Indignatos

Opinion _ Are We Really Facing the Coronavirus Together_ – The New York Times

April 2020. Michael Sandel opinion piece.

Wooders visit 2017
Wooders visit 2017
john-wooders-visit
Wooders visit 2016

“What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price;  that which, even without presupposing a need, conforms with a certain taste, that is, with a delight in the mere purposeless play of our mental powers, has a fancy price;  but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity.” Kant

“This idea that only people who know how to make a fortune should be in the cabinet, with some exceptions based on lunatic but very macho trajectories–it is perhaps the clearest expression of the principle of general equivalence as the dominant metaphysical doctrine of our time. It is a doctrine that requires, precisely, lunatic ideology on the side, to inspire, since not everybody is going to be pleased merely adoring the plutocrats. Politics is now the production of wealth for the wealthy, on the right. It is not clear to me the left is clearly opposing this generalized equivalence–it seems to endorse it when most of its internal battles are themselves about the production of politics, leaving the rest for granted. Like in the university: administrators win every time when they impose their soulless quantifications because the faculty have no idea as to what to propose instead.” Alberto Moreiras

  1. moral-limits-of-the-markets
  2. roth_repugnance.  “Repugnance as Constraint on the Market”
  3. Lessons from Financial Crisis Lagarde.  Begins at minute 16.
  4. https://www.c-span.org/video/?325849-1/christine-lagarde-janet-yellen-financial-crisis
  5. https://www.ineteconomics.org/about
  6. Mahnaz’s Blog Post: Wearing Debt , and Olympia

Passages from “Moral Limits”:

  • Christopher Hill vs Adam Smith, or  “What is wrong with tipping the tutor?” Commodification of books, the privatization of prisions, and commercialization of governments and universities– illustrate one of the most powerful social and political tendencies of our time, namely the extension of markets and of market-oriented thinking to spehers fo life once thought to lie beyond their reach.   Is monetary payment an indignity? Should prison and incarceration be a private profit-making enterprise? Should countries and nations ‘brand’ themselves?   “The effect of the increasing commingling of government and commerce is more far reaching than one might imagine, in part because it works so well. Government, widely dislikced, seeks to bolster its popularity, even its legitimacy, by leaning on popular images or icons of commercial culture.” p. 93 and Trademarking universities.
  • Two objections:  Consent/Coercion and Corruption/Degradation. What are they and what are the differences between them? p. 95
  • What is wrong with letting people buy and sell babies as they choose? p. 99
  • “Anderson’s argument brings out a controversial feature of the corruption argument against commodification. To object that market valuation and exchange of a good corrupts its character is to assume that certain things are properly regarded and treated in certain ways.  Thus Anderson invokes a certain conception of the proper end of pregnancy and childbearing. To know whether a good should be subject to market exchange, according to this view, we need to know what mode of valuation is fitting or appropriate to that good. This is different from knowing how much the thing is worth. It involves qualitative, not just quantitative judgment.” p.101
  • The marketing of Ivy League sperm commodifies the male reproductive capacity in much the way commercial surrogacy commodifies pregnancy. Both treat procreation as a product for profit rather than a human capacity to be exercised according to norms of love, intimacy and responsibility.” p. 103
  • The second difficulty follows readily from the first…. She claims that certain modes of valuation are fitting or proper to certain kinds of goods. This argument has at least to some, a worryingly Aristotelian aspect, for it depends on attributing at a certain social practices a characteristic purpose or end. Arguments of this kind are subject to two familiar objections. If we derive the fitting or proper way of regarding goods from the social meanings that prevail in a given society at a given time, we run the risk of lapsing into conventionalism. If, for  example, there are fewer and fewer things that money can buy  these days, we might imply conclude that the meaning of our social practices is changing in this respect. The critical role of an appeal to proper modes of valuation is lost….
  • Is it possible to argue that markets corrupt or degrade certain goods, without lapsing into conventionalism or essentialism?p. 106-107 by analogy and by consequences?
  • What are the ideals of citizenship in the republican tradition which are vulnerable to corruption under a market system?
  • What are the differences between republicanism, pluralism and liberal conception of citizenship?
  • What happens to the ideals of citizenship, in the cases a market run military service ? If military service is just another job, why should the employer discriminate in hiring on the basis of nationality? … Why not subcontract military functions to private enterprise?
  • commodification of votes. Why is it objectionable?   Isn’t it wrong for politicians to bribe voters with campaign promises directed at their pocketbooks?  p.115…
  • The moral confusion at the h”market in votes, then tepolit
  • Growing inequality is a problem from teh standpoint of fairness, as theories of distributive justice explain. But it also does damage to the sense in which democratic citizens share a common life. This damage, this loss, is best captures by the argument from corruption. Here is a case where shifting the terms of philosophical argument may suggest new political possibilities. A politics that emphasizes the civic consequences of inequality may hold greater promise of inspiring the reconstruction of class-mixing public institutions than a politics that focuses on individual choice.  p.121
  • Does freedom “consist in the voluntary exchanges people make in a market economy, regardless of the background conditions that prevail?”
  • “The dimensions of life that lie beyond consent, in the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy.” p. 122

Repugnance as Constraint in the Market, or repugnant markets vs. Indignation as a ground for politics?

