Justice and the Moral Limits of Markets

again I'd like to welcome everybody here to this lecture I'm Judy lagron will be chairing the event we'd like to extend a particular welcome to those of you from outside the Elysee who joined us here today but also very pleased to see those from inside the Elysee and most special welcome to Michael Stanback who is the auntie and Robert vast professor of government at Harvard University he's got a very distinguished career author of various books the liberalism of the limits of justice democracy's discontent his course on which the book which he about which you will be talking today the course in which his book is based is called justice and it's enrolled over 40,000 the recipient of the Harvard ranked there Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize he was a Harvard professor from 1999 and in 2008 he was recognized by the American Political Science Association for a career of excellence in teaching over this side of the Atlantic he has of course been the reef lecturer this year all of this of course pales entirely pales beside his real claim to fame which is that he's actually believed to be a model for the nuclear power magnate Montgomery burns from The Simpsons he didn't promise us to give us a rendition from the citizens today however he is going to start us off with what's the right thing to do that's a question I've asked thousands of students at public university in my class justice would it be just to torture the suspect to get the information do you think sorry to steal a drug picture their child needs to survive my name is Michael Sandel and over the years thousands of students have joined me for an ongoing debate about the moral decisions we face in our everyday lives so there's nothing wrong with correcting me injustice and discrimination that's another black people party effort against a lot of unfortunate family circumstances for which we can claim your credit raise your hand those of you here I notice you raised your hand king justice piloting experience everything that you thought about that point because the purpose of sex is one first appropriate easier than two for a unifying purpose between a man and a woman police are releasing that's fine but civil union is not marriage within the Catholic Church what is the right thing to do answer with all the basically this entire network reasoner inescapable is that we live some answer to these questions replicated and now I have the chance to invite you to join us as Howard opens his classroom to the world well thank you very much for that warm welcome in those kind words of introduction the what you've just seen is actually a short preview of a public television version of the the course and the book it's all by way of an experiment to open access to the classroom and to see whether the topics and the themes that are debated by political philosophers and by students of political philosophy can begin maybe in some small way to find their way into public discourse and democratic deliberation that's really the the goal of the the book which is meant to be accessible and inviting not only to students of political philosophy but also to citizens generally who care about these questions and would like to think about them let me summarize the theme of the of the book and then I would like to put to you some questions that have to do with the connection between justice and the moral limits of markets and walk a bit it's often most of our debates about justice revolve around too familiar considerations one of them is a conception of justice that says justice means promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people the utilitarian idea of justice promoting the general welfare and then there's a rival conception of justice that gets a lot of attention these days in the academy but also in public debate that says maximizing utility or the general welfare isn't the only thing that matters morally there is also the matter respecting freedom and in particular the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness their own conceptions of the good respect for freedom an individual choice is a powerfully influential second strand of contemporary debate about justice and a lot of the arguments within political philosophy and abroad in the world in our politics is an argument between utilitarian theories of justice and what we might broadly call freedom based theories of justice now it's also true that some of our debates take place within what is a fairly expansive freedom camp there are those who interpret freedom to mean respecting the outcomes of the choices people make and the exchanges they make in market economies they tend to be advocates of less a fair free market principles let the results of the market lie with rely where they fall there are other advocates of a freedom based theory of justice who are not libertarians who are not advocates of less a fair market approaches to justice but who think that true freedom requires choice against a background of fair conditions so for the second strand of the freedom school in order really to respect free individual choice it's not necessarily simply to have a market economy however free it's not simply enough to valorize free choice free exchange in the market but the choices only realize freedom if they're made against the background of enough equality of condition an equality of opportunity so that people's choices are not in effect coerced by economic necessity so these are the familiar debates the utilitarian won the freedom one with the two different strands of the freedom view the first strand of the freedom view informs less a fair abuse the second broadly speaking liberal egalitarian or liberal welfare state views those are important traditions those dominant and influential ones the argument of the book is that they don't fully capture what justice is about and they don't even they aren't even adequate to make sense of the debates about justice that we actually have instead we need to take account of a third understanding of justice a third tradition which goes beyond utility and Beyond freedom to take up the question of virtue moral desert and the meaning of the good life now this third understanding of justice is in some way to try to revive or emphasize or point to this third