MORALS AND MARKETS
Steven Lukes
I want here to address a theme that is at once perennial, since ancient times subject to various traditions of commentary and debate, and actual, vividly present in our minds as we face the forthcoming election. It can be summed up in the question: what harms do markets do? When is the buying and selling of goods and services for profit—trading with enforceable contracts that is, unlike giftgiving, conditional upon payment—out of place and, more importantly, why?
What exactly is the harm that is done? From the biblical story of the moneychangers in the Temple through the endless medieval discussions of usury to
Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of ‘callous cash payment’ taken up by Marx and
Engels in the Communist Manifesto to the abundant literatures on commodification, stemming from Lukács, and the ‘colonization of the life-world,’ from the Frankfurt School, to Karl Polanyi’s account of the Great Transformation, unraveling social bonds by disembedding the economy, to critiques of the
‘acquisitive society’ by Christian socialists such as R. H. Tawney, of anomie by
Durkheim, of omnipresent calculation by Simmel, of rationalization by Weber and of consumerism by Veblen the question remains alive and insistent. It has very recently been raised once more in two books: What Money Cannot Buy by
Michael Sandel and Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale by Debra Satz, on which I shall focus. Interestingly, neither takes any interest in the other but, as we shall see, they offer different answers that represent two alternative classical approaches to the question. I shall here outline and assess these and end by suggesting that there is a third kind of answer that is worth our attention.
First, a few preliminaries to indicate how I want the question to be understood.
To begin with I shall largely bypass economics (though I shall return to it in the concluding section) because economists generally deal with the question I am posing by avoiding it. Economists deal in trade-offs, not taboos and, so far as markets go, are concerned with market failure—with sub-optimality, not harmfulness. Markets fail when reality fails to live up to theoretical requirements.

They fail by failing to exhibit the idealized conditions under which they would otherwise succeed. One central reason that they typically fail is because of negative externalities—costs imposed on uninvolved third parties. As Elizabeth
Anderson has remarked, ‘the theory of market failure is not a theory of what is wrong with markets, but of what goes wrong when markets are not available.’
Moreover, when economists apply their theory to real world markets, it soon becomes evident that the typical causes of market failure--asymmetric information, natural monopolies and monopoly power in general, non-zero transaction costs, economies of scale, outright coercion and social norms incompatible with efficiency--are not merely familiar but widely prevalent. My question rather concerns the consequences of market success.
Secondly, the question is: what damaging effects can be attributed to this form of distribution and allocation, as distinct from the harm or illegality attached to the goods or services so distributed and allocated. Addictive drug markets or markets in weapons or in diamonds that finance civil wars or in looted art may be bad but not, or not only, because they are markets. Conversely, good and even sacred things, like bibles, can be marketed without causing trouble. The question is: what harms result from marketing and from rendering marketable, or marketizing, certain goods and services in specific contexts?
And thirdly, the question is distinct from the further, policy question of what practically follows, of what is to be done. That depends entirely on the available and feasible institutional alternatives. There may be none. Maybe the only alternative to a given undesirable market is an even more undesirable black market. And if there are alternatives, these may range from various degrees and kinds of regulation to prohibition. I want to focus only on the question in what respects markets can be harmful, leaving open the question of what can be done about them.
The positive case for markets
I just cited Marx and Engels taking up Carlyle’s denunciation of the cash nexus that had ‘pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his
“natural superiors”, ‘ leaving nothing but ‘naked self-interest’ and drowning ‘the

