair advantage bestowed upon them.

In addition to external considerations that may override it, the duty to lean out is restricted from within, its borders delineated by the very justifications that ground it. In other words, the three arguments for the moral duty to lean out can also provide guidance on its scope. I refer now to three important factors that we should consider in this regard, however these are by no means exhaustive.

A. Playing to Win v. Playing Not to Lose

We can discern two distinct possible responses to positional arms races: defensive and offensive. Defensive behavior involves merely “keeping up with the Joneses,” by making sure that one’s relative position does not deteriorate. Judith Lichtenberg rightly observes that often, the motivation underlying conspicuous consumption is better characterized as “the need to avoid shame” than to show that the consumer is better than others.³⁹ Conversely, offensive behavior involves raising the bar to a new level and seeking to outdo one’s rivals. For example, by coming in over the weekend, Adam engaged in offensive action, aggravating the interns’ arms race, bringing it to a new level. Of course, Adam’s is just the last action in the gradual race to the bottom, so the other interns are also responsible for the raging arms race. But not all interns are equally culpable at every point. Those who are last to adopt the new working hours seem to be engaging in purely defensive behavior, which is much less blameworthy. Their behavior arguably facilitates rather than obfuscates fair decision making, because once everyone works roughly the same, working hours will not affect the hiring decision, and other, more appropriate considerations will return to center stage. The concern with one’s relative standing, therefore, is not reprehensible, insofar as it “represents a desire for equality rather than superiority.”⁴⁰ The distinction between “playing to win” and “playing not to lose” also helps us understand the scope of the moral duty that stems from the argument from estrangement. People are allowed to be partial toward themselves, supposedly permitting defensive behavior, but they must also have appropriate concern and regard to other people and their projects, thereby ruling out engaging in offensive competing.

Finally, the argument from coercion also seems amenable to this distinction. The coercive pressure to invest in an arms race is stronger when one falls behind than when one is, more or less, equal compared to their competitors. An agent engaged in offensive behavior is therefore coercing others, whereas an agent engaged in merely defensive behavior is being coerced.

Admittedly, sometimes, competitors are not free to choose between defensive and offensive competitive behavior and can only defend themselves by raising the stakes. For example, when ranking is ordinal,⁴¹ there is no possibility to be on a par with others, and if an agent wants to avoid losing, they must play to win. Limited information concerning other competitors’ behavior can also cause a competitor to invest more than is actually necessary to avoid losing, which may result in unintentional offensive competing. I concede the distinction is unhelpful in these cases.

Initiating positional competitions can sometimes be characterized as extreme cases of “playing to win.” For example, the first intern to stay later than the standard nine-to-five working schedule is engaged in offensive competing. On the other hand, there are cases in which a critical mass is required to give the positional good the power to ration the relevant end use good. The first person buying a Louis Vuitton bag, for example, probably didn’t get the most signaling value out of it, and its value increased gradually through consumption.⁴² The same applies to other large-scale competitions, such as the educational arms race, which involve social processes that unfold over decades and that countless agents take part in. Discerning which cases involve offensive competitive behavior, therefore, depends on the specific characteristics of the competition at hand.

B. The Nature of the Stakes

A second factor we should consider in deciding whether individuals have a duty to lean out in specific cases is the nature of the stakes involved in the competition. As mentioned above, one of the reasons that Wahid Hussain focuses uniquely on institutions that design competitions is probably that his leading example is the gladiatorial arena, a context in which competitors lack agency. But clearly, not all positional competitions involve such high stakes, and perhaps even more importantly, the stakes are often not equally high for all competitors.

Adam the intern, for example, could be the son of a successful lawyer, enjoying the connections that provide a wide range of career opportunities. Even though he still really wants the job, he has other adequate options if he doesn’t get it. On the other hand, if Adam is first in his family to attend university, has little connections and opportunities, and has significant student debt, we might be less critical of his behavior.

The same kind of considerations may justify competitive behavior related to social status. The higher up one is in the professional or social ladder, the more we can expect them to lean out.

Circumstances such as those just described seem relevant also for determining whether agents are coerced into behaving competitively. If the stakes aren’t especially high, and losing would not result in “grave evil,” we would not say that the agent was coerced, making them responsible for their action. And if the stakes for others are sufficiently high, their behavior could be considered coercive.⁴³

Note that as the stakes become too high to expect individuals to lean out, institutions might be under a stronger obligation to intervene and prevent harmful competitions. This observation applies also to the discussion concerning coordination, in the next section.

C. Potential for Coordination

Positional arms races are often the result of the actions of multiple agents, many of whom have no relations with one another. In other cases, positional competitions obtain within relationships such as workplaces, schools, and social groups, in which coordination is, at least in theory, possible. For example, instead of submitting to the arms race and spending even more hours at the office, the interns could initiate a meeting in which they set ground rules regarding their conduct. Specific interns that thwart such understandings are especially morally culpable.

Of course, this does not exonerate employers whose working environments are conducive to harmful arms races, but when the type of relationship between agents provides ample opportunity for coordination, and coordination does not pose significant risks, they have a duty to coordinate and lean out.

The possibility of coordination is compatible with the argument concerning winning for the wrong reasons. When coordination is possible, avoiding it suggests that the competitor knows their chances of winning fairly are small, and therefore they prefer the positional option.