tradition is these days in some ways to lean against the grain about the dominant assumptions underlying our politics and that's what I try to do in the book to suggest that we can't give an adequate account of justice not in economic life also not when we deal with contested cultural questions in politics and social questions without acknowledging the importance of what we might call the virtue or dessert based or a conception of justice that draws on and invites into politics competing conceptions of the common good of civic virtue and of the good life although it's less familiar this third strand in contemporary debate it goes back at least to Aristotle's politics Aristotle defined justice roughly speaking as giving people what they deserved he recognized what is in undoubtedly the case that the hard questions begin when we start arguing about who deserves what and why Aristotle's answer to that question is it depends on the good that's being distributed he begins with the example of flutes you may remember those of you who have read the politics of Aristotle how if we had some flutes to distribute how should we decide who should get the best ones and his answer is the best flutes should go to the best flute players now you might say that's a perfectly reasonable utilitarian idea if the best musicians have the best flutes they will make better music and we'll all be better off but that's not Aristotle's reason Aristotle's reason for giving the best flutes to the best musicians is that's what flutes are for to be played well the greatest musicians are best able to realize the purpose the nature of a flute closely connected to this idea of desert is a certain idea of virtue and of honor and of recognition part of the point of musical performance is not simply to create pleasing sounds it's also to honor and recognize the virtue of being a great musician and so the claim of desert has not only to do with the contribution to the general welfare but also to do with realizing the purpose which purpose is closely connected to honoring rewarding recognizing the virtue of being a great musician now most of our debates these days don't have to do with distributing things like flutes but with other more complex Goods and opportunities but what I would like to suggest and we'll see in the discussion whether you think this is completely wrong headed or not is the debates we have about distributive justice these days do rest often implicitly on this third idea this Aristotelian idea that justice does have something to do with giving people what they deserve in accordance with their virtue and it's connected somehow with deciding what virtues what goods are worthy of honor and recognition take for example the recent public debate about bailouts and bonuses in the wake of the financial crisis there was not surprisingly considerable reluctance when government officials Treasury officials came to the public in the US and in the UK and said we have to bail out the Wall Street firms and the banks and the hedge funds who pose a systemic risk people said that's not fair that's what the hesitation was about there's something unjust about ordinary taxpayers having to subsidize financial institutions very wealthy people who took in many cases risky reckless Gamble's and now not only wrecked their countries that their companies but put entire the entire world financial system at risk where is the fairness in that what was the reply well the reply was yes it's a bad thing but we've just got to do it we've got to do it because if we don't the whole system may melt down and everyone will be worse off so it was a straightforward utilitarian argument made with considerable urgency by politicians the political establishment Treasury officials and the like in fact it was sometimes said when the public hesitated fairness is off the table right now you're ever hearing something like that we we can't be bothered with that at the moment because the whole system is in peril and you will regret it if we don't so set aside fairness set aside those moral qualms and we just have to do it and the bailiffs went ahead and then the bonuses came and that generated another round of outrage what was that outrage about outrage actually is interesting as a political phenomenon also as a moral one outrages of anger but not just any kind of anger it's anger at injustice and so it's worthwhile attending I think to outrage and parsing that's trying to make sense of its source in a lot of the discussion at the time of the bailout politicians and commentators who thought of themselves as serious responsible types said I hope we're beyond the point of this populist rage they called it populist rage it was an inconvenient intrusion by the general public into what they saw as a necessity a sober policy that had to be undertaken but so-called populist rage it was a kind of outrage that actually I think persists and it had a point a legitimate point to make sense of what the point was I think we had to have recourse to something like this third conception of justice why was it unjust not only because the beneficiaries were wealthy and those who were paying the subsidies were less wealthy that would be a matter of straightforward fairness there was a deeper moral intuition at work I think of the following kind the people who are getting those bailouts and receiving those bonuses are getting something they don't deserve why do they not deserve them well for one thing they behaved recklessly and created enormous havoc more than that the argument often went or the intuition did they're greedy anyhow these people and greed is a vise here I'm just playing out the intuition I think lying behind the popular anger greed is a vice that should not be rewarded if anything it should be punished and discouraged now insofar as this moral intuition about they don't deserve it and in any case they were reckless and even greedy that moral intuition makes sense of part of the response the sense of injustice but it only makes sense if and it's only plausible if you accept something like what I've called this third Aristotelian account that justice does have something even today that we don't normally articulate it justice has something to do with giving people what they deserve in accordance with their virtue now there was an