Markets without Limits

Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests

Jason F. Brennan, Peter Jaworski

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000605846
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Filosofía
• Sous-sujet: Ética y filosofía moral

May you sell your spare kidney? May gay men pay surrogates to bear them children? Should we allow betting markets on terrorist attacks and natural disasters? May spouses pay each other to do the dishes, watch the kids, or have sex? Should we allow the rich to genetically engineer gifted, beautiful children? May you ever sell your vote?

Most people—and many philosophers—shudder at these questions. To put some goods and services for sale offends human dignity. If everything is commodified, then nothing is sacred. The market corrodes our character.

In this expanded second edition of Markets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski say it is now past time to give markets a fair hearing. The market does not, the authors claim, introduce wrongness where there was not any previously. Thus, the question of what rightfully may be bought and sold has a simple answer: if you may do it for free, you may do it for money. Contrary to the conservative consensus, Brennan and Jaworski claim there are no inherent limits to what can be bought and sold, but only restrictions on how we buy and sell.

Key Updates and Revisions to the Second Edition:

• Includes revised introductory chapters to further clarify what's at stake in the commodification debate.
• Provides easier-to-follow chapters on semiotic objections, stronger analyses of these objections, and more evidence of these objections' widespread pervasiveness.
• Offers cogent responses to several recent papers that have raised counterexamples to the authors' thesis.
• Includes new empirical evidence on the ways markets sometimes crowd in virtue and altruism.
• Analyzes the topics of blackmail and "associative" objections to markets.
• Includes new material on issues surrounding exploitation and coercion, selling citizenship, residency rights, and arguments about "dignity" as objections to markets.

PART I SHOULD EVERYTHING BE FOR SALE?

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003164425-1

… modern civilization has become largely possible by the disregard of the injunctions of those indignant moralists.

—F.A. Hayek

1 ARE THERE SOME THINGS MONEY SHOULD NOT BUY?

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003164425-2

THE DEBATE’S OVER, AND MARKETS WON, BUT …

Market institutions, for all their terrible shortcomings, are the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

Deirdre McCloskey says we can boil economic history down to a simple story: “Once upon a time we were all poor, then capitalism flourished, and now as a result we’re rich.”¹ Even, say, an American living at what the U.S. government considers the poverty line today has a standard of living around three times higher than that of the average American in 1900 AD.² Or, as Paul Krugman wrote in 1996, “… most families in 1950 had a material standard of living no better than that of today’s poor or near-poor … it does not seem at all absurd to say that the material standard of living of the poverty-level family in 1996 is as good as or better than that of the median family in 1950.”³ On average, the global standard of living has increased by a factor of at least 20 in the past 200 years. In some countries, it has increased by far more.

We owe this to markets and economic growth. The wealth we enjoy did not exist 50 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago. The United States by itself in 2013 produced something like 50% more than the entire world’s economic output in 1950 and close to 80 times the entire world’s economic output in 1000 AD.⁴ Wealth has been made, not just moved around. Even if all of the wealth or income that existed in the world as of 1000 AD had been liquidated and distributed equally among everyone then alive, the average standard of living would be no better than that of Haiti or Malawi today.

Economists have known these kinds of facts for a long time. These claims about growth may be controversial among pundits and voters, and even among some professors in certain humanities departments, but not among experts. But the message of development economics is now going mainstream. Consider: U2 front man Bono, long known for his social activism, now “preaches capitalism”:

… imagine for a second this last global recession but without the economic growth of China and India … without the hundreds of millions of newly minted middle class folks who buy American and European goods … Imagine that. Think about the last five years.

Rock star preaches capitalism. Shocker. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it …

But commerce is real. That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stub cap. Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid, of course, we know that.⁵

In recent years, surveys show millennials and other young people in the United States are more enamored of socialism than older generations. Yet, oddly, even those who claim to reject market capitalism end up endorsing it by other names. These millennials rarely say they want actual socialism, that is, government nationalization and control of the means of production. Instead, they point to Scandinavia, Switzerland, or Canada as examples of what they want. But the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and Canada are not socialist, but instead free-market welfare states, in many respects and in some cases overall freer than the United States.⁶

Of course, growth has not touched everyone equally. Critics of market society, following Marx, say that what matters most is what common people have the real ability to do, and this means giving them real resources to achieve their ends. But this kind of prosperity—where common people have real resources—is found in market societies and nowhere else.⁷

For informed humanitarians, the debate is no longer whether we should have market societies or not, but rather which kind of market society we should have.