most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egoistic calculation.’ On the other hand, they were well aware of the ‘wonders’ that the globalizing market was accomplishing, showing ‘what man’s activity can bring about.’ The advantages of markets are extremely well known—both the classical case, which Marx partially shared with the classical economists, and those developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am concerned with the question: what harms do markets do. I ask this question against the background of well-known and widely accepted benefits that market exchange brings: dynamism, capacity for innovation, communication of information unavailable by any other means, enhancement of choice and success in promoting long-term economic growth. These features all appear to be vindicated by the world-historical triumph of market over command economies and over the latter’s various failed attempts to simulate the market. There are also three basic respects in which market exchange can, in theory, claim superiority over all hitherto known alternative mechanisms. The first is Paretoefficiency, leading to an equilibrium in which no-one can be better off without someone else becoming worse off, or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, where sufficient gains are generated to the beneficiaries that they could hypothetically compensate the losers and still have gains left over for themselves. ‘Efficiency’ here means responsiveness of the system to consumers’ revealed preferences subject to the limits of technology. But note that such efficiency, or optimality, is only guaranteed under idealized conditions: notably, of perfect information and of the existence of many markets, each of them being a market for a single homogenous product. Where these conditions do not obtain (for instance, where there is asymmetric information between buyers and sellers), there is no guarantee of efficiency. Negative externalities, imposing costs on others than direct consumers, also generate suboptimal outcomes. It is often claimed that that these can be dealt with by market-based solutions, but whether this depends, among othr things, on the extent of transaction costs. The second claim for market superiority is the securing of liberty: markets ideally exhibit voluntary exchange, revealing individuals’ preferences, expressing their consent and cooperation in the face of diverging values. The third respect in which markets are held to be superior is that they promote certain kinds of equality: they enable

relations between strangers, and they dissolve hierarchies, with a formal right of exit, thereby alleviating extreme inequalities.
The case against markets
So what is the negative case? It is already adumbrated in the foregoing quotations from The Communist Manifesto where the vaunted freedom of free trade is also described as ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation,’ while the critique of the cash nexus is developed in other Marx texts, notably the early manuscript on money and in the forceful critique of equality in the Critique of the Gotha
Programme. In its general form the critique of the market was most powerfully stated in the twentieth century by Karl Polanyi in his great book The Great
Transformation. The great harm that what Polanyi called ‘the market system’ did was to unravel social bonds. The great transformation consisted in the disembedding of the economy, in the world-transforming project of building a self-regulating market economy, in which the three factors of production—labor, land and money—were treated as ordinary commodities and subjected to market exchange. These were, Polanyi thought, ‘fictitious commodities’ and their marketization led to the destruction of livelihoods, habitats and communities and thus to counter-movements of social protection, leading, Polanyi thought, to political stalemate and ultimately fascism and the Second World War. But the problem was that Polanyi never explained what made these commodities
‘fictitious’—other than that they were not produced for sale, but this hardly shows what is socially destructive about marketizing them—besides which our social and institutional life is riddled with legal and other fictions. And another problem with Polanyi’s argument, as Nancy Fraser has recently pointed out, is that (unlike Marx) he romanticized the social relations in which economic life had hitherto been embedded, neglecting its repressive, hierarchical, gendered forms of domination.
An alternative and challenging interpretation of Polanyi is offered by Nancy
Fraser: that his talk of ‘fictitious commodities’ is a way of arguing that by universalizing contract you undermine it, by destroying the non-contractual basis on which it depends. In other words, ‘fictitious commodification’ is the attempt to

commodify the market’s conditions of possibility.’ (She finds the source of this idea in Hegel; I find it in Durkheim). Human beings, providing labor power, nature in the shape of land and purchasing power, as money, are constitutive of the very fabric of social life and form the necessary background for commodity production and exchange, so you can’t have ‘commodification all the way down.’ Consider the following passage from Polanyi:
To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment….would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused without affecting the human being who happens to be its bearer. …In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure and social dislocation. ..Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled….the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove disastrous to business as floods and droughts were in primitive society.
The idea here is that market relations and processes corrode and thus eventually destroy certain valuable, indeed essential activities, practices or relationships. But what is missing is twofold: an account of what exactly it is about buying and selling that might corrode the underpinnings of the market system; and an account of what gets corroded: of the activities, practices and relationships that buying and selling put at risk. This leads us to consider the first of the two classical answers to our question referred to above, on which Michael Sandel’s book focuses, namely that markets corrupt. Now Polanyi’s thought is generalized and applied to whatever activities, practices and relationships are seen as constitutive of a good society and thus especially valuable and as vulnerable to the corruption that markets are held to threaten. Thus Sandel writes that in order to describe
‘what’s troubling about a world in which market thinking and market relationships