interesting feature of the response by the bankers and Wall Street CEOs to the withering critique by the way is empirical support for my hunch this interpretive reconstruction of what the moral intuition was all about I was in an airport in the midst of the bonuses AIG was paying out to the very division that had created these risky financial instruments and I saw one of the tabloids the New York Post and it had a full page headline saying not so fast you greedy bastards that was an indecorous aristotelian headline that the bankers what did they say when they were called that some of them were called before Congress maybe he had similar scenes here in the public debate they were questioned and they said you know it wasn't really our fault what happened many of them said that the head of one of Wall Street firm testifying before Congress said we were the victims of a financial tsunami and you heard that phrase during the whole discussion of the bailout victims of a financial tsunami there was nothing we could have done we were the victims of economic forces bigger than us beyond our control we did all we could which if true strictly speaking would suggest what they were suggesting we're not to blame you're not to blame if you're hit by a tsunami now that's an interesting response from the standpoint of justice and what people deserve if you think about it now unfortunately the Congress men and women who didn't think of the this natural follow-on question but if I were sitting behind them in passing of notes about follow-on questions I would have been tempted to suggest that they asked the executives this if when things go very badly in the financial market you already know what question I mean it suggests that these things are due to bigger systemic forces economic forces beyond your control and therefore you know don't deserve blame suppose you're right about that doesn't that suggest the back a few years ago when times were very good and you were reaping enormous bonuses not from the taxpayers but from the financial markets doing very well stock market soaring and might it be the case that that too was due to systemic forces big economic forces not of your own doing or making after all this was a period of the globalization of financial markets the advent of the Internet the rise of the the housing market bubble also of things that we're not the doing of the people who reap the benefits non taxpayer subsidized benefits so if you're not responsible for the market collapse when the financial tsunami hits are you really responsible for the stupendous gains that took place when the Sun was shining if the weather is to blame now what about when the weather was good and if that's the case then doesn't the very defense that the bankers and CEOs made about their lack of control suggest that the bounty that markets financial markets but other markets bestow on those who happen to be running the companies or trading on the floor are also not morally deserved not a matter of moral entitlement anyhow that's the follow-up question I would have asked I'm not sure what huh but they would have answered but at what what it suggests is that the debate we've had over the bailouts if you think about the broader questions of Justice that the discourse raises it has more far-reaching implications than we have discuss so far it's not of course there's agreement that there has to be greater degree of regulation but regulation alone doesn't reach or respond to the full import the full moral import the full import from the standpoint of justice that the financial collapse and the bailout and the bonuses raise so that's one way in which it's very difficult to make sense of a contemporary argument about just and unjust rewards bailouts and bonuses without leaning on something like the idea that justice is a matter of dessert that rewards virtue and then we debate what are the relevant virtues and what exactly is the moral claim not only of bankers and Wall Street CEOs but of any of us to the bounty that markets bestow on the talents and skills and activities that we happen to have or be capable of it's a broad question of justice now what I would like to do is put to you a question about the moral limits of markets because one of the advantages I think of bringing out the importance of this third tradition of Justice the one that attends directly to conceptions of the good and of virtue and of moral desert one reason it seems to me important is that in thinking about markets in the role of markets it directs our attention to questions that go beyond fairness a fair allocation through the tax system redistributed taxation and so on of the results that markets produce if all that mattered from the standpoint of justice for markets was how do we balance increasing GDP a utilitarian concern broadly with fair distribution we could probably have much of that debate with in terms of the utilitarian versus the freedom based theory of justice but there's a second question about markets in the moral status of markets that goes beyond fairness and distributive justice and that's the question of what goods and what social practices should be governed by markets by market valuation and exchanges part of what's happened I think over roughly speaking the last three decades the period we associate with recent globalization it's not just that there's been a great run-up in stock markets and in housing markets and in the financial markets and then a collapse it's also that markets and market oriented thinking have extended their reach and influence into spheres of life traditionally governed by non market norms so there's been a rampant commodification of a great many spheres of social life during the heady period of market triumphalism the period going back to the Reagan and Thatcher period but a period that really continued moderated but consolidated during the Clinton Blair years it isn't just that there was deregulation though there was certainly that it's also that without much public notice and certainly with very little public deliberation market practices extended into spheres of life and into the treatment and allocation of goods traditionally governed by non market norms here's one example it's now the case that there are more private military contractors fighting in Iraq than there are US