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

Michael Sandel aims to establish that there is an inherent immorality in market values entering nonmarket spaces, which is occurring through the over-commodification of an increasingly market-driven world. As is suggested in the title of his work, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel believes that there are some objects, institutions, and ideas that should not be able to be bought and sold.

Sandel suggests that market values don’t merely enter spaces as well as existing civic values, but instead that market values “crowd out” existing values. He provides the example of a Swiss town feeling less inclined to support the nuclear waste plant near their homes when they were offered financial incentives for allowing it, as well as lawyers preferring to give free advice to pensioners rather than for a dramatically reduced fee. In both cases, “the intrusion of market norms crowded out [a] sense of civic duty” (140). Sandel thus argues that free-market values corrode important societal value systems, such as civic goodness and altruism.

Sandel also suggests that the market cannot regulate morally righteous behavior, but that it instead tends to result in the opposite, as ethics are abandoned in favor of making money.