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

AuthorMontanye, James A.
PositionBook review

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

By Michael J. Sandel

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Pp. 244. $27.00 cloth.

The conjunction of a stubbornly persistent economic recession, an apostatizing statement by a former Federal Reserve chairman claiming that financial markets' ability to self-correct may have been overestimated, and a resurgent interest in progressive social policies has caused scholars across the board to reevaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the market process. Much of the current empirical work is aimed at designing more efficient market regulations. A parallel effort is given both to reconsidering the morality of the market process itself and to asking whether society's broad reliance on markets represents an appropriately moral social choice. If the market process stumbles on moral grounds, then the way will be eased for more progressive regulation of markets and of social institutions generally en route to creating an ostensibly more perfect--albeit still illusory--concept of social justice.

Joining the recent literature on markets and morality is the latest book by the popular philosopher Michael Sandel, entitled What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Sandel considers whether markets and market values have come to dominate aspects of life where morally they don't belong. Are there, in other words, some things that money can't--and furthermore shouldn't--buy?

This book rises on two legs. One is fairness, arguing that economic inequality causes money and markets to matter more now than in the past. The second leg, which borrows tacitly from Kant, argues that valuing certain goods in money terms corrupts their nature by depriving them of some essential dignity. Sandel acknowledges markets' ability to allocate goods efficiently, but he argues that efficiency entails morally corrosive and corrupting social costs: "we corrupt a good, an activity, or a social practice whenever we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it" (p. 46). He offers numerous examples of activities that were once guided by long-standing social norms but recently have become infused with market values. He questions throughout whether this truly is the way we want to live.

Ostensible examples of moral corruption fall under four heads: (1) market opportunities for buying our way out of public queues, where earlier norms obliged everyone, regardless of social status, to wait their turn; (2)...

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