military troops and the same is true in Afghanistan this is a radical change from the way in recent history wars have been fought the outsourcing of war to private companies now there was never an explicit political debate or democratic debate about whether we wanted to outsource ward private companies whether we wanted markets to allocate essentially military functions and services and yet its seemed almost a peace with the general drift to market orientation we've also during the same period seeing that seen the rise of for-profit schools for-profit prisons for profit hospitals and the extension of markets into a great many spheres of life uh here's the question I would like to put to you to see what you think about it and then see if we can extract the the moral of the story the implications for this broader question of justice and the moral limits of markets let me put to you the following case and see what people have to say a few some years ago after 9/11 an agency of the US Defense Department launched an experiment online it became known as the terrorists futures market any of you hear about that it was trying to draw on there was a recent great interest in what's sometimes called the wisdom of crowds the idea was that people who thought they could predict when and where the major terrorist attack would occur could go online on a government website and place a bet that the attack would occur at a given time in place they could also do it with other catastrophic catastrophic events like the assassination of a foreign leader so if you had a hunch or maybe some information that you were confident enough about to place a bet the theory is that this would collectively generate better intelligence than the CIA could generate on its own that was the theory now there's a lot of debate among economists and gay theorists about whether that actually works but let's suppose for the sake of argument that the government would glean some useful information by having the terrorists futures market I should say that when word came became known that this venture was being launched it generated a firestorm of protest by politicians members of Congress and it was withdrawn but many economists have written since that this was an irrational impulse and if it would generate useful information why shrink from it so I'd like to see what the range of opinion is on the terrorists future market case in the room how many of you find the idea of a Chara's futures market morally objectionable raise your hand and how many don't how many think that if it did provide useful information it should go forward right so it's an interesting division of opinion I'm not sure exactly who has the majority maybe those the who would permit it roughly even so that's a good place for us to start we have stewards with handheld microphones highly trained volunteers who will come to you and what I would like to first like to hear from someone who who objects who finds it morally objectionable to have a terrorist futures market raise your hand someone who is prepared to give his or her reasons grounds for objecting why does it bother you why do you think it's morally troubling yes I'll go and then if I have to basically you can think of the way in which a market manufactures desires or needs that work no in the first place for example you wouldn't necessarily predict that one could require a dozen different shades of pink lipstick so my worry is is that you can actually buy some kind of positive feedback mechanism actually create a scenario which wasn't there to begin with and your initial bet might be highly speculative and arbitrary and might just you know generate an interest which isn't there in the first place and so is the worry and tell us your name of this what's your name sharra would you say that is the worry that the people who place the bet will begin rooting for the disaster they there doesn't seem to be any principled rational basis between or correlation between the bet that's placed and the actual likelihood of it happening it isn't actually it's a bit like saying that if something looks suspicious because they've looked the police officer in the eye well the opposite could be true which is that they've avoided eye contact yes there's actually no rational basis I think to make a bet on such an important question all right but but suppose suppose that collectively it would generate useful information there's a feeling that this is somehow morally troubling who else all right you're not alright so you can speak in reply but who among those who find it morally objectionable why exactly go ahead right it's not I wouldn't place a bet on you dying tomorrow and you know as a way of sharing information with my friends you wouldn't place a bet on me dying tomorrow thank you thank you for him is it that's because I look fit or you just are because you and principle you wouldn't do that okay and what's your name David all right let's see now someone on the other side how do you reply to David's worried that this is not a decent way to relate to one's fellow citizens or to people even halfway around the world to bet on something awful happening to them what do you what do you say to that how would you reply okay you know there's someone near the microphone go ahead well they replied David I would just say that's you know what we're assuming that it would you know work and help to save lives right so you know that that's an assumption that we're making but in response to David I mean it's not a decent thing to do but I think that's kind of what life insurance companies do anyways you know insurance company is a like they have all these probabilities and you know that's what they do to make money so I interesting what's your name when when yeah all right when you raise the case of life insurance actually keep the microphone way for a minute when I take out life insurance life insurance policy or when my family takes one out on me is let's say when my wife takes run out on me she's she's not hoping that her gamble will win her bet that her pet will win right where do you think the insurance company actually is rooting for me to live longer they'll make more money if I live longer what about that when whereas here I'm rooting for that assassination to take place as soon as possible from a financial