SO, WHICH MARKET SOCIETY?

A market is a relationship where the mode of interaction is consensual exchange.⁸ Broadly speaking, a market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services for valuable consideration of some kind.⁹

Note that this definition is controversial. Precisely what constitutes a market is disputed. For example, some have insisted that this definition is overly broad. It includes not just cases where a good or service is exchanged frequently, systematically, or “pervasively,” but also cases of one-off, individual exchange that are better thought of as incidental or, at best, “proto-market” exchanges.¹⁰ But we won’t hang on this definition too much. Instead, later in this book, when we consider various complaints critics have about markets, we will usually grant their working definition, whatever that is, and then try to show their criticisms fail anyway.

Definitions aside, one might ask: What kind of market society should we have? That is a broad and imprecise question. We need to break it down into a set of narrower questions, such as:

• 1. How much should governments intervene in and regulate the market?
• 2. What sorts of property-rights regimes and background legal institutions are best?
• 3. How much should governments provide social insurance or other welfare programs to protect citizens from misfortune on the market?

These are all worthy questions, but they are not our concern in this book. Here, we focus on a fourth question:

• 4. What sorts of things should be and should not be for sale?

This question concerns what we call the scope of the market. Even if we accept that we should have a market economy, there remains the question of what should and should not be part of that market. Most people think that some things should be kept out of the market, that some things are not properly the kind of thing that should be bought and sold. Over the past few years, dozens of books and hundreds of articles have debated this question.

NOXIOUS MARKETS?

Consider the following examples, some familiar, some not. Ask yourself: Do you think it is morally wrong to sell the goods or services in each example?

• Human Billboards: In Tokyo, the PR firm Wit Inc. paid young women $121/day to wear sticker advertisements on their thighs as they go about their days. The women must be young, popular, thin, and pretty. They agree to wear short skirts or shorts. Wit’s CEO explains, “It’s an absolutely perfect place to put an advertisement, as this is what guys are eager to look at and girls are eager to expose.”¹¹
• Watch My GF: In the United States and elsewhere, one can purchase subscriptions to websites that collect nude or sexual videos men have submitted of their current or ex-girlfriends. These pictures were meant to be private; the women intended only for their then-current boyfriends to see them. Sometimes men submit these videos to humiliate their exes. (It’s called “revenge porn.”) Some of these websites instead have user agreements that require the people in the videos to authenticate themselves and consent for the videos to be posted.
• Prostitution: Of course, rather than looking at pictures, you can always buy sex. For example, as of 2021, readers can search www.yesbackpage.com to find sexual services in their area. (Yesbackpage.com replaces backpage.com, which was seized by the FBI.)
• What’s Your Price? WhatsYourPrice.com is a dating website in which users pay other users to go on first dates with them. A 22-year-old college student Vva33, who posted a picture of herself emerging from a pool in a little black bikini, tells men that she “won’t meet for less than $300” as she gets “too many higher offers.” Related websites promise to help match would-be “sugar daddies” with would-be “sugar babies.” Out of curiosity, back in 2014, we created a fake profile of a heterosexual male who is a partner in an architecture firm and loves outdoor sports. Our fake architect immediately received a $200 offer for a first date with an attractive professional woman.
• Wigs: Hair extensions and wigs are often made from real human hair. This hair frequently comes from poor women in the third world, many of whom sell “their treasured asset[s]” because they have few options.¹²
• The Other Express Lane: In airports queues, not everyone is equal. For a long time, first-class passengers have been able to use a separate line, cutting ahead of everyone else. The Transportation Security Administration now sells expedited security access through its PreCheck and Global Entry programs. Some airlines continue to sell line-cutting rights for security queues or for flight boarding.
• Human Eggs and Pregnancy Surrogacy: When Brennan was in college, an infertile couple ran an ad in his university’s newspaper offering to buy an egg from a tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman for $25,000. Relatedly, one of Brennan’s gay friends and his partner paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce their two children. They purchased eggs from one woman and paid a different woman to carry the fertilized eggs for them. They also paid this second woman for her breast milk.
• The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: Why does fictional billionaire Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) drive an Audi rather than, say, an Aston Martin or a Bugatti? Simple: Audi paid to have its products placed within the film. In fact, in any high-budget summer film from Hollywood, if you can see the logo or brand of the product the characters use, chances are, you’re viewing a paid product placement.
• Payola: Sometimes the music on the radio is itself the placed product. Record companies sometimes pay radio stations to broadcast music signals. In the United States, this is legal so long as the radio station discloses that the song is sponsored, but this rule is difficult to enforce, and many radio stations do not disclose that they received money.
• Pay for Grades: Following the work of economist Roland Fryer, some school systems are experimenting with paying underperforming students for good grades.