This consideration also sits well with Hussain’s claim that our duties vary according to the type of relationship we have with our competitors. Possibility for coordination characterizes close-knit relationships that come with stronger moral duties of solidarity.

Finally, when coordination is possible but intentionally avoided, agents cannot claim that they were compelled, for prudential reasons, to engage in positional competing, even if the positional competition involves “grave evils.”

V. CONCLUSION

This article aimed to challenge the convention that individuals are rational and justified to engage in positional competing. I argued that while institutions are often better positioned to effectively prevent or alleviate positional arms races, participants in the competition are also morally obligated to do so. The three arguments put forward demonstrate how the engagement of individuals in positional competing, and the different levels and forms of agency involved in their actions within that competition, affect the moral evaluation of their actions. The discussion of the limits and scope of that duty further accentuates the complexity of positional competitions. Put together the article attempted to provide a sufficiently nuanced account that avoids being over demanding but at the same time manages to carve out a slice, however slim, of moral responsibility for individuals.

Notes

I call the duty I am interested in “the duty to Lean Out” in reference to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s famous 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, which became a catchphrase for urging women to actively engage in the labor market competition. [^{^}]
Hirsch 1976. Brighouse and Swift 2006. Claassen 2008. Despite quite extensive literature, recent scholarship has noted existing ambiguity concerning the very definition of positional goods (Drissen 2023; Tyssedal 2025). In this article I follow Brighouse and Swift’s definition, which I take to be the accepted definition among philosophers. [^{^}]
For example, Judith Lichtenberg (1996) explicitly demonstrates why many (although not all) instances of consuming because others consume are not blameworthy. [^{^}]
Halliday and Hankins 2020. [^{^}]
Dietsch 2015, p. 2. [^{^}]
Teichman 2005. [^{^}]
Thus, when the agents competing are states, international organizations may be needed for enabling coordination that can prevent positional arms races. This raises various unique challenges, including effective enforcement and democratic deficit (Dietsch 2015, 104; Schelling 1961). [^{^}]
Schelling 1961. [^{^}]
Ellsberg 1956. [^{^}]
Hirsch 1976. In certain conditions, arms races may have positive externalities, such as experimentation in luxury goods or technological development that may eventually be supplied to all, or transfer from military to civil purposes. (Bernardino and Araujo 2013; Congleton 1989). When positive externalities are sufficiently large, this may affect our overall evaluation of the arms race. [^{^}]
Halliday 2016. Sockett 2018. [^{^}]
Hussain 2020. Sockett 2018. [^{^}]
Swift 2003. Brighouse and Swift 2009. [^{^}]
Martin 2022. Martin and Kotzee 2013. [^{^}]
Wright 1982. Pasquale 2008. [^{^}]
Agmon 2021. [^{^}]
Halliday and Hankins 2020. [^{^}]
Harel Ben Shahar and Kimhi 2025. [^{^}]
Swift 2003. Jonathan 1990. Macleod 2004. [^{^}]
Rawls 1971, pp. 115, 333–337. Hickey et al. 2021. [^{^}]
Cohen 1997. [^{^}]
Murphy 1999. [^{^}]
Swift 2003. [^{^}]
Hirsch 1975, p. 10. [^{^}]
Frank 1985, pp. 249–250. Mason 2000. [^{^}]
Mason 2000. [^{^}]
Barclay and Willer 2007. Fisher and Moule 2013. Cox 2011. Shoemaker 2017. [^{^}]
Swift 2003. [^{^}]
Although admittedly there may competing accounts of how to distribute jobs. [^{^}]
Swift 2003. [^{^}]
This becomes definitively worse if timing is of essence in the competition, and competitors have a “hope of stealing an advantage by a quick dash for supremacy” (Schelling 1961). [^{^}]
Hussain 2020, p. 81. [^{^}]
Agmon 2022. [^{^}]
Berman 2002. Garnett 2018. See also Nozick 1974, p. 263. [^{^}]
Fowler 1982. [^{^}]
Ibid., p. 331. [^{^}]
Fowler 1982. Anderson 2006. Lamond 1996. [^{^}]
Fowler 1982. Berman 2002. [^{^}]
Lichtenberg 1996, p. 283. [^{^}]
Ibid., p. 289. [^{^}]
Harel Ben Shahar 2018. [^{^}]
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point and for the Louis Vuitton example. [^{^}]
Admittedly, this potentially creates a problem when the agent performs an action that contributes to the aggravation of a positional arms race that affects a non-specified group of agents. For some of this group, the stakes are very high, whereas for others, not so much. Therefore, A’s action is coercive with respect to some but not all agents, and A has no knowledge or control over who and how many of these agents will be coerced. [^{^}]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For helpful comments the author wishes to thank participants at: MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory; the “Morals and the Limits of Markets” Workshop at WZB Berlin Social Science Center; the Competition and Competitiveness Project Workshop at Essex University; the Zicklin Center Workshop in Normative Business Ethics at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; the Law and Philosophy Forum at Tel Aviv University; the Political Philosophy colloquium at Humboldt University. Thanks, too, to two anonymous referees for Political Philosophy. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant No. 1493/23.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that she has no competing interests.

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Lean Out! On the Morality of Engaging in Positional Competitions

Abstract

Keywords:

Funding