point of view of course I don't mean I wouldn't say that they're rooting for you know for the assassination or the terrorist attack to happen they're just you know placing it's a small bet yes but if it were a bigger bet I well I mean that would be the morally objectionable part would be them rooting for for them to be okay yes because they might go out and fomented well right so we would have an added enforcement problem though maybe the people who place the bets could be identified and we could keep an eye on them to make sure they didn't try to make their bet come true okay fair enough then it depends how much good information you get is it worth all these extra people looking after the the gamblers that's good that's good all right you had a view assuming that it provides us with useful information I see a problem with it from a utilitarian point of view yes it is my right to place a bet all right let me it's interesting and you've analyzed you're very well from the standpoint of the first two traditions and I agree with you which is why I'm using this example to see whether we need the third tradition to explain the moral intuition some people have at least that there's something slightly morally creepy about it but let me but you've made a strong case tell us your name Asif Asif eyesu I see I see I'll see if tell me let me offer you a slightly different version of this not the terrorists futures market there is a game on the internet called death pools have you ever heard of that no is anybody death pool you know what they are you yes exactly you're familiar with this it's an Internet game where you can bet on when celebrities will die it's nothing to do with predicting a terrorist attack and you which the way it works I think but you'll tell us if this is right you submit a list of ten people whom you predict will die by the end of the year and you put in a certain amount of money and whoever hits the most correct guesses at the end of the year wins the wins the pot of money death pools now work that through the to do you think objectionable more than that on a life raft and it's your life or someone else's who actually just directly even if you didn't play a causal role which is an important qualifier of course what's your name Charlotte Charlotte now play out Charlotte keeps the microphone for one moment Charlotte I see did the analysis from this Tandy from the standpoint of utilitarianism and also freedom and rights with respect to the terrorists futures market would you agree that in the case of death pools if some people enjoy it they derive some pleasure some entertainment value from it and they don't violate anybody's rights the celebrities don't know unless they go online I suppose who's betting on their early demise so no rights are being violated utility is increasing so on either of those theories of justice or morality how would you well or how how would you respond to that I think you have to weigh the kind of the losses that are being encouraged maybe there are no real losses being occurred of random celebrity dies they're not suffering in any way apart from the most abstract way that maybe there are sort of dignity as a human being is being infringed this website I wouldn't I wouldn't say it's illegal but I do think it's the people who are gaining pleasure from the death of someone else just for the monetary gain right it's interesting and so it's morally objection according to Charlotte's analysis because the the source of the objection this is very interesting is not that the celebrity's rights are being violated and it may even be that the utility is going up if people get pleasure from this if they find it terribly amusing to do that but somehow it's a bad kind of it this is something creepy about the pleasure someone takes in gambling on and then maybe hoping for someone to die even if they do nothing to hasten the death and so what would you say well there's something like vicious about that or at least disgusting or it's not a good way to be or I mean we're in I'm trying to find the language but it seems if we follow Charlotte's moral intuition which i think is why it must be why those who find it objectionable this do find it objectionable that it takes us onto the terrain of what is a good way to be or the proper way to value of human life maybe the people would you go surprised to say they have bad character the people are going you're on dangerous ground there because we're thinking in that way chances are you're gonna be interacting with a lot of people in your daily life and I think that you know I wouldn't say you it will spread necessarily you know I don't believe that people who play video games become violent but I think it's a dangerous kind of reasoning to start and disagreeable in itself even if it doesn't spread yes ok good thanks well I think now these are this isn't something that admits of knock down proof but I think what Charlotte has just articulated as a moral objection to the the death pool is a pure case in the Terra's futures market because there is no redeeming good there are no lives being saved it's sheer amusement so in a way it isolates the moral objection if there is a moral objection and I think what Charlotte has articulated draws unavoidably on this third category of consideration having to do with the quality of character the virtue or vice involved in this practice the proper way of valuing human life somehow here is being violated let's put aside death pools in terraced futures market one other I find very intriguing proposal for the use of markets to solve a global problem the refugee crisis there are those who have proposed there there are more refugees than there are homes places to take them and so it's been proposed that one way to increase the number of refugees accepted would be to have a global convention where the countries of the world agree to certain refugee quotas country by country presumably on the basis of wealth but in order to persuade the countries to accept a higher quota than they otherwise would since many countries don't want to take too many refugees including a number of wealthy ones you say once you have your refugee quota each country will be able to buy and sell those quotas so let's take for example Japan Japan is a wealthy country would have let's say a quota of 