What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

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.