NOXIOUS POTENTIAL MARKETS?

All of the examples above are markets that either currently exist or used to exist until recently. But also consider the following possible markets, which some people wish to see legalized:

• Tiger Farming: Tigers are nearly extinct. A large part of the problem is that hunters poach tigers for their fur. Laws against poaching and trade in tiger pelts fail to stop the problem—it’s just too difficult to stop poachers and the black-market tiger trade. This raises the question: In order to save tigers from extinction, should governments allow tiger farming? That is, should governments allow private farmers to raise and slaughter tigers for their fur, just as they allow ranchers to raise cattle for meat and leather or rabbits for their pelts? Defenders of tiger farming say that there is no moral distinction between pigs and tigers—if one may be farmed, so may the other—but allowing tiger farming would remove the economic incentives behind poaching and thus prevent extinction in the wild.
• Betting on Terror: In the early 2000s, following the work of many economists on the predictive power of information markets, the Pentagon considered creating a Policy Analysis Market (PAM). These information markets would have allowed people to bet on when certain events would occur, such as terrorist strikes or certain kinds of conflict in the Middle East. The markets are designed such that the market price of a bid indicates the probability that an event will occur (e.g., $.87/share on a bet that terrorists will attack Boston tomorrow = 87% chance that terrorists will attack Boston). Defenders of PAM believe the Pentagon, CIA, and other agencies would in turn have used this information to save lives.

Chances are you oppose some of the markets above. You find at least some of these markets offensive, repugnant, degrading, or evil. If so, you are not alone. Most people think there are some things that money should not buy, that should be insulated from the market forces of supply and demand.

WE ARE THE CRITICS’ CRITICS

Debra Satz refers to those markets that generate “revulsion” as noxious markets.¹³ She says there is “an intuitive disgust or abhorrence to certain kinds of market transactions ….”¹⁴ Margaret Jane Radin describes the objects of sale on these markets as “contested commodities,”¹⁵ and insists that some things are “market-inalienable,” meaning they are not the kinds of things we should have permission to sell.¹⁶ Contested commodities include markets in organs and blood, sex, surrogacy, line-standing services,¹⁷ and the like.

There seems to be a limitless market for books about the moral limits of markets. Critics of the market all agree that it is permissible for them to sell books on the limits of the market, and some of them have made piles of money selling such books. Some charge $25,000 or more plus first-class airfare to give public lectures about what money cannot buy.

In recent years, Debra Satz, Ruth Grant, Michael Sandel, Robert Skidelsky, Margaret Jane Radin, Benjamin Barber, and George Ritzer, among others, have each argued that certain things should not be for sale, and the spread of the market corrupts our personal and civic character. We will refer to these thinkers and their intellectual allies as “anti-commodification theorists.” They are opposed to what they call “commodification,” where “commodification” is a pejorative word for putting something up for sale that was not previously the kind of thing people tended to buy and sell. “Commodification” connotes the process or action of extending the market—buying and selling—to things previously excluded or protected from the market.

The common theme in their work is that the market is a mutinous servant of the public good. The market may be good—or tolerable—for some purposes, but it spreads and takes over like pigweed.

Commodification, they say, is a built-in defect of the market mentality. People—from arch-capitalists like PayPal founder Peter Thiel to anti-capitalists like filmmaker Michael Moore (net worth: $50 million¹⁸)—are always looking to make a buck...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Should Everything Be for Sale?
• Part II Do Markets Signal Disrespect?
• Part III Do Markets Corrupt?
• Part IV The Other Big Objections
• Part V Debunking Intuitions
• Bibliography
• Index