20,000 but it would be given the right if they didn't want to take 20,000 refugees to pay Poland let's say or Uganda to take them now the exchanges would be sure purely voluntary between countries so there would be a market in tradable refugee quotas suppose for the sake of argument as the proponents suggest that a market incredible refugee quotas would increase the number of refugees that countries would collectively agree to provide homes for would it be objectionable or would it be a good use of the market how many would find it objectionable and how many would support it how many would all right let's quickly hear from someone who finds it objectionable what would be the reason here go ahead I mean first after something very creepy about trading people something very creepy about trading it also kind of caused perverse incentives for like rich countries that want refugees to send them off to tell if rich countries send them off to other countries but pay the other countries and wind up giving homes for these refugees you're offloading a responsibility yeah and then the creepiness tell us more about the creepiness what does that mean in the world mainly like yeah it's be trading to be trading people from one country to the next trading for people who are displaced from their homes it rankles you it's interesting the language of creepiness and being rankled that's interesting all right and they're offloading the countries are offloading a responsibilities yes but right some might take them in what's your name right Brian okay what do you say something against Brian that's right that's what we want go ahead I think you see exactly where the moral intuition goes wrong the trade is not about trading people but it's a way to urban as a market for where people live so in a way that's comparable to it's like a market for apartments in London and there's nothing creepy about that depends on the apartment I suppose it's a market like any other yes simply presume that we actually don't want these people at all that even if just a recent example even if the US and I mean under-ice the international law and bombs Iraq still the u.s. can get away with not accepting Iraqi refugees but this would be a subject to the agreement it would be legal and understood to be permissible to have this market just as it's permissible to have a market in London apartments what would be wrong with that so it is basically ranking of racist nationalities geographical backgrounds all right let's see what those who you ever apply in the back the idea of paying to get out of your universal obligation the idea of refugees we all have an equal universal obligation to look after them and if you start and so you're saying that the what's being commodified here is not the people it's the obligation to look after them to provide them asylum all right who has a reply to these right in the back row in the back row the woman in the back I think there are cases that refugees can be treated very badly anyway so if this system was implemented properly it could almost be empowering and if countries were to take responsibility in the way when you trade carbon permits it's actually often making sure that things are implemented properly in countries taking responsibility for carbon abatement this could be you know as long as it's not that the money then gets used for corrupt means then it could actually end up with kind of a better home for the refugees how do you happen what's your name and how do you answer Brian's suggestion that there's something creepy about it do you find it creepy thing is that markets actually often do determine where do the refugees end up you know we've had this issue at Calais where all these refugees with nowhere to go and they were in appalling conditions and that's presumably because countries are saying we don't have the resources to house you so that is a market driven force if you can find a way of allocating people somewhere where there are resources for them then that's better than them having nowhere to go so the refugees themselves will be better off I think they could be but I think it's to do with the implementation of the system you know whether the people are treated like commodities uh-huh so one worry maybe that by using the market mechanism it might lead to the countries who are it might lead to some countries seeing refugees as opportunities for revenue rather than as human beings in need of care that would be one worry okay one let's see if we can take one more and then try to alright go ahead I think we're missing the most important point and and that also has to do with the refugees being better off we're talking if the country does not want to take refugees in today's world it does not take refugees in that world the country would have at least have to pay another country to take these refugees so if the regulation is right and these other countries cannot to easily make money with them the refugees are definitely better off you ever reply today go ahead quickly yeah yeah to me it bothers me that the countries would make profit from from people in the same way that it would bother me if an orphanage would produce revenue from the work of the orphans without giving it back to the orphans so for me it would be it would be perfectly acceptable provided that the revenue that came from selling these whatever the package the quarters the quotas the revenue for me if that went back into making houses or if that went into providing food then it's perfectly fine it's it's creepy if they take profit from it all right although that presumably removes the incentive of the other country to take them well the money okay well and the example of the market applied to the orphanage also raises a question in another domain which is there are children in need of adoptive homes by and large markets are not allowed there is not a market in babies for adoption and yet some advocates of markets have suggested that a market would be an efficient way of allocating babies and like we could have a similar discussion about whether if it actually did lead more children to find homes whether it would be objectionable what are these examples illustrate well they do involve questions about the moral limits of markets but unlike a lot of questions we confront in politics today about