On Monday, I’ll be at CU Boulder’s Center For Western Civilization, Thought, & Policy, along with Jason Brennan (Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics & Public Policy, Georgetown University) and Margaret Jane Radin (Michigan Law, Toronto Law) to discuss and debate the moral limits of free markets.
The event is free and open to the public, and I’ve copied the event information below. Although I’ll be back after the event with updates on the substance, I expect that Jason will take the position, consistent with his book, Markets Without Limits, that “if you may do it for free, you may do it for money.” I imagine that Peggy, consistent with her book, Contested Commodities, will argue that there should be some limits on markets, when necessary to protect nonmarket ideals important to personhood.
I plan to leave the normative debate to those two and take a more descriptive approach: regardless of whether or not market transactions actually degrade relationships and values, most people continue to believe that they do, at least in certain contexts. As a result, market advocates need to account for, and even accommodate, those concerns if the market is to exist at all.
As I explain in a piece I just posted to SSRN:
Students of markets from all disciplines are increasingly turning their attention to the cultural and psychological factors that affect market structure. In traditionally taboo markets, of which reproduction surely is one, those factors include cultural understandings of the moral limits of markets and our collective level of comfort with fully commodifying and subjecting traditionally sacred items and activities to the marketplace.
While it is easy to dismiss these cultural understandings as romantic, silly, or delusional, this severely underestimates their importance, not just to society, but to the market itself. By reframing traditionally unacceptable behavior as a more palatable and familiar transaction, society is able to accept a market that is otherwise socially problematic or even repulsive. Market architects ignore these cultural understandings--and, in particular, societal conceptions of the ethical limits of markets--at their peril. In a world unwilling to embrace the sale of female reproductive capacity for merely a price, the "priceless gift" of egg donation allows a market to flourish that otherwise might stagnate under the weight of social disapproval.
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The Moral Limits of Free Markets (4/4/16)
The "Western Civ Dialogue" series presents:
The Moral Limits of Free Markets
Monday, April 4, 2016
4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
British and Irish Studies Room
Norlin Library – 5th Floor
University of Colorado Boulder
Free and open to the public.
If you may do it for free, may you do it for cash? For instance, may you buy and sell votes? How about buying and selling kidneys? Or buying and selling children? What should be off-limits to the market economy? Or do genuinely free markets permit everything? Scholars representing a wide range of views discuss the issues.
Featuring:
- Jason Brennan, Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics & Public Policy, Georgetown University
- Margaret Jane Radin, Professor of Law, Emerita, University of Michigan Law School & Distinguished Research Scholar, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
- Kimberly Krawiec, Professor of Law, Duke University Law School
Sponsored by the:
Center for Western Civilization, Thought and Policy (CWCTP)
http://www.colorado.edu/cwctp/
Co-sponsored by the:
Center for Values and Social Policy
The adjective "free" strikes me as ideologically loaded (or even merely redundant) in the sense that it suggests something like laissez-faire capitalism is the ideal, norm, or what actually exists, none of which should be, or is, true. So, why not--as in the subtitle of (other) books on this subject by Debra Satz and Michael J. Sandel--simply "The Moral Limits of Markets"?
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | April 01, 2016 at 08:09 PM
Anything that is extracted from Earth is God's bounty. How can anybody be allowed to profit from that?
Posted by: Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King | April 01, 2016 at 09:56 PM
I wish this event weren't on a Monday so I could attend ... In any case, will it be live-streamed or will a podcast or video be made available?
Posted by: Enrique Guerra-Pujol | April 02, 2016 at 11:19 AM
I'm not sure Enrique, but if there is a recording or podcast of some sort I'll post a link to it here after the event.
Patrick, my definition of "free market" is the same as yours -- free from regulation or government oversight. I'm not sure why the organizers chose it, but I suspect they either didn't think through it, or didn't intend the term in that way. No one on the panel is defending taboo markets against regulation. Even Jason, who is set up to be the market advocate here, is arguing that objections to the evil effects of markets can be addressed through regulation. At least that is the argument in the book -- he may also favor less regulation than others would, or even no regulation, if he had his way, I really don't know. But that's tangential to the point of the debate, which is whether these markets should exist at all.
Posted by: Kim Krawiec | April 02, 2016 at 01:40 PM