Don’t Step Over This Moral Line

Using intriguing illustrations, Michael Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, shows how markets are creeping into places they have no business being

In Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, one of the most fascinating illustrations has to do with day-care centres in Israel. When parents started showing up late to pick up their children, the centres decided to fine them. What happened was the opposite of the result they sought—the number of late pickups went up. Paying money had made parents feel less guilty about their behaviour. In their minds, they had converted the fine into a fee and begun to look at it as a service being provided by the school.

The first chapter of What Money Can’t Buy is titled ‘Jumping the Queue’. In it, Sandel, who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, speaks about markets corrupting the simple ethic of waiting your turn. For example, in Beijing, patients at public hospitals stand in long queues to get appointment tickets. This has led to a trade in these tickets, with scalpers collecting them beforehand and then selling them to patients. In Washington DC, for hearings of Congressional committees where anyone can enter on a first-come-first-serve basis, there are now ‘line standing companies’ providing services to lobbyists. Someone else will stand in line and the lobbyist will arrive only when the hearing begins to take his place. In US and UK airports, Economy Class passengers can pay a small fee and move to the head of the queue for check-in and boarding.

Reading it, I was struck by Indian parallels. For example, at Mumbai’s suburban railway stations, there are two lines for the same ticket counter; one for first class, where there is usually no queue, and another serpentine one for the general class. There is an even more interesting Indian parallel that shows how queues can lead to markets. Till about a few years ago, to get a passport we either had to suffer large queues and red tape or pay an agent. The Government then made agents illegal and everyone is now forced to go to a passport office to submit an application. The process was streamlined by making it compulsory for applicants to take prior appointments online, but given that a passport office can only cater to a limited number of applicants per day, as soon as the window for taking appointments opens, all the slots get filled. Those who don’t have a broadband connection can forget about ever getting an appointment. This has led to an entirely new subset of agents: those who make online applications for people. They even advertise themselves online.

I point this out to Sandel and it immediately piques his interest. We are in a hotel lobby in South Mumbai. He is in the city to give a series of talks on the theme of his book. “An appointment industry, I love it,” he says, asking for my pen and noting it down. Sandel’s use of everyday examples like these, which are there all around us but go unnoticed, and sifting out the moral questions they raise are what make his lectures so incredibly popular at Harvard where thousands of students attend them in large halls.

When markets influence queue jumping, he writes in his book, ‘the ethic of the queue—“first come, first-served”—is being displaced by the ethics of the market—“you get what you pay for.” And this shift reflects something bigger—the growing reach of money and markets into spheres of life once governed by nonmarket norms.’

One example of this is in the use of monetary incentives to guide human actions. The book cites the example of Barbara Harris, a social worker from North Carolina, USA, who offered $300 to women drug addicts if they would consider long-term birth control. This was to prevent babies being born addicted and brought up neglected. Such a deal might seem alright because it is consensual and everyone wins. But Sandel says there are two arguments against it. One is that it is a form of coercion.

The drug addict may not be “acting freely… given her addiction and, in most cases, her poverty.” But there is also one more argument: that it corrupts the norms that govern parenthood and the human body’s reproductive capacity, turning it into a commodity.

He writes, ‘Harris treats drug-addicted and HIV-positive women as damaged baby-making machines that can be switched off for a fee. Those who accept her offer acquiesce in this degrading view of themselves… They treat their reproductive capacity as a tool for monetary gain rather than a gift or trust to be exercised according to norms of responsibilities and care.’ Another example in his book is of some schools in the US giving children money as an incentive for getting good grades. This corrupts the norms that govern education.

When markets encroach upon such traditionally non-market areas, the moral objections essentially boil down to two: the fairness one (it is unfair to those who can’t pay to get to the front of the queue) or the corruption one (it corrodes the norms that govern a non-market activity like parenthood). I ask Sandel which of the two he thinks is more problematic. He says, “The fairness argument is much more familiar in general public discourse. Many people oppose free markets in the buying and selling of organs or reproductive capacity [say, surrogacy], on the grounds that inevitably it will be desperately poor people who make that choice. It won’t be a truly free choice because it will be under the pressure of necessity. But I emphasise the second, the corruption argument. It points to the erosion of the moral and civic fabric that can occur when we put a price on every aspect of the good life. We pay less attention to it, yet it is pervasive as market thinking and market values reach more and more aspects of life.”

Another riveting instance his book provides of the overreach of markets is in death. For example, multinationals in the US have started to take large life insurance policies on employees in which the company itself is the beneficiary— they would profit if a worker died. Or, consider the life settlement market, in which investors buy life insurance policies from elderly people by paying them a lump sum and get the money when the insured person dies. Wall Street went one step further: it bundled these policies and created death bonds out of them, just as they did with mortgages which led to the 2008 recession. The problem with markets that depend on people dying to make money is that they make an investor hope for the death of someone so he can profit from it.

Sandel says the germ of the book’s idea goes back to his days as a graduate student when he grew interested in economics because of its clarity and rigour in addressing social life and politics. “I wondered back then whether these rigorous methods could include ethical considerations such as concern for equality, for justice, or whether those ethical concerns had to be worked independently,” he says. In the book, he argues that economics needs to reconnect with moral and political philosophy because this was how the subject began. “If you go back to the classical economists like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, despite their different ideological orientations, they all shared the assumption that economics was not an independent science. It was really a sub field of moral and political philosophy and I think we need to get back to that understanding,” he says.

The absence of this understanding lets the market run riot in places it has no business being in. But how do you know whether a norm is being corrupted when a market suddenly comes up? There is no one universal principle. “We have to look case by case. It is hard to identify a single rule or principle that can tell us whether a norm worth caring about has been corrupted,” he says. To show why this is the case, he offers two examples—prostitution and voting. For the first, one can ask, ‘Does it violate human dignity to buy and sell sex?’, and for the second, whether there should be a free market in votes during elections. To think about the first requires thinking about the meaning of sexual intimacy, the relation of one’s body to one’s person. In the second example, the relevant virtue is the civic virtue of deliberating on the common good and exercising a voice in how we are governed—does the buying and selling of votes corrupt that? “The answer will be different, and the moral deliberations will be different if we are talking about a free market in sex and a free market in votes,” he says.

That is also why economics is so seductive— it has one answer for everything. “Markets have a single principle— a transactional principle which says consenting adults should be free to place whatever value they want on the goods exchanged,” he says. Sandel says we are becoming market societies without realising it, and that moral philosophy is a way to draw lines to keep that at bay. “The first thing is to recognise how far we have travelled as a market society. The second step is to engage in a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong. The third step, having had that debate, is to try to have policies to enjoy the benefits that markets can provide and keeping markets in their proper place, preventing them from invading the whole of life,” he says.

The ultimate objective of such measures is for human beings to lead what he calls the good life. To lead such a life we must first come to an understanding of what it is; what is just and unjust. He says, “One element of the good life is to develop these capacities for judgment, for deliberation in the company of others, and that requires that we share a common life, a sense of community. Which is why living in a good society and having a voice in its government is an essential aspect of the good life. One of the most corrosive effects of markets in recent decades has been to erode the moral and civic fabric, to lead us to see ourselves as consumers rather than as citizens.”

marketsMichael Sandelmoney