On So-Called Competition Harms

15 years ago, Ronald Dworkin articulated a distinction between deliberate harm and competition harm:

We need to . . . distinguish[] between two kinds of harm you might suffer because other people, like you, are leading their own lives with their own responsibility for their own fates. The first is bare competition harm, and the second is deliberate harm. No one could even begin to lead a life if bare competition harm were forbidden. We live our lives mostly like swimmers in separate demarcated lanes. One swimmer gets the blue ribbon or the job or the lover or the house on the hill that another wants. . . . [E]ach person may concentrate on swimming his own race without concern for the fact that if he wins, another person must therefore lose. That inevitable kind of harm to others is... part of our personal responsibility—it is what makes our separate responsibilities personal— that we accept the inevitability and permissibility of competition harm. ... We need the right to compete to lead our own lives (Dworkin, 2011, 287-8)

His objective was to argue that you do not wrong someone when you cause them a competition harm. Recently, in his book Wrongs and Rights Come Apart (2025), Nicholas Cornell has argued that you can wrong someone when you cause a competition harm by an act which itself is a wrongdoing. So while Dworkin thinks you are never responsible for causing 'mere' competition harms, Cornell thinks you can be responsible for competition harms you cause, but only if your action which caused them was morally objectionable. Thus both have in common the idea that there is a class of actions you might perform which cause competition harms but those harms are morally irrelevant to the evaluation of your action. Yes, you have caused harm, but that is not 'on your account': you have a 'right to compete' so long as you don't do any wrong along the way.

I am uncomfortable with this idea and I suspect it seeming innocuousness comes from eliding very different cases, and Cornell is careful to distinguish the market - his main example - from competitive games or sports. In the latter case, you can avoid any risk of competitive harms by simply opting not to play. But you can't realistically opt-out of the marketplace. But he still allows that there will be losers in the marketplace, and so long as the winners are doing no wrong, they can ignore the competition harm caused

Sources of Scarcity

Competition harms arise in general - and there may be some exceptions - when there is some good which is scarce, so cannot be equally distributed, and failure to acquire that good is a harm for some person. My contention is that we cannot fully understand the moral significance of (knowingly or at least being able to know that one is) causing such a harm until we know the source of the scarcity.

Competitive games and sports are special situations where we create artificial scarcity. Someone only engages in such an activity because they want to cause a competition harm to other players - wanting to win entails wanting others to lose. Another form of artificial scarcity is created in consumer products: limited production runs of luxury goods, first editions, original artworks etc. This artificial scarcity inflates prices, because some consumers are willing to pay for exclusivity. Those willing to pay for competition harms to others. Of course, the competition harm of not owning a first edition of Descartes' Meditations is pretty trivial, but it is the same desire for exclusivity, for causing competition harms in others, which leads to social exclusion and gated communities.¹

What of Dworkin's other examples: the job, the lover, and the house on the hill?

Starting with the job, Dworkin's thought seems to be that two or more people might want the same job and only one can have it. This looks like a mismatch of supply and demand familiar in the academic job market: there are many more qualified people who want academic jobs than there are job openings, so competition harm is inevitable. This is probably true for many other job markets. There are two factors in the creation of the scarcity here. One the number of people who want jobs of that type, the other is the number of such jobs created. Unlike the artificial scarcities discussed above, there is no conceptual reason why jobs couldn't be created to meet the demand. One might reply that there would be nothing for them to do, but that just moves the bump under the carpet, to what limits the demand for the work being done.

To give a simplified example, suppose there are twice as many people who want to be baristas (or 'latte artists'!) as there are currently jobs for baristas. We could avoid the competition harm here by making social changes which removed the scarcity, perhaps restricting sale of coffee-making equipment for home and office use and removing VAT on barista-made coffee, requiring employers to give coffee breaks which allowed people to get a professionally made coffee etc. The point is not that this is a realistic change, but to show that the scarcity which causes the competition comes from choices made about how to structure society and the economy.

Now suppose that person A has quite a broad set of competences and could do many jobs, including some where supply exceeds demand. But they choose to apply for a barista job and get it. Person B, in contrast, is less fortunate in their competences and being a barista is one of the few jobs they are qualified for. When A gets the job that B also applied for, B suffers a competition harm. And this has come about in part from a structural situation which gives A privileges, protections from competition harms in the job market, that B lacks. I would not want to go so far as to say that A has done something wrong, that causing this competition harm to B should be 'forbidden', but if A was a morally sensitive individual, they would hopefully take this into account when making their choice about which jobs to accept. The permissibility of the competition harm does not give A a 'moral immunity', a right to simply ignore the impact of their actions on B.

