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Markets with Some Limits

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Notes

  1. See Brennan and Jaworski (2015a, 2015b, 2015c).

  2. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a, p. 1059).

  3. Ibid.

  4. In particular, they identify Anderson (1990), Sandel (2000; 2012), and Satz (2010) as endorsing Anticommodification.

  5. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a, p. 1054).

  6. Brennan and Jaworski (2015b, p. 16).

  7. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a, p. 1055).

  8. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a, p. 1076).

  9. Ibid.

  10. I have adapted this case from Singer (1972).

  11. I assume you share my judgment that saving the child in this case is obligatory but my argument does not require that you do. If you do not, you should feel free to imagine your own case of obligation and make the appropriate substitutions in what follows.

  12. Barring genuine moral dilemmas, if it is wrong for me to not perform an action, then it is not wrong for me to do so.

  13. To head off a possible confusion, I am not claiming that no obligations entail reciprocal obligations on the part of others. It might be true that some obligations are ‘conditional’ such that I am obligated to do a thing for you only if you are also obligated to do something for me. In such cases, however, the obligation is conditional. I am concerned with conditioning the doing of the obligated act given the obligation.

  14. Changing circumstances may dissolve the obligation. For example, I am no longer obligated to make our meeting if you cancel. But such contingency is not the same as my placing conditions on my meeting you. We cannot permissibly place conditions on what we are obligated to do.

  15. For the sake of argument, I grant the defender that it would be permissible to accept these rewards.

  16. This is especially so if conditional rewards for the fulfillment of obligations can be considered markets, as considered above in § 2.

  17. As John Rawls claimed, “the problem of the justice of actions, as a theoretical question, is essentially the problem of formulating reasonable principles for determining to which interests of a set of competing interests of two or more persons it is right to give preference.” (1951, p. 191).

  18. For just one example from John Broome, we might think a lottery appropriate given the equal strength of the potential parents’ claims to the guardianship rights (1990).

  19. Note that it cannot be the case that doing so would lead to consequences that are as good or better. Suppose I am obligated to O. Either (a) the consequences of my offering to O conditional on compensation are at least as good as my O-ing itself regardless of whether anyone buys or (b) the consequences of my offering to O conditional on compensation are at least as good as my O-ing itself only if someone buys. If (a) is the case, then O cannot actually be an obligation of mine, since there is an (expected) outcome where I don’t O (the one in which no one buys) that is at least as good as an (expected) outcome where I do (the one in which I simply O). If (b) is the case, then it follows that if no one buys, I am still obligated to O. Therefore, if I am acting rightly, placing my offering to O conditional on compensation is a bluff—I will O regardless of whether I get paid to. Arguably, such bluffs are not really markets, since no conditions are in fact being placed.

References

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  1. Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, USA

    Mark Wells

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Wells, M. Markets with Some Limits. J Value Inquiry 51, 611–618 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-017-9619-4

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