Money can’t buy you love, can it?
A Royal Mail poster designed by Manfred Reiss
CHILDREN HAVE various incentives to perform well at school. They might earn a gold star on their homework, for example. At my children’s school they have a Fantastic Board. It’s a happy (and unfortunately rare) day when they’re awarded a place on that. What about if we paid them? If we gave £10 for each A and £5 for each B?
Some schools have experimented with this. But it’s not an approach which meets the approval of Michael Sandel.
Sandel is the superstar professor at Harvard, whose famous “Justice” lectures pull in 2000 students. He is also a consummate media performer and former Reith Lecturer (full disclosure: I produce his BBC Global Philosopher series.)
Sandel objects to the way money, and market exchange, have penetrated almost every area of our lives. He objects to the way that the number of “goods” which can’t be bought is shrinking. His book What Money Can’t Buy is full of what he regards as discomforting examples of the encroachment of the market. Companies, for example, have been set up to locate and pay homeless people to queue for tickets for free outdoor theatre performances — so the rich don’t need to waste their time. In some parts of the world you can buy the right to shoot endangered wildlife. There’s the company that will write your best man’s speech, the prison offering inmates a chance to upgrade their cell, for a fee, the ad agency that sells advertising space on people’s foreheads and so on….
There are two main problems with the monetisation of everything. It makes the world ever more separate and unequal. The rich have always been able to buy goods and services which others can’t — fancy restaurants for example. But imagine if everything goes up for sale, so that there is no shared life. We can all enjoy public parks for example; parks are financed from the public purse. But imagine if parks charged, and we ended up with luxuriant ones for the rich and scrappy ones for the poor.
Sandel’s more fundamental objection, however, is that commodification can alter the nature of a good. It’s one thing to donate blood because you want to help the sick, quite another to do so because it pays.
Markets can be corrupting;
Michael Sandel when the market takes over, we can lose opportunities to cultivate certain virtues. We should want kids to read books for the love of reading, not to earn a buck.
Sandel was raised in the Jewish community of Minneapolis. He went to the local school but also to Hebrew School. In his early days of becoming an academic he was linked to the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Among other things, the Institute tries to draw connections between modern philosophy and the Talmudic tradition.
Sandel told me that his Jewish upbringing shaped his political philosophy “though in ways that are hard to trace precisely”. One obvious link is his claim that humans can’t be understood as moral agents without reference to the communities to which they belong.
Wonderfully written and tapping into a widespread unease about the times in which we live, What Money Can’t Buy became an international best-seller. Sandel’s critics argue that although he may have identified a problem, he hasn’t supplied a full answer. Clearly we find the idea of some markets (eg in organ transplants) more repugnant than others. But why? I suspect that often our reaction to markets is simply a function of whether we’ve grown accustomed to them.
Suppose, when mass air-travel took off, the law had obliged airlines to treat all passengers equally — similar seats and meals etc. Suppose, over decades, we became used to this. Then suppose the market was liberalised, and overnight airlines introduced a separate area on planes reserved for the rich. The poor were squeezed in cramped conditions at the back, whilst those who could afford it flew in luxury in the front, with seats so big they opened up into beds. Picture that! Would there be no outcry, no sense of repugnance?
In our world, we are used to the idea of first class travel. We may be envious of those who can afford first class, but most of us don’t find the market in airline seats disgusting. Which, despite Sandel’s terrific book, still leaves something puzzling about the question, what can’t money buy?
You can buy the right to shoot endangered wildlife
David Edmonds works for the BBC and Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics