What Money Can't Buy
The Moral Limits of Markets
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4.5 • 13 Ratings
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life-medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
In What Money Can't Buy, Sandel examines one of the biggest ethical questions of our time and provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?
Customer Reviews
Everybody should read this
Having watched Michael Sandel deliver the Reith lectures and his series of Harvard tutorials on Justice, I have long been a fan. This is a thoroughly thought provoking and moral book in the same vein as Freakonomics. In a modern society where market values impinge on all aspects of our modern life it is important to stop and reassess which direction we are heading in, to reset the moral compass...