What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In this book the author takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life including medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, the author argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be? What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
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A surprisingly accessible and engaging read–which is quite a feat when you consider a work combining economics and philosophy. Sandel depicts the problem as more than just commodification that favours the rich. The subtler effect of inserting economic optimization into relationships between people and communities, what Sandel calls corruption, distorts the ability to even frame moral agency. For example, a supply and demand approach of virtue (i.e. don't exhaust your compassion) fundamentally changes the understanding of the good as a practice rather than a resource. The marketizing presupposes the very concept of “ought” to be transactional, thereby paving the way for any one of Sandel's eye-opening case studies from bribing childhood reading to short selling the life spans of strangers.
