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September 18, 2008
In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets Michael J. Sandel asks: Are there some things that money can’t buy? His answer is that today markets and market-like practices are extending their reach in almost every sphere of life. He says: Consider prisons. Once the province of government, the incarceration of criminals is now a proŠtable and rapidly growing business. Since the mid-1980s, more and more governments have entrusted their inmates to the care of for-profit companies. In the United States, the private prison business is now a billion-government have contracted with private companies like the Corrections Corporation of America to house their prisoners. In themid-eighties when the trend began, scarcely a thousand prisoners occupied private prisons. Today, more than 85,000 U.S. inmates are serving time in for-profit prisons. And the trend has spread to Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and South Africa.
Sandel says that the most powerful social and political tendency of our time, namely the extension of markets and of market-oriented thinking to spheres of life once thought to lie beyond their reach.
Sandel says that there are two objects to the market penetration of everyday life. The first objection is:
an argument from coercion. It points to the injustice that can arise when people buy and sell things under conditions of severe inequality or dire economic necessity. According to this objection, market exchanges are not necessarily as voluntary as market enthusiasts suggest. A peasant may agree to sell his
kidney or cornea in order to feed his starving family, but his agreement is not truly voluntary. He is coerced, in effect, by the necessities of his situation.
Sandel says that The second objection is an argument from corruption. It points:
to the degrading effect of market valuation and exchange on certain goods and practices. According to this objection, certain moral and civic goods are diminished or corrupted if bought and sold for money. The argument from corruption cannot be met by establishing fair bargaining conditions. If the sale of human body parts is intrinsically degrading, a violation of the sanctity of the human body, then kidney sales would be wrong for rich and poor alike. The objection would hold even without the coercive effect of crushing poverty.
Sandel says that each objection draws on a different moral ideal. The argument from coercion draws on the ideal of consent, or more precisely, the ideal of consent carried out under fair background conditions. It is
not, strictly speaking, an objection to markets, only to markets that operate against a background of inequality severe enough to create coercive bargaining conditions. The argument from coercion offers no grounds for objecting to the commodification of goods in a society whose background conditions are fair.
The argument from corruption is different. It appeals not to consent but to the moral importance of the goods at stake, the ones said to be degraded by market valuation and exchange. The argument from corruption is intrinsic in the sense that it cannot be met by fixing the background conditions within which market exchanges take place. It applies under conditions of equality and inequality alike.
Sandel argues that the worry about corruption cannot be laid to rest simply by establishing fair background conditions. Even in a society without unjust differences of power and wealth, there would still be things that money should not buy. He argues for the independence of the second objection and tries to show that it is
more fundamental than the first.
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Even more scary and worse for the health and survival prospects of liberal democracy, is the privatisation of the many functions formerly done by either the Pentagon or the various legally created Intelligence agencies.
Any kind of constitutional or legal control and accountability has become impossible.
The issues and consequences of which are regularly featured at TomDispatch.