justice and markets they don't have only to do with maximizing utility because we're assuming in both of these cases that utility would increase in the sense that more refugees would be given asylum and that lives would be saved in the terrorists futures market and that entertainment would be generated by the death pools so the objection utilitarianism alone can't make sense of the moral hesitation it's not clear that any rights are being violated in these cases assuming that the refugees are not mistreated but are given homes they wouldn't otherwise have but for the increased in the overall number of refugees accepted it's not clear whose rights are being violated under the present system as was pointed out refugees are stuck in refugee camps that's why they're refugees and they are not able to pick and choose which country they go to so it can't be that their rights are being violated so insofar as there is a moral hesitation nonetheless it can't be captured by either utility or the freedom / rights based theory of justice when people began to articulate the reasons for the creepiness or the moral hesitation it had partly to do with this being the wrong way to value refugees even if they're not mistreated and it also the suggestion was also made that you shouldn't be able to sell off a responsibility a global responsibility to look after refugees so in order to decide the question that we've just begun to consider whether this is a morally objectionable use of markets we have to resolve the competing conceptions of the right way to value refugees and we have to resolve the question whether there is a responsibility or a duty to accept some relatively high number of refugees such that commodifying it would be outsourcing or shucking off a responsibility rather than fulfilling it and to sort those questions out and in the case of the terrorists futures market or the death pools we have to decide what is the right way the proper way to value human life is there some affront some indignity that we inflict because we are taking pleasure in the wrong kind of thing let's say in the death pool case it reflects badly on our character all of these considerations which we would have to resolve if we were to sort out these questions as policy questions take us onto the terrain not of utility not of freedom and fairness alone but on to the terrain of how properly to value the various goods that are in question and what count as the right sorts of pleasures to take is there something just disagreeable morally about encouraged or even allowing people to derive pleasure gambling on the lives of celebrities all of which is to suggest that when it comes to the moral limits of markets if we want to have a democratic debate about what goods should and should not be governed by market value and exchange then we will be drawn unavoidably into this area that requires us to sort out the right way to value the goods that social institutions distribute and that's a set of questions that force us back to an older understanding of justice then the ones that animate our politics today utility on the one hand and freedom on the other so here's here's the conclusion I would draw from this and then you'll tell me whether you think I'm right or wrong a just society can't be achieved simply by maximizing utility or by securing freedom of choice and fairness to achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise another way of putting this point is to say that justice is unavoidably inescapably judgmental whether we're arguing about how to distribute flutes or about bailouts and bonuses or about terrorists futures markets or how to allocate military service or refugee quotas questions of justice are bound up with competing notions of honor and virtue pride in recognition bound up in short with rival accounts of how properly to value goods justice is not only about the right way to distribute things it is also about the right way to value things and if that's the case the content and the quality and the focus of our public debates about justice need to be enlarged to take account of arrival conceptions of how to value the goods that we exchange or contemplate exchanging through the use of markets thanks very much thank you very much Michael well we've had one Q&A session but basically it was asking the questions your opportunity to think about 5-10 minutes using the market right we have to decide whether the repugnance is well-taken or not or whether on reflection the people should get over it and we have to figure that out and that can be a very hard question and there are people Pro market act advocates who have some of them and I'm thinking mainly of academics who do this for a living defend markets some of them have a very low threshold of repugnance in fact I once went to one of the Ground Zero in this view is the University of Chicago Economics Department or the law and economics colleagues there and I went there once trying to see if I could find some purely voluntary exchange that they would find or admit to finding Republic nits enough to ban and so I came armed with an arsenal not just the easy ones like terrorists futures markets and death pools even death pools they would say well that's fine voluntary change so but I have some tougher ones that I didn't feel I needed to wheel out for this group but here was one actually two of the leading thinkers in this area the ardent defenders of free markets and voluntary exchange Gary Becker a Nobel prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and Richard Posner who is the founder of the law and economics movement applying these ideas free market ideas to law and so I started them out with private prisons and then we broke it down by function they had an objection to private prisons broke it down by function well to have the food service the catering privately supplied into prison that doesn't really seem terribly troubling even to me and what about what about the health clinic maybe a closer call but in principle the health clinic could be outsourced what about the prison guards well provided they were governed by rules that were set down by public authorities and didn't abuse the prisoners the mere fact of the they were hired from private companies wouldn't seem objectionable and so we went what about the warden and