Abstract
This is going to be a continuation of the discussion before lunch. In that discussion we heard about two different arguments, or kinds of argument, for calling a market ‘noxious’: an argument from equality and an argument from corruption. A market can be called noxious because it undermines human equality, either because some of its participants are vulnerable to exploitation or because it inflicts serious harms on some section of the population. Alternatively, a market can be called noxious because it corrupts the good it traffics in, by imposing on it a meaning that is not properly its own. Modern liberals are generally uncomfortable with this latter argument, because it implies, unpalatably from their point of view, that a voluntary, victim-free transaction can nonetheless be vicious. I want to defend the corruption argument, both because I think it is a valid argument and also because I think it is primarily a worry about corruption, and not equality, that underlies our fear of creeping marketisation. Here, as elsewhere, modern liberalism imposes a kind of hypocrisy on us. It forces us to voice our moral intuitions in a language alien to them.
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Notes
Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Jean-Claude Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil: An Essay on Liberal Civilisation, tr. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity and Public Happiness (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).
Gabriel Abend, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
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Skidelsky, E., Skidelsky, R. (2015). The Moral Limits of Markets. In: Skidelsky, E., Skidelsky, R. (eds) Are Markets Moral?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472748_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472748_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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