  • We have discussed indignation, or the  stakes of the breach of dignity for political, moral life. Fro defining, becoming and surviving as human. We have discussed the legal constraints, protection and regulation of human dignity, specifically the ways in which the law seeks to protect “human dignity” from the onslaught of market forces.   Today we will discuss ‘indignation’ as a ‘factor’ or constraint on the Market.  That is we shall be looking at the ways market oriented economists approach the matter of ‘dignity’, ‘indignity’ and ‘repugnance’.
  • ” When my colleagues and I have helped design markets and allocation procedures, we have often found that distaste for certain kinds of transactions can be a real constraint on markets and how they are designed, every bit as real as the constraints imposed by technology or by the requirements of incentives and efficiency. In this essay I’ll first consider a wide range of examples, including slavery and indentured servitude, lending money for interest, price-gouging after disasters, selling pollution permits and life insurance, and dwarf tossing.”
  • “Repugnance may make it difficult for argumetns that focus only on the gains from trade to make headway in changing these laws.” p. 2
  • Lending money for interest was once widely repugnant, and no longer is, (with the important exception that Islamic law is commonly interpreted as prohibiting it). State usury laws in the United States, and Islamic banks in some countries, are examples of modern expressions of this repugnance.2 The changing repugnance of debt and of involuntary servitude have even interacted, in changes in bankruptcy law. In colonial America and the early years of the Republic, insolvent debtors could be imprisoned, or sentenced to indentured servitude (Coleman, 1974). But as involuntary servitude became more repugnant, and debts less repugnant, bankruptcy laws were rewritten to be less punitive to debtors.
  • “prediction market” for terrorism related events?
  • Dwarf throwing vs Wife Carrying?
  • Trading political Futures?
  • selling right to pollute, and paying people to house your garbage?
  • One often-noted regularity is that some transactions that are not repugnant as gifts and inkind exchanges become repugnant when money is added. The historical repugnance to charging interest for loans seems to fall into this class, as do prohibitions on paying birth mothers of children put up for adoption, and perhaps prostitution. That is, loans themselves, and adoption, and love are widely regarded as good things when given freely, even when their commercial counterparts are regarded in a negative way. Similarly, in Massachusetts and California, it is legal to sell human eggs for fertilization but illegal to sell them for research purposes, although it is legal to donate them for research (Associated Press, January 20, 2007). And widespread outrage in Britain greeted the decision to allow sailors recently released from captivity in Iran to sell their stories to news media: after two sailors had done so, the remaining sailors were no longer allowed to receive money for interviews (Peck, 2007). p. 8
  • Offering money is often regarded as inappropriate even when not repugnant. For example, dinner guests at your home may respond in-kind, by bringing wine or inviting you to dinner in return, but they would likely not be invited back if they offered to pay for their dinner.
  • Concerns about the monetization of transactions fall into three principal classes. One concern is objectification: that is, the fear that putting a price on certain things and buying or selling them might move them into a class of impersonal objects to which they should not belong. The sociology literature has shown a longstanding interest in how the introduction of money changes many kinds of social relationships and their meanings (as a starting point, see Simmel, 1990). A second concern is that offering substantial monetary payments might be coercive, in the sense that it might leave some people, particularly the poor, open to exploitation from which they deserve protection. A third 9 concern, sometimes less clearly articulated, is that monetizing certain transactions that might not themselves be objectionable may cause society to slide down a slippery slope to genuinely repugnant transactions. Let’s consider these three concerns in more detail as they apply to paying organ donors.pp. 8-9
  • One way of seeing the role that repugnance plays in this debate is to compare it to a difficult technological barrier. If the technological barriers could be overcome that currently prevent, say, transplanting pig kidneys into human patients, such “xenotransplants” would also end the kidney shortage. But no one supposes that this solution can be implemented quickly, because some technological barriers cannot be overcome quickly, if at all. I’ve argued in this essay that repugnance is similar to technological barriers in this respect: markets that we can envision may nevertheless not be easily achievable. I would not like to guess whether repeal of the widespread laws against kidney sales is likely to happen more quickly than the advances in xenotranplantation, or artificial kidneys, or other medical breakthroughs that would end the shortage of kidneys. p. 17
  • Of course, there can also be “technological” developments in the law. For example, Volokh (2007) endorses a “medical right to self defense,” that would give a person dying of end stage renal disease the right to pursue all reasonable avenues to preserve their life, including purchasing a kidney. If this argument or one like it makes headway, the courts might end bans on organ sales. Popular repugnance often affects courts differently than legislatures; for example, the ban on gay marriage was lifted in Massachusetts by a court interpreting the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, not by new legislation. The Massachusetts court decision is an example in which a ban based on a repugnance that had survived since at least Biblical antiquity was ended quite suddenly, although repugnance-inspired political battles on the issue continue. The persistence of repugnance in many markets doesn’t mean that economists should give up on the important educational role of pointing to inefficiencies and tradeoffs and costs and benefits. But neither should economists expect such arguments to immediately win every debate. Being aware of the sources of repugnance can only help make such discussions more productive, not least because it can help separate the issues that are fundamentally empirical—like the degree of crowding out of altruistic donations that might result from different incentive schemes compared to how much new supply might be produced—from areas of disagreement that are not primarily empirical.
  • Although economists see very few tradeoffs as completely taboo, non-economists often decline to discuss tradeoffs at all, preferring to focus on the repugnance of transactions like organ sales.
  • Discussion itself may change some views on repugnance (Baron and Leshner, 2000), in some cases by reducing visceral repugnance, and in others by refining it.