invade every human activity…we need the moral vocabulary of corruption and degradation. And to speak of corruption and degradation is to appeal, implicitly at least, to conceptions of the good life.’ (187)
The Corruption Argument
Sandel’s book is full of examples intended to support this claim concerning corruption: to ‘corrupt a good or a social practice is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it’ (34). Thus,
‘[i]mplicit in any charge of corruption is a conception of the purposes and ends an institution …properly pursues’ (35) and we ‘corrupt a good, an activity or a social practice when we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it.’ (46)
The key question is to ask what the meaning of the good in question is; once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the good they touch, we have to ask where markets belong—and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them. (202)
For example, Sandel argues,
[f]riendship and the social practices that sustain it are constituted by certain norms, attitudes and values. Commodifying these practices displaces these norms—sympathy, generosity, thoughtfulness, attentiveness—and replaces them with market values. (107)
And numerous other examples are marshaled to illustrate the point: ways of
‘jumping the queue’ such as afforded by ticket scalpers and concierge doctors; paying cash for sterilization, bribing kids for good grades and adults to lose weight, selling the right to immigrate, trading procreation permits or pollution permits or carbon offsets, paying to kill an endangered rhino, auctioning college admissions, selling blood, markets in life and death such as so-called ‘janitors insurance’, internet death pools and the terrorism futures market, skyboxes at baseball games and commercials in the classroom.

In order to assess this argument we need to look more closely at the notion of commodification—what it is to commodify goods and practices—and at how we are to decide which goods and practices are at risk. So let us look first at the very notion of commodification.
Margaret Radin has given us a useful breakdown of its component elements.
Goods or services are commodified when they exhibit the following features:-
(1) objectification—treating persons and things instrumentally, as manipulable at will
(2) fungibility—when they are fully interchangeable with no effect on their value to the holder
(3) commensurability—when their values can be arrayed as a function of one continuous variable or can be linearly ranked
(4) money equivalence—where the continuous variable in terms of which they can be ranked is monetary value.
If these are the features which render goods or services commodified, the question then arises: what harm is held to flow from these features? The answer to this is, I suggest, twofold. On the one hand, certain goods and services are said to be debased or distorted by being commodified, that is, treated as marketable.
Call this the corruption argument. By ‘corruption’ I mean to adduce the general idea of pathology: the thought that the impact of the market is to distort, impair or degrade otherwise well-functioning and potentially flourishing activities or relationships.
The general idea is this: that among the goods that people value there are some which have the value they do in part just because they are not up for sale and, if they do start to be bought and sold, or are even seen as saleable, their value is debased. And to this idea a second is often adjoined: that, once this process begins in respect of one such good, other such goods are infected and the contamination spreads, across persons and across goods. Changing for a moment

the metaphor, this has been called the ‘domino effect’ by Margaret Radin.
According to this argument (to change the metaphor yet again), there is a slippery slope leading from any sales of something to an exclusive market regime for that thing, and there is a further slippery slope from a market regime from some things to a market regime encompassing everything that people value.
The idea here is that certain exchanges should, if possible, be blocked to prevent the corruption that markets allegedly cause from spreading. Call this the
contagion argument.
How, then, are we to recognize where corruption and contagion occur? And how do the processes which commodification describes do their distinctive damage?
Which goods and services are at risk? Michael Walzer in his Spheres of Justice argues that the various items he lists as defining his spheres—notably security and welfare, office, kinship and love, political power, and so on—are to be protected from what he calls the tyranny of ‘market imperialism’—the dominance of the sphere of money and commodities, because our ‘shared understandings’ require this. (‘The market is a zone of the city, not the whole of the city’) So, for instance, he argues that the meaning of healthcare requires its distribution according to equal medical need. Yet that is far from a shared understanding in the US today. Or, to take another example, to which I will return, the meanings of love, marriage and sex are deeply contested, but Walzer wrote of ‘our shared morality and sensibility’ and that ‘sex is for sale, but the sale does not make for “a meaningful relationship”.’ Elizabeth Bernstein writes that the aim of the last chapter of her book Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce
of Sex is ‘to decode recent moral panics around sexuality—in particular mobilizations around prostitution and trafficking—by redescribing them as political and ethical disputes about what sexuality should mean.’ The problem is that ‘we’ do not have a single, shared map. Our understandings of where these boundaries should be are not sharply drawn and, worse, ‘we’ disagree about where they lie. On the contrary: they are confused, inconsistent and contested.
Moreover, they reflect unequal power relations, in which some voices prevail and

