English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Michael Sandel of Harvard teaches government and, especially, justice, for which he is internationally known. His book is sweetly written, and offers a good occasion to examine the moral convictions of communitarians, and their distaste for the market. One cannot but agree with Sandel that the study of markets should be remoralized. We should know why we believe, morally speaking, that bread should be allocated by a market but children should not. It’s not enough to simply sneer, from left or right or middle. Even economists need to do the philosophical work. “Markets are not mere mechanisms,” Sandel wisely observes. “They embody certain norms” (p. 64). “Market reasoning is incomplete without moral reasoning” (p. 81). He is correct to stand thus against the naïve wertfrei line which Samuelsonian economists value so much. But the book does not do the work. Sandel is sophisticated about moral and political theory, yet his book is puzzlingly shallow. He does not provide, as he promises early on, moral reasoning, “a philosophical framework for thinking through” the “role and reach of markets” (p. 11). Instead he provides a tendentious assault, often veiled as mere reporting of what “some people” say (p. 20 and throughout), on what he claims is an unprecedented drive to price everything, “market triumphalism” (p. 14). He does battle with the more easily defeated utilitarian economists (Judge Richard Posner, for example), but ignores the best that has been thought and written on the merits of a commercial and innovative society (by John Tomasi in a recent book among many others). That is, Sandel doesn’t raise the philosophical game of the people he is lecturing. Instead he plays to their least examined political dispositions – their disposition to mere fairness unanalyzed and their disposition to mere disgust unhistoricized. He does, to his credit, give many interesting examples of the moral dilemma in choosing money over status or queuing to allocate things, from selling kidneys to buying baseball players. Yet surprisingly for someone who has taught over the years 15,000 students in his famous course, Moral Reasoning 22, Sandel’s moral ideas in the book have no discernible connection to human moral thinking since Moses and Confucius and Socrates. The kids deserve better. His moral thoughts in fact are two only, and thin versions even of these: that equality is good; and that the sacred can be corrupted by the profane. “The fairness objection [to what money should buy] asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitude and norms that market relations may damage” (p. 110). That, philosophically speaking, is it. About the first, fairness objection, Sandel repeatedly declares without a lot of further argument that “part of what’s troubling about” whatever scheme to market something he doesn’t want marketed “is the unfairness of such a system under conditions of inequality” (p. 71 and throughout).Such a “first objection” he says (or in this particular case the Sacramento Beenewspaper says), is “about fairness” (p. 36). Sandel’s analysis of equality as a moral principle does not get much beyond the school-yard taunt that such-and-such is “not fair.” He uses for example the truncated logic that “scalping [of, say, tickets to Shakespeare in the Park or to campsites at Yosemite] is unfair to people of modest means, who can’t afford to pay $150” (p. 36, italics supplied). The magic word here, uneco-

ordo

The Moral Limits of Communitarianism: What Michael Sandel Can’t Buy: Review of the book “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limit of Markets” by Michael Sandel