A Mistake in the Commodification Debate

Abstract

ABSTRACT:A significant debate has developed around the question: What are the moral limits of the market? This paper argues that this debate proceeds on a mistake. Both those who oppose specific markets and those who defend them, adopt the same deficient approach. Participants illicitly proceed from an assessment of the transactions making up a market to a judgment of that market's permissibility. This inference is unlicensed. We may know everything there is to know about the transactions in a specific market—they might all be absolutely bad—but we will not yet know whether that market should be prohibited. To discern this, to establish that intervention into some specific market is justifiable, one must supply a rather different assessment. One must compare the outcome in which that market is permitted with the best outcome available in its absence. None in this debate has offered such a judgment.

Markets Within the Limit of Feasibility

“…The 'you' in the thesis really refers to us, what we are permitted to do as a collective endeavor. This recognition that we are talking about markets rather than individual transactions has consequences for this debate (see Semrau 2017), and in this case the consequence is that it affects the feasibility of buying and selling the good morally. Sure, I can do it, but can we?…”