others are silent. Walzer’s own social-democratic idea of social justice requires that commodities are exchanged through bargains, not commands or ultimatums, that no such exchange be ‘desperate’, and that ‘the welfare state underwrites the sphere of money when it guarantees that men and women will never be forced to bargain without resources for the very means of life.’ But such an understanding of what is just is, in the present US context, far from shared and it is wishful to suppose that it is.
The central thought behind the corruption and contagion arguments is that certain goods and services are too morally important to be bought and sold: that exchanging them for money is to display a distorted or corrupted understanding of their meaning, of what gives them value. So Elizabeth Anderson argues that markets are suitable only for the allocation of ‘pure economic goods’ –goods that are ‘traded with equanimity for any other commodity at some price’ as opposed to goods that are ‘higher, personal, or shared’—goods that are valued intrinsically. For Margaret Radin markets in what is essential to the flourishing of our ‘personhood’ should be blocked or highly regulated. So she speculates that full and open commodification of sexual services ‘would be reflected in everyone’s discourse about sex and in particular about women’s sexuality’ and
‘with this would come a change in everyone’s experience, because experience is discourse-dependent.’ For Michael Sandel (in an earlier text) in ‘the cases of surrogacy, baby selling and sperm selling, the ideals at stake are bound up with the meaning of motherhood, fatherhood and the nurturing of children.’ The idea is that we deny or neglect the meaning of what is of higher value in our lives when we treat them as objects, as exchangeable, as commensurable and as having prices.
Richard Titmuss argued similarly when he maintained that the giving of blood exhibits the altruism that, he claimed, selling it extinguishes. For the ‘paid seller of blood is confronted…with a personal conflict of interests…Because he desires money and is not seeking in this particular act to affirm a sense of belonging he thinks primarily of his own freedom; he separates his freedom from other people’s freedoms.’ His further claim was that selling blood crowds out altruism, diminishing the scope for giving it and other worthwhile things in society.’ As he

famously wrote, private market systems in the US and other countries ’deprive men of the freedom to choose to give or not to give;’ the commercialization of blood has the effect of ‘discouraging and downgrading the voluntary principle.
Both the sense of community and the expression of altruism are being silenced.’
And the same idea is at work in Georg Simmel’s claim that in prostitution ‘the stake of the woman is infinitely more personal, more essential, encompassing more of her ego than that of the man, and for which, therefore, a money equivalent is most unsuitable and inadequate, the giving and taking of which means the extreme abasement of the female personality.’
There are two main problems with these arguments. One, to which I have already alluded, is the unsettled character of the ‘higher, personal or shared values,’ for example the importance of belonging versus freedom, and indeed the very meaning of any one of them. We don’t agree about what ‘belonging’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ mean. The second problem is that it is often not clear just why paying money for some good or service is such a threat. Must Titmuss’s ‘personal conflict of interests’ always be resolved by suppressing one or the other? Do people not endlessly contain contradictions and exhibit ambivalence? Are experience and discourse so malleable and is experience so ‘discourse dependent’? And why should there not be alternative, co-existing distributive mechanisms for blood without one driving out the other? Was Kenneth Arrow right to criticize Titmuss for failing to provide either a theoretical analysis of why it should or any convincing evidence that it does? Is it really true that viewing and treating others as means to individual ends, and seeing the world in impersonal and quantifiable terms are incompatible with altruism, reciprocity and the realization of values that are ‘higher, personal and shared’? Mary Douglas has persuasively argued that goods are to be seen as ‘ritual adjuncts’ and their consumption as a ‘ritual activity,’ which ‘uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid process of classifying persons and events.’ In an individualist weakgrid, weak-group modern capitalist society, market behaviour will, on this account, be amenable to anthropological interpretation as a mode of ‘fixing public meanings.’