Desires for Particular Goods

Let's set aside the lover, for surely thinking one has suffered a harm rather than a disappointment when the object of one's affection chooses another feels dangerously close to misogynistic entitlement.² Perhaps Dworkin thinks that any disappointment, any frustrated desire is a harm. If we include such trivial matters as harms, then we mask the oddity of the alleged 'right to compete' in harmful ways.

Instead, let us consider the house on the hill. What Dworkin seems to have in mind here is the sadly familiar situation of someone setting their heart on a buying a particular house only for another purchaser to outbid them. We might wonder the extent to which this disappointment is meaningfully considered a harm, but we can certainly frame it in terms of the loss of, or at least failure to acquire, a good. In that case it differs from the lover case which is simply a matter of unreciprocated feelings.

Rather I think this is better understood as analogous to the artificial scarcity cases: by allowing oneself to have a desire for a particular object, or more precisely for a relation to a particular object such as ownership, which others cannot also have, one has created the scarcity which causes the competition harm. Anyone can avoid these competition harms with a second-order desire to not form desires for particular goods: another house may turn out to be just as nice and make one just as happy. There are plenty more fish in the sea, as the saying goes.

However, before we conclude that the other purchaser has moral immunity with respect to the harm its loss causes to another, we should think about the role that particular-object desire play in our moral culture. Such desires are widespread, often actively encouraged by parents, and seen to be both normal and part of a good life. One generally accepted way for a life to go well, something that is good for people, is for them to form particular-object desires and have them satisfied. Ownership of the dream house, the one that had a special place in one's desires, is widely thought to be better, contribute to a better life for the subject, than 'mere' ownership of a house from a list of alternatives each of which was equally desirable.

In the context of such a moral culture, the competition harm of not getting the house on the hill takes on a slightly different aspect. In that context, the motives of the person causing the competition harm are important. Suppose they bought the house as an investment and don't plan to live in it themselves, or even plan to leave it empty or demolish it, then to simply shrug off as irrelevant to their decision any considerations about it being someone else's dream home seems callous. Of course, the other should not be forbidden from buying the house, but the competition harm they might cause does seem relevant to their decision. If they could achieve something similarly good for them without causing that competition harm, that would be morally better, because they are part of a moral culture which takes the obverse of the competition harm in this case, the getting of one's particular dream house, as a significant good.

Natural Scarcity

None of Dworkin's examples look like cases of natural scarcity, where there is not and can not be enough of the good in question for everyone to have what they want. Rather they are all cases where we have chosen to create the scarcity.

It is surprisingly hard to find examples of natural scarcity for humans in the modern, interconnected world. Harvest failure and famine may be caused by war or corruption, and only produce a local scarcity which can be alleviated by transferring food to the affected region. Many other apparent cases of natural scarcity turn out to be - like the jobs example - cases where we have made social and economic choices which create a mismatch between supply and demand.

However, let us suppose for a moment that there is a case of genuine natural scarcity. How should we think about competition harms in such a case?

If this naturally scarce good was a luxury rather than a necessity, a distinction I shall leave intuitive for present purposes, then one might feel comfortable with Dworkin's right to compete. However, others may think that if luxuries are unevenly distributed, it would be morally relevant to take into account whether one was competing against someone whose life had few if any luxuries compared to one's own life. That is certainly my instinct.

However, and this is where Dworkin seems very wrong, if the good is a necessity, then there is no right to compete and good moral reasoning should take into account the needs of the other. Again, it is not that causing competition harm is forbidden, but that whether one causes it is a morally relevant consideration in making the decision.

Dworkin's opening example is this:

You are hiking in the Arizona desert with a stranger, you are both bitten by rattlesnakes, and you both see a vial of antidote lying in the scrabble. Both race for it, but you are nearer and grab it. He pleads for it, but you open and swallow it yourself. You live and he dies. (2011, 285)

He is concerned with the thought that taking the antidote for yourself is permissible. We can grant that. So is standing back and letting the other take it. However, in no real world case would that exhaust the morally relevant considerations.³ To secure the 'intuition' we need it to be the case that the only available distinguishing feature between yourself and the other is that you are, as in = to, one of the two people. The most obvious reason this is a distorting simplification is that you know a great deal about yourself. Forget the consequentialist's appeal to how your death would affect the future states of affairs, and just think about how you think of yourself. Are you proud of your life so far? Do you value self-sacrifice highly?

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

While Sydney Carton prefaces this in consequentialist fashion with imagining the good outcomes that follow from his death, it is perfectly coherent to think that dying to save another, even if one has no idea at all what the outcomes of their living will be, is a good death and a death which may compensate for a bad life, or even a death which will complete a good life. Dworkin's example tries to abstract from what is always a potential element in such a decision: our moral assessment of ourselves, both our lives and our deaths. To be specific, you might think that you do not want to live by causing the competition harm of another's death. The permissibility of taking the antidote does not exhaust the moral relevance of the competition harms you would cause.