Professor
Michael Sandel is quite the philosophical superstar; his course on Justice at Harvard University – now available
online and for free – has been viewed by millions. Compared with your average,
sleep-inducing university lecture, Sandel’s course makes for compelling
viewing. In 2009 he delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures on ‘A New Citizenship’
to great acclaim. He is, without question, a brilliant communicator and a
stirring intellectual.
In his
latest book, ‘What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’, Sandel
takes a prod to our fetish for markets and the rising tide of commodification.
Some things should just never be sold, he argues, because doing so degrades and
corrupts goods that are best understood in non-market terms.
It’s
necessary to get something out of the way to begin with, because I can hear the
indignant cries of the rampant right-wingers already: “Communist! Communist!”
This is not a tract against capitalism. Sandel doesn’t question – and really,
the debate is just boring now – that markets are powerful and efficient (though,
imperfect) tools for the allocation of resources and the organization of
productive activity. Free markets are, as Churchill said of democracy, the
worst system available – besides everything else. What this book laments, is
“the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where
they don’t belong,” and the fact that, “without quite realizing it, without
ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.”
There
are two arrows to Sandel’s bow; the first is an objection about inequality, and
the other is about corruption. To take them in turn: in a society where
everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means – the more
money can buy, the more it matters. Secondly, some things are improperly valued
or degraded (corrupted) when commodified. I don’t agree with Sandel’s approach
to why some things shouldn’t be sold, but let’s give him the benefit of the
doubt for now and consider some examples. Here are some things you can now buy
(at least in the United States):
- A prison cell upgrade: $82 per night. In Santa Ana, California,
and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for nicer
accommodation – a clean, quiet jail cell, away from the cells for
non-paying prisoners.
- The services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a
pregnancy: $6,250. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly
outsource the job to India, where the practice is legal and the price is less
than one-third the going rate in the United States.
- The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $150,000. South Africa has begun
letting ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to
give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
Of course, some of these things are a
little pricey. But no worries – you can always raise some extra funds by:
- Renting out space on your forehead to display
commercial advertising: $777. Air New Zealand hired thirty people to shave
their heads and wear temporary tattoos “Need a change? Head down to New
Zealand.”
- Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a
place for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15-20 per
hour. The lobbyists pay
line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.
- If you are a second grader in an underachieving Dallas
school, read a book: $2. To encourage reading, the schools pay kids for each
book they read.
Sandel’s
book is great value for its panoply of jaw-dropping and often hilarious
examples alone. The ones I’ve outlined here are by no means the most unusual
(for the truly tragic, wacky and outrageous, you’ll have to get yourself a copy
of the book).
Take
the phenomenon of hired line-standers. What should we make of this practice? My
guess is that most people would think that paid line standing, at least on
Capitol Hill, is objectionable. But why? One reason is that Congress is a
democratic institution, and when well-heeled lobbyists buy their way into
hearings, it undermines the public nature of the forum. If allowing this
practice would make congressional hearings the exclusive purview of the rich, I
think we’d have a pretty good reason not to allow it.
In his
book the ‘The Gift Relationship’, the British sociologist Richard
Titmuss showed that paying people decreased both the quantity and quality of
blood that a blood bank would receive (unless a very large amount of money was
at play). The payment converted what had been a donation into a transaction,
and eroded the moral aura that had been associated with the act. A market
culture, just as here, changes how we view a whole multitude of goods, and not
always for the better.
Sandel
walks a fine line in this book between playing the moralist, and the
conversation starting provocateur. It’s difficult to know which examples he
supports and which he doesn’t. Let’s take another one from above: paying
$150,000 to kill an endangered black rhino. No doubt there is an emotional
knee-jerk, or ‘yuck’ reaction against this. It seems base, or uncouth, to kill
such a beautiful creature if the only reason is that it’s for what might,
generously, be described as ‘sport’. But it’s not clear why we shouldn’t allow
it if it does in fact lead to less black rhinos
dying overall. The empirical evidence Sandel discusses indicates that it has
indeed had this effect; the new monetary incentive to preserve rhinos has been,
apparently, enormously effective. If what we care about is outcomes, we should
(assuming there are no viable alternatives) allow the hunters their bloody
indulgence.
I’m not
convinced by Sandel that we need to philosophize to figure out the ‘nature’ of
goods. We can, and should, be less highfalutin and more consequential in our
analysis. A decision not to allow something to be sold is best reached after
concluding that doing so will have bad consequences, not because it is somehow
inconsistent with it’s ‘nature’. Sandel is right to challenge the market fundamentalists,
but I am concerned that he seeks to replace it with a fundamentalism of his
own; namely that some things should just never be sold, no matter what.
It is
in enunciating the various ways in which market culture has degraded and
debased society (most particularly in the United States), and in its vigorous
call for a more robust public debate, that the value of this book chiefly lies. Sandel is never less than highly entertaining, and even
if you don’t agree with him, this book won’t fail to induce some seriously
enjoyable cogitation.
Here is
an interesting
interview of Sandel on this
book. And for those who haven’t heard of his course at Harvard on Justice,
it is well worth taking a look.
--
William
Isdale is a law and arts (politics and philosophy) student at the University of
Queensland, where he is an Academic Excellence Scholar and TJ Ryan Medallist
and Scholar. He is the President of the Australian Legal Philosophy Students'
Association and Editor of the Justice and the Law Society's journal 'Pandora's
Box'. In early 2012 he was a visiting student at Oxford University's Uehiro
Centre for Practical Ethics.
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