Moreover, are there not indeed many contexts, especially in modern urban living, in which instrumental relationships, and seeing the world in anonymous and commensurable terms, is much to be valued, indeed an essential precondition for, and counterpoint to, mutual relationships in more intimate settings. You want your doctor to have a bedside manner, but you also want patients to have hospital numbers and medical resources to be rationally allocated on objective grounds, whatever these may be. Indeed, it is not even obvious that treating people as objects and as a means to some end is always a bad idea. It must depend on the end and on who is doing what in pursuing it. According to his biographer, Beethoven was ‘filled with a deep conviction as to the significance of his work and his art’ and in 1801 referred to two of his friends as
‘merely…instruments on which to play when I feel inclined…I value them merely for what they do for me.’ As for commensurability and incommensurability, why should we assume that we cannot both know the price of something and know that it is priceless? (Recall Viviana Zelizer’s book Pricing the Priceless Child). And we make insurance decisions and pay medical administrators and policy makers to allocate resources and plan the siting of airports on the basis that alternative options involve the statistical certainty of deaths and injuries that we expect to be costed on a rational and systematic basis that puts a (regularly up-dated and commercially based) value on human lives.
In sum, the view that the cash nexus of buying and selling corrupts valued practices and relationships and contaminates others calls for a certain skepticism.
As Debra Satz writes, ‘there are rival views of the meaning of many particular goods (and of human flourishing) and, more importantly, there is only a tenuous connection in most cases between the meaning we give to a good and its distribution by a market.’ Furthermore, it is often quite unclear whether buying and selling damages such goods and, if so, how. On the other hand, there is clearly something deeply and importantly true about this view, to which I will return.
The Inequality Argument

Sharing this skepticism, Satz takes a different tack. She thinks that ‘the major problem with noxious markets is not that they represent inferior ways of valuing goods…but that they undermine the conditions that people need if they are to relate as equals.’ (94)
There are, first, the more straightforward cases where markets function in such a way as to reproduce, reinforce or exacerbate pre-existing material 0inequalities, in particular where the various market agents occupy different and unequal market positions, as for instance when poor countries exchange toxic waste for money. Ravi Kanbur has argued that extremity of outcomes, weakness of agency and inequality in market relations spark our instinctive reactions to markets in arms, drugs, toxic waste, body parts, child labor, etc. When the scores on these criteria are sufficiently high, a market may ‘tip’ into the obnoxious category.
More specifically, weak agency will exist where there is inadequate information about the nature and/or consequences of a market (as with body parts), or others enter the market on one’s behalf (as with child labor); some agents may be particularly vulnerable, needing goods with limited suppliers or where the participants have highly unequal needs for the goods supplied; or the outcomes may be extreme, involving harms to the basic welfare needs or agency interests of individuals, or the harm may be to society, where a particular market promotes
‘servility and dependence, undermines democratic governance [and] undermines other regarding motivations. (98)
This last point introduces Satz’s central concern about inequality and her main argument. She proposes that noxious markets are those which ‘undermine the conditions that people need if they are to relate as equals,’ that is ‘as individuals with equal standing.’ She illustrates this thought by citing the case of the sinking
Titanic in which there were only enough lifeboats for first class: steerage was expected to go down with the ship. As Thomas Schelling, who introduced this analogy, remarked, we no longer tolerate this: ‘if some people cannot afford the price of passage with lifeboats, and some people can, they should not travel on the same ship’ This undermining can happen in two main ways. Either a given