so on well make a long story short I found one case that was it was the hardest one I could muster on the for-profit prisons in Texas they have capital punishment now take the job of the guy who pulls the switch on the electric chair if from the standpoint of market reasoning the same logic that argues for privatizing the other function in the prison would argue for privatizing that function the executioner but imagine how that market would work in practice in Texas now you would put it out for bid the standard hourly wage would probably people would do it for less than that less and less imagine the auction I suppose you could do it on eBay or something but what would happen chances are what would happen is some people would do it for free but they would be under bid I suspect by people who would pay for the privilege now that payment that payment could go to improve the quality of the health care in the prison or to make conditions more humane on utilitarian grounds and on market grounds there would be no reason to object in principle to auctioning off the privilege as it would very well be for pulling the lever on the electric chair I put that to them one of the two of them said fine with me I won't say I won't maybe shouldn't identify them beyond this the other and the other of the two said and know that that would be terrible and so my eyes lit up and I said okay why why because here I thought I you know it could ride back whatever that principle was and he said grudgingly for your sorts of reasons he said the one libertarian barrier I've encountered and asking people similar sort of question libertarians get upset about the idea of buying and selling folks I tried that one too and you found even better and know what they do there is they insist they say they're against buying and selling votes but when I asked for the reason it's not because there is some intrinsic something intrinsically wrong it's that there are externalities effect on third parties if you you know if you want one thing and I want another and we pay off the third voter then it's conceivable let's say it's you who buy them off then my side losses even though that's the third voter might have voted for me but I think that's a bad argument for the following reason suppose we had no market in votes but suppose you persuaded my voter to vote for you he changed his vote they would there is an externality to third parties to political persuasion but we don't ban political persuasion on the grounds that there's an external effect therefore that can't be the reason that can't be the grounds for rejecting a market in votes we're still haggling over that one some libertarians of course don't want any votes at all you mentioned at the very end judgment for me that where's the question who has right to judge ultimately another human being when we're all guilty as a world the imperfection yes and that leads me to the myth of sisyphus in I'm not sure if you're aware of this myth from the ancient Greeks who I believe said that we are all in the absence of an ultimate deity or somebody who just knows better than all of us and can tell us just simply what to do in our imperfect lives we're all doomed to destroy your stone of Our Lives up and down up and down the hill and we just involved in the struggle and the struggle itself is the meaning of our human condition all right and maybe this is as good a place as any if I can manage to answer that question to end if I did everyone any other question I say that justice has an inescapably judgmental aspect to it and the worry is who are we to judge other human beings we're all imperfect after all and isn't there something who's doing the judging and isn't there a kind of hubris even in judging given our own imperfections the short answer is in democratic societies we collectively as Democratic citizens offer our judgments and argue about them don't take them as fixed and given once and for all but engage with our fellow citizens in the particular judgments that might be at stake in this policy or that I don't mean to suggest that we should be judgemental in a global wholesale way of deciding justice by determining all things considered the moral worth of a particular person's life I have in mind more local judgments as for example local but still important maybe even faithful I think we do have to judge to go back to the case of the financial crisis and the bankers how valuable how worthwhile is the social contribution that bankers make to the common good and should the compensation of bankers or anybody else be brought more closely in line with the value of the social contribution they make now that's not judging the sole of the investment banker or the moral worth of her life as taken as a whole from a god side point of view but it is making a judgment often the judgments are comparative between the the moral importance of the contribution the banker makes or the hedge fund manager by comparison with let's say a school teacher and if the compensation and social rewards in prestige are vastly out of line with the contributions they make to the common good that would be a reason collectively democratically to try to reorganize systems of compensation and reward and social prestige to bring those honors and recognitions and compensations more closely into line with what we judge here's the judgmental part what we judge to be their contribution to the common good and by that standard I would say the school teachers should make more relatively speaking than the hedge fund managers that is relative to what they make now that's a judgement not passing judgment on their souls but instead engaging as Democratic citizens in debate about the contribution to the common good thank you well thank you well I think there's one area where we can all make a very firm judgment one area of our life and that concerns the excellence of Michael sundials lectures so Michael thank you very much indeed you

Channel: LSE

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Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics, Public, Lecture, Event, Seminar, Professor, Michael J. Sandel, Michael J Sandel, Michael Sandel, Julian Le Grand

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Length: 79min 10sec (4750 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2010