What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

A market-based solution was developed by Barbara Harris, the founder of the North Carolina-based charity, Project Prevention, to prevent the births of children from addicts in America: a cash incentive to undergo sterilization or long-term birth control. Critics point out that vulnerable women are targeted and coerced into giving up their reproductive rights, and that the scheme funds women’s drug problems rather than helping to treat them. The proposal was heavily criticized in the United Kingdom, but was taken up in some African countries by women who tested HIV positive.

The arguments against the scheme take two forms: First, that this is coercive toward a desperate person, who is addicted and likely impoverished; and second, that it is corrupt in terms of dealing in the sale of something (reproduction) that should not be commodified. Some parts of people’s lives should not be characterized by market values, Sandel suggests. The parts of people’s lives that are commodified and the parts that are not commodified need to be clarified.

Economists are increasingly being pulled into moral debates and considerations, because areas of life traditionally not governed by market norms are now becoming so. An economic approach to all aspects of human behavior rests on the assumption that all people, in all decisions and choices, are seeking to maximize their welfare by weighing up costs and benefits.