market can produce extremely harmful outcomes, for individuals or else for society, by supporting relations of humiliating subordination or unaccountable power. Or else, secondly, the underlying conditions of the market agents can be highly unequal, as when some are seriously lacking in agency or knowledge or else some are significantly more vulnerable than others. Satz examines markets in women’s reproductive labor, in women’s sexual labor, in child labor, in voluntary slavery and in human kidneys in the light of these criteria.
She addresses the first two of these markets in terms of what she calls ‘contextual reasons.’ In other words, contract pregnancy and prostitution are to be considered in the light of, not in abstraction from, prevailing attitudes towards
(and self-conceptions of) women in our societies. Thus it is ‘a mistake’ simply to focus on ‘the meaning’ of these forms of labor, on the idea that these practices are ‘degrading’ as such; rather than to realize that ‘the view that selling sexual or reproductive services is “degrading” may reflect society’s attempts to control women and their sexuality.’ (120). They ‘become problematic only in a particular political and social context.’ (116) Markets in women’s reproductive labor
‘reinforce gender hierarchies—unequal status between men and women—in a way that other, accepted labor markets do not.’ (117) Contract pregnancy ‘places women’s bodies under the control of others and serves to perpetuate gender inequality (133): the problem is ‘not that it degrades the special nature of reproductive labor or alienates women from a core part of their identities, but that it reinforces (to the extent that it does) a traditional gender-hierarchical division of labor,’ (13)
Concerning prostitution she argues that, given currently prevailing beliefs and attitudes, this market perpetuates status inequality between men and women.
Prostitution, she eloquently writes, ‘is a theater of inequality; it displays for us a practice in which women are seen as servants of men’s desires.’ It ‘shapes and influences the ways in which women as a whole are seen.’ (147) Stigma
‘surrounds the practice, shapes it and is reinforced by it.’ (149) In a different culture, she allows, things could be otherwise but she criticizes feminists who argue than prostitutes can function as sex therapists , fulfilling a legitimate social

need as well as providing a source of social experiment and alternative conceptions of sexuality and gender. Such feminists, she thinks, have minimized the cultural stereotypes that surround contemporary prostitution and exaggerated their own power to shape the practice.
Prostitution, like pornography, is not easily separated from the larger surrounding culture that marginalizes, stereotypes and stigmatizes women.
I think that we need to look carefully at what men and women actually learn in prostitution; I doubt that ethnographic studies of prostitution would support the claim that prostitution contributes to women’s dignity or empowerment.
In short, the ‘powerful intuition’ that prostitution is intrinsically degrading is, she thinks, ‘bound up with well entrenched views of male gender identity and women’s sexual role in the context of that identity.’ (153) Her argument thus connects prostitution to stigma and unequal status and thus to injustice. It operates ‘through beliefs and attitudes’ which however, she concedes, ‘might someday be changed.’ (150)
It is instructive to contrast this position with Radin’s approach, which, like
Sandel’s, focuses on the intrinsic meaning of prostitution. She suggests that it is scarcely worthwhile asking whether the marketing of sex, in general, absent any other worrisome features, such as maldistribution and wrongful subordination, would trouble us. This issue, she thinks, is a ‘professor’s hypothetical’, since commodification occurs in market societies in which inequality and subordination are inherent: for that reason she suspects that ‘the hypothetical disconnection of commodification from subordination is not a fruitful line of inquiry.’ This is an interesting line of thought and suggests that we can discern three distinct positions on this matter. The first, deriving from the corruption argument and already encountered in the quotation from Georg Simmel, is the essentialist view that there is an essential link between sexuality and self, embodied in women more than men and that inevitable damage occurs when one’s sexuality is deployed for monetary gain. The second is Satz’s: that an alternative, nonexploitative and non-gender-exploitative form of prostitution is imaginatively

