Introduction

This chapter introduces the topic at hand: the political morality of competition as a distributive and organisational mechanism in Western liberal democracies. While competition has many things going for it, it is equally clear that it comes with moral limits as well. This chapter starts with some representative examples where competition indeed seems to run against moral limits in the domains of work, leisure, politics, healthcare and education, followed by the main research question this book aims to answer: what, if anything, makes competition morally problematic and how can we determine the weight of these moral problems? Importantly, this book explores whether competition can still be morally problematic, even if the conditions of fairness have been met. After providing a definition of competition, it will become clear how this book contributes to existing moral and political philosophical debates, most notably, the literature on commodification and positional competition. This chapter ends with an overview of the chapters to come.