Ron Peters's Reviews > What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Sandel’s question is simple but answering it is complex. “Markets reflect and promote certain norms, certain ways of valuing the goods they exchange. In deciding whether to commodify a good, we must therefore consider more than efficiency and distributive justice. We must also ask whether the market norms will crowd out nonmarket norms, and if so, whether this represents a loss worth caring about.”

Market reasoning is often incomplete without some consideration of moral reasoning. Sandel notes that the current, transactional way of thinking about many of life’s activities is new. Economists' beloved notion of incentives only rose to real prominence in the latter 20th century: “This is a far cry from Adam Smith’s image of the market as an invisible hand. Once incentives become the cornerstone of modern life, the market appears as a heavy hand and a manipulative one.”

Sandel does a good job of showing how, the more markets extend into more areas of daily life, the more entangled they are with moral questions. When market reasoning is applied to “sex, procreation, child-rearing, education, health, criminal punishment, immigration policy, and environmental protection” can we afford to mindlessly maximize the satisfaction of preferences based on the ability and desire to pay, regardless of the moral worth of the choices being made?