conceivable but not (and here she agrees with Radin) on the historical agenda— not within practical reach, given existing cultural attitudes and gender power relations. And a third position (that Radin denounces as a professor’s hypothetical but Professor Satz entertains) has been most lucidly expressed by the radical
French feminist lawyer Marcela Iacub in a famous op ed in Le Monde entitled ‘The
Property of One’s Body and Prostitution.’ 1 This argues for the principle, established since the sexual revolution, that the permissibility of a sexual relationship depends only on the consent of the partners. But, she writes, it is argued, what about the lack of consent apparent, above all, in the case of trafficking? But why should one call the victims of organized criminality prostitutes? Should one label the American slaves farmworkers? A woman forced into prostitution is a slave not a prostitute. We should distinguish the criminality from the activity. And addressing the essentialist argument that in selling one’s sexual services, one is selling one’s entire self, she observes that this, though an entirely respectable conception of sexuality, is only one among others that should not be imposed on everyone. Why, she finally asks, given a morality of consent, should one assume that it is illegitimate to consent to a sexual relation for another reason than irresistible desire or delicious pleasure (or, one might add, the goal of procreation)?
As for kidney transplantation, the Titmuss argument might suggest that monetary incentives would crowd out altruism. Assume that is not so, and ask: is kidney selling as such wrong on egalitarian grounds? First, Satz observes that the vulnerability of the sellers and their weak agency, due to lack of information about risks, are key considerations that would need to be addressed in any proposed scheme, which would have to preclude ‘desperate exchanges’—though, with regard to the undertaking of risks, she asks whether or not the potential harms are worse than other sales that we currently permit. What, then about
‘equal status considerations’? Current black markets extending across the planet are, obviously, massively unequal, transferring organs from poor to rich, third world to first world, female to male and non-white to white. Indeed this can be put far more forcefully, as it has been by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, when she wrote
1 16 October 2006.

of ‘human trafficking, the recruitment of the wretched of the earth—to provide a so-called ‘spare’ kidney—to very sick and equally desperate buyers’ and ‘stealing from the poor to supplement the bodies of the well-insured and welladvantaged.’ Satz is unsure whether a legal, regulated market would counter these trends, and indeed quotes Scheper-Hughes’s comment that ‘Perhaps we should look for better ways of helping the destitute than dismantling them.’ Satz even suggests that ‘kidney markets might actually worsen inequalities based on class’, since ‘they could expand inequality’s scope by including body parts in the scope of things money gives a person access to.’ To counter this, she writes, the government could use subsidies and insurance or become a single buyer of organs, to equalize access of rich and poor to kidneys, but reasons that this would, for various reasons, be difficult. But then Satz turns to a further issue which she labels ‘integrity of the body,’ arguing that by permitting the general practice of buying and selling this new kind of resource—of body parts—you change the general choice environment and affect motivations and create new incentives. She cites a study by Laurence Cohen in areas of India where kidney selling is common, according to which ‘operable women are vehicles for debt collateral.’ Kidneys become potential collateral and creditors can put pressure on debtors and poor people who don’t want to sell their kidneys can find it harder to get loans. So people will find it harder to get reasonable loans without mortgaging their organs. Which raises the question of whether we should view our internal, bodily resources as analogous to other resources, a conflation which, Satz correctly observes, lies behind the repugnance people feel towards kidney markets.
We have examined the two main classical and contrasting ways of assessing the harms that markets do as exemplified in the recent books by Sandel and Satz, the former focusing on the corruption or degradation of the supposedly intrinsic or essential meanings of valued goods and practices when they are marketed or marketized, the latter on the injustice of such markets especially where they generate social inequality that is independent of the way income and wealth are distributed. I want to turn, finally, to a quite different approach to the question

