1 - The Wrong of Privatization: A Kantian Account

Summary

Privatization – the outsourcing of public responsibilities to private actors – is a pervasive phenomenon across the world. Welfare and healthcare delivery, military defense and prisons management are only some of the functions that governments increasingly contract out to private actors.

In this chapter, I will argue that even if privatization could facilitate the achievement of socially desirable goals, there would still be non-instrumental reasons to object to it (or, at least, to many of its instances). Importantly, my argument is meant to apply also to cases where the privatized function does not involve the direct exercise of force and where the private actor is a nonprofit organization, as opposed to a for-profit firm. Political philosophers have recently developed several powerful non-instrumental objections to privatization.