Abstract
Critics of markets have long claimed from that markets make people vicious, particularly materialistic and greedy, or even sadistic. In Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?, Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi provide an essential contribution to discussions of markets and morals by deploying social scientific tools and empirical rigor to answer what has historically been treated as a philosophic problem. This article considers possible replies from philosophic critics of markets, particularly those who hold that the relevant contrast institutions are outside the set of existing societies such as a utopian future communism or mythic asocial state of nature. The article then argues that Storr and Choi provide significant answers even to such critics and points to directions for future research.
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Notes
Though I suspect that parallel arguments can be made regarding some of the other philosophers Storr and Choi discuss, I focus on Marx and Rousseau as representative of the general issues.
More recently, Erik Olin Wright (2019, 1) defends anticapitalism while also acknowledging that within capitalism “the array of consumption goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere.”
Jeremy Bellamy (2012) similarly argues that markets are inefficient and corrupting compared to a hypothetical, specifically science fiction, system of collective planning.
There are different ways to specify a democratic criterion, but dividing Storr and Choi’s set of nonmarket societies between the democratic and authoritarian societies would presumably put Spain in the former and North Korea in the latter.
See also Leon Trotsky (2005, chap. 8).
Storr and Choi focus on large-scale societies. Henrich et al. (2004) discuss insightful experimental data from small-scale nonmarket societies. Such studies lead Herbert Gintis (2012) to contends that the “notion that the market economy makes people greedy, selfish, and amoral is simply fallacious.”
G. A. Cohen (2009) seems to suggest something along these lines. Cohen holds that markets undermine community and foster greed, though markets currently seem necessary for productivity, particularly in terms of the information function of markets. He maintains hope, however, that alternative means will be developed for achieving market productivity coupled with the community spirit of a camping trip. See also Van Schoelandt’s (2014) reply to Cohen.
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Van Schoelandt, C. Do markets corrupt our morals compared to what?. Rev Austrian Econ 36, 91–97 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-022-00579-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-022-00579-8