before us—an approach of which there are, indeed, traces or foreshadowings in both of these books.
Representation and Reality
The relevant section in Sandel’s book is entitled ‘Incentives and Moral
Entanglements.’ He observes that the language of incentives is a recent development in economic thought, only entering economic discourse in the twentieth century and becoming prominent only in the 1980s and 1990s. (The usage of the word ‘incentivize,’ dating from 1968, has soared by 1,400 percent since 1990 and in major newspapers risen from 48 appearances in the 1980s to
5885 in 2010-11). According to Greg Mankiw, author of the most influential economics textbook today, the subject-matter of economics embraces human interaction in general and the principles by which individuals make decisions, and one of the most important of these is that ‘people respond to incentives.’ And according to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of Freakonomics.
‘incentives are the cornerstone of modern life’ and ‘economics is at root the study of incentives.’
As for Satz, she refers at several points to the important truth that markets do not merely confront individuals with incentives but ‘shape’ those individuals in turn.
Thus she writes that ‘some markets shape individuals and society in problematic ways’ (6), of ‘the ways that certain markets shape us, our relationships with others, and our society,’ (9), that the classical political economists, notably Adam
Smith, ‘saw that ‘labor markets could function in ways that shaped their participants as submissive inferiors and dominating superiors bent on exercising their arbitrary power’ (5) and that ‘whereas contemporary economics sees the preferences and capacities of agents in a market as givens, particular markets— think of media, education and caregiving—shape us. Moreover they may shape us in ways that are in tension with a society of equals.’ (95) To use the language of
Foucault (which she certainly does not), Satz is here pointing to markets contributing to the constitution of the subjectivities of market actors.
These observations, unremarkable in themselves as they might seem, adumbrate a much debated and increasingly influential approach to the ‘anthropology of

economics’ advanced by the French economic sociologist Michel Callon under the label of ‘performativity’ which explores the complexities of market devices and the various agencies involved in their constitution (Interestingly, like Sandel, he is fond of the term ‘entanglements’). Here I aim to do no more than sketch one of its central claims and suggest that it has a bearing upon the topic of this paper.
The ‘performativity program’ is in part ‘designed to describe and analyze
[the] increasing involvement of economics in the conception and experimentation of concrete markets.’ Economies, he provocatively suggests, inverting Polanyi, are embedded in economics. For Callon the anthropology of the economy and of economics implies that there is not on the one hand a reality (concrete markets) and, on the other, discourses, analyses that account for this reality in a way that is true, or scientific, to a greater or lesser degree. The economy is a world that includes economics as one of its components in its own right.
The actors engaged in the construction and functioning of concrete markets include firms, consumers and their organizations, researchers from private enterprises or government labs (natural or life sciences), technological engineers, lawyers, accountants, civil servants who draw up regulations, consultancies, patent offices, etc.—and economists.
Economists, he suggests, and marketing specialists who live in university departments are stakeholders in the markets they study, simply because they are in networks connecting them to the CEO, to the employees (sometimes!), to bankers, trade unions, social movements, etc.
As for neoclassical economics, it has a central role in ‘this process of configuration-reconfiguration of concrete markets,’ acting on ‘the hypothesis that any collective can be considered to be composed of individual actors with their own preferences (or functions), capable of calculating (in the broad sense) their

decisions and choices’ and seeing ‘any individual as an autonomous subject capable of intentions and a free will, responsible for his or her acts’ a view which is ‘becoming pervasive.’
How then, one may ask, is this pervasive constitution of various markets to be judged and criticized? What is the nature of ‘social critique’ on this account?
Callon’s approach appears designed to contest those we have considered--the moralizing approach of Sandel and the egalitarian political theorizing of Satz—in favor of a close, fine-grained anthropological investigation of the forces and counter-forces at work. Thus social scientists (and a fortiori, I presume, moral and political philosophers) ‘have no particular legitimacy to say what the sense of history is, who the dominated and dominant are, or which points of view are morally just.’ The challenge is ‘to enable all the differences to be deployed, and to be attentive to the conditions allowing their comparison and evaluation’ by
‘identifying and revealing the forces that, in a more less articulated way, challenge the dominant models and their grip on real markets.’ It is an intriguing picture that certainly marks an alternative to the other two answers to the question with which this paper began: that ‘[a]ll that remains are the power struggles between agencies and the (possible( contribution of the social sciences, irrespective of their field, to the (partial) shaping of those struggles.’