What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

In his Introduction, Sandel poses the central problem of his text: Markets, and market values, “have come to govern our lives as never before” (7). After decades of policies encouraging the growth of a free market, Sandel suggests that “we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society” (13, emphasis added). He argues that belonging to a market society has moral consequences that impact daily life.

The pivotal theme, The Immorality of Over-Commodification, is introduced. Sandel suggests that, “some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities” (13). To illustrate his point, Sandel refers to the fact that some states have started paying elementary school children to read books. While encouraging reading practice is justified based on the strong association of reading with academic achievement, Sandel suggests that children will lose their intrinsic motivation to read for the joy of reading if they are instead reading only to earn money.

Sandel problematizes the commodification of almost all aspects of people’s lives. He questions the ethics of a free (and therefore unregulated) market, where buying and selling rules all aspects of life, through examples designed to evoke discomfort, such as pointing out the discrepancy between paying $6,250 to an Indian surrogate mother when that “is less than one-third the going rate in the United States” (6). Sandel suggests that wealthy Western women’s using the wombs of women in developing countries in this way—and at such a low price—is unethical.

Sandel also explores the example of wealthy individuals paying the annual premiums of a person’s life insurance in order to collect the death benefit when the person dies. Sandel suggests that “this form of betting on the lives of strangers has become a $30 billion industry. The sooner the stranger dies, the more the investor makes” (7). The idea of wealthy individuals profiting from the deaths of less-wealthy individuals, Sandel asserts, is evidence that “markets have become detached from morals” (8).

These examples illustrate another key theme of Sandel’s work: Free-Market Values and Social Inequality. In the examples above, wealthy individuals can become wealthier, or access opportunities not open to everyone, through the free-market system. This inequality is, in Sandel’s view, immoral. Over-commodification of things like healthcare, education, and political opportunity has changed the experience of wealth. While in the past people just could buy more luxurious material possessions, increasingly the wealthy can now access a greater quality of life and more opportunities. Sandel problematizes this trend, which increases the gulf between poor or middle-class individuals and the rich: “[T]he commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of inequality by making money matter more” (11).

By creating cognitive dissonance about Western society’s market values and urging his readers to ask big questions, Sandel introduces his next key theme: The Importance of Debate on Market Values. Sandel implies that market values have become accepted and perpetuated without sufficient questioning of their desirability: “[W]e need to ask whether there are some things money should not buy” (8-9, emphasis added). He suggests that it is time to ask “ask whether we want to live this way” (8, emphasis added) instead of accepting the dominance of free-market values as inevitable.

Sandel believes that such a debate has been conspicuously absent despite the dramatic failures of the Western markets. He asserts that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis should have prompted “a time of moral reckoning, a season of sober second thoughts about the market faith” (15). Despite the fact that economies were devastated, fortunes were lost, and millions were left unemployed, there was not “a fundamental rethinking of markets” (16). Instead, the largest protest movement in the United States after the GFC, the Tea Party Movement, suggested the same policies and market views that Sandel believes caused the collapse in the first place: libertarian, free-market values and politically conservative reforms, such as lowered taxes and the abolishment of Obamacare. Sandel suggests that, while the critique of the country’s condition was valid, the movement merely perpetuated the system’s inherent flaws.

Sandel thus believes that a true rethinking, in the form of a robust societal and political conversation, needs to include a consideration of the moral foundations of how a good life can be achieved. He believes that such a debate is essential to preserve society’s morality and to protect the wellbeing of lower and middle-class individuals, who are especially vulnerable in a free-market system.