What Money Can T Buy Chapter Summary

In the New York Times bestseller, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Markets, Michael Sandel provides a fresh approach for evaluating the role of the free markets and how they impact everyday life. Sandel argues that the reach of the markets, into all spheres of life, has lead to the commodification of essentially every human activity, which corrupts and crowds out nonmarket values. He defines this revolution, which has taken place over the last thirty years, as a drift “…from having a market economy to being a market society.” What Money Can’t Buy intends to spark an enlightened debate on whether people should be able to put a price on certain goods or activities. The book is a new development in the sense that it analyzes the
entanglement of moral and market reasoning but the ideas of John Rawls clearly form the foundation for debate.

Sandel starts his book by providing us with a list of things that money can currently buy, such as the right to hunt endangered animals or the cell phone number of your doctor or the right to pollute our atmosphere.
Through these various examples, his intention is to communicate the idea that we currently live in a society where everything can be bought and sold. Sandel states that the reach of the markets has expanded and “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life.” He determines that that the transformation towards a market society has caused us to lose sight of what we truly value. Ultimately, Sandel is concerned about the free markets to the extent that they are invasive and corrupt the very nature of the good things in
life.

Throughout the book, Sandel’s arguments provide for an insightful critique of liberalism and, more notably, John Rawls. When considering John Rawl’s view of justice we can gain a better understanding of the arguments delivered by Sandel. In short, Rawl’s theory of justice focuses on two main principles - the liberty principle and the difference principle. These two principles essentially support social welfare, equality of opportunity, and the equal right to basic liberties. Rawl’s work offers a fundamental approach for understanding justice but, based on Sandel’s ideological view, it is missing a very important consideration: individual morality as a foundation for justice. The concept of liberal neutrality is a prime example of Sandel’s disagreement with Rawls because neutrality doesn’t permit debates on morality. Rather, liberal neutrality is an idea that seizes to question what individuals value or what their conception of the good life is.

The central focus of Sandel’s critique on liberalism suggests that the liberal state simply can’t remain neutral in relation to the public good because it must consider individual’s values.
He expresses that protecting individual liberties is a primary concern but in order to do that we must preserve individual values and promote civic virtues. Sandel would argue that the liberal idea of market neutrality, which disregards the relevant value of certain individual preferences or values, is a primary contributor to the demise of society. His analysis of the moral limits of the markets highlights the liberal state’s contribution towards fostering market reasoning in spheres of life that it perhaps shouldn’t. Through the development of the liberal state, or market based economy, widespread expansion of the markets has created a society where market principles maintain an imperial force in our private lives and public
discourse.

Through analyzing Rawl’s theory of justice and liberalism, it can be noticed that Sandel wants to take things a step further by highlighting the correlation between justice and morality. Rawl’s theory builds a strong foundation for discussion on the role of justice, as based on reasoning and rational choice but Sandel requires us to question morality as a framework for justice. The prostitution example in the book relates closely to this point because it forces us to consider how voluntary persons actions truly are. The notion that a disadvantaged economic situation might force someone to engage in prostitution, even if they were disgusted by it, is a representation of how market reasoning can be applied beyond the realm of material goods. Liberalism would find no problem with the action if it was truly free but Sandel would argue that this is the problem. Sandel states that, “So when market reasoning travels beyond the domain of material goods, it must traffic in morality, unless it wants blindly to maximize social utility without regard for the moral worth of the preferences it satisfies.”