Is There No Limit to Markets and Capitalism?
The Winter 2006 issue of the Wilson Quarterly discusses “Markets, Morals, and Civic Life” by Michael J. Sandel, in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2005:
On a level playing field, are there no fundamental grounds for limiting markets? Of course there are, and the reasons go back to why there are some things that money can’t buy: The things themselves — from love to a Nobel Prize — would be completely corrupted by the transaction.
What matters most in determining what’s an acceptable transaction, according to Sandel, is “the moral importance of the goods that are said to be degraded by market valuation and exchange.” That distinction, he admits, is not always clear. Is being a surrogate mother “morally analogous to baby selling — as the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in the 1987 “Baby M” case — or “more like sperm selling, a commonly accepted practice”?
If we presume that there are no justified limits to what can be bought and sold, except perhaps for human beings, then there is no basis for restricting the exchange of money for things like surrogate motherhood and human organs. If, however, we presume that there are some things which simply can’t be bought and sold without degrading why people want or need them in the first place, then it’s simply a matter of determining what standards we can use for making such evaluations.
Sandel is on to something, I think, but even if he has it exactly right we don’t yet have actual standards we can use, just a good starting point. Even he acknowledges that there will be significant grey areas, and that’s inevitable in the context of human relationships. That it might not be possible to create absolute and perfect standards is not a good reason to refuse to try, however, or to think that no standards are worth using.
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Comments
Absolute foolishness.
1. Simply because a transaction would be stupid doesn’t mean it should be restricted by state action. I think your post was stupid but I don’t support the government banning it.
2. It’s only stupid if both parties don’t want to do it. This means that the only way to see if it’s stupid is to let them choose. Oops, that’s a market.
3. Selling a child is a horrible argument against freedom. Slavery isn’t a part of freedom. Unless we’ve been reading a bit too much of 1984. Oh, for the record — Big Brother was a bad guy. I’m just saying…
And what does this have to do with atheism? If anything you are discrediting the atheist movement by associating bad economic analysis with the disbelief in God. Please, focus on something else and a little more in your arena.
No one claimed the contrary. This is just a red herring.
Feel free to offer a substantive critique.
No one offered any such argument. That’s another red herring. Thus far, the only two objections you’ve raised are against things not actually in this post.
I’m guessing you’ve missed the last few decades during which American Christianity has become closely integrated with market capitalism.
Feel free to show where I have engaged in any “market analysis,” much less bad analysis.