29 thoughts on “Indignatos”

  1. Sandel discusses market trends while bringing up the topic of the commodification, commercialization, and privatization of goods that shouldn’t be purchased with cash. He employs two major, unrelated concepts—such as coercion and corruption—to explain this issue. Because individuals are selling goods under conditions of extreme inequality and economic necessity, which means that some people have no option, compulsion argues that the market is not as free as it appears to be. For instance, the basic definition of prostitution is coercive because it is seldom consensual and because prostitutes are forced to engage in it owing to necessity, such as destitution, drug addiction, and other factors. They probably wouldn’t sell if they were content with their life or at least had adequate living conditions. As a result, the economy influences their decision. The second idea is corruption, which demonstrates how certain commodities’ essence is lost or weakened regardless of the situation. If we consider prostitution as an example, the context and background are irrelevant since corruption implies that prostitution is bad simply because it corrupts the moral value of human sexuality. Despite these criticisms, the market today has produced a vast array of non-commodifiable goods. For instance, there is a strong potential for tipping to corrupt reader preferences, reviewers’ opinions, and general book evaluations, as well as for proprietors of books to be compensated for placing their titles in front of windows.

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  2. In “Morals Limits of the Markets” Sandel covers the notions of corruption and coercion. Corruption are identified as certain things that have intrinsic value or, otherwise, when choices are made freely. However, by trading something in the marketplace some values can be degraded. For example, buying and selling children degrades the relationship between a mother and a child is degraded. Thus, corruption leads to problems of essentialism and conventionalism. Coercion, on the other hand, represents the choices that are made freely.
    Roth in “Repugnance as a Constraint on the Market” defines repugnance by certain things that people do not want to do. Being repugnant is being restricted or chained. But the market should be free. Consequently, should morality limit the market? Markets are made by taking into account certain factors that contribute to it and need to be understood. Human beings are rational and, thus, have repugnance. This should be taken into account of a market design. Morality is taken as a market factor, and Roth identifies it as repugnance.

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  3. Sandel’s framework of coercion and corruption accurately diagnose many of the problems faced in our current society. I especially find the corruption argument enlightening. I think the topic of consent and coercion is something more openly discussed in current political discourse but the one against corruption is not as popular I feel. I think that is because current societies have become too intrenched in the market to consider the deeper philosophical understanding of what really is a republican democracy and how to protect it. Many western countries, especially the U.S. have such an individualistic culture that it is not surprising that the arguments of corruption are not taken seriously; the mindset is just to avoid the consequences of corruption by gaining wealth. I wonder how this argument would apply to other regions of the world that exhibit a more collectivist culture. The market system could actually reach heights if placed into collectivist groups where the goal of the community was communal benefit rather than the success of the nuclear unit. I think the example of China’s intense industrialization under communism and the decrease in poverty in the 60s is very relevant. However, I think China now is following the more individualistic mindset with extremely wealthy corporations implicitly controlling global politics.

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  4. The concept of human dignity is the inherent worth and value of every human being. It is a fundamental principle that is enshrined in many legal and moral systems, and it is generally considered to be the foundation of human rights. The idea of human dignity is closely linked to the concept of respect, as it implies that every person should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their individual characteristics or circumstances.

    Dwarf throwing and wife carrying are two activities that have been criticized for their potential impact on the dignity of the individuals involved. Dwarf throwing, also known as midget tossing, is a carnival game in which dwarfs are thrown onto a mattress or other soft surface. The aim of the game is to throw the dwarf as far as possible, and the person who throws the dwarf the farthest is declared the winner. This activity has been criticized for its potential to cause physical harm to the dwarfs involved and for its potential to violate their dignity.

    Wife carrying is a sport in which men compete to see who can carry their wife the fastest over a predetermined course. The wife is carried on the man’s back, and the couple must navigate a series of obstacles along the course. This activity has been criticized for its potential to cause physical harm to the women involved and for its potential to violate their dignity.

    In both cases, the activities of dwarf throwing and wife carrying have been criticized for their potential to violate the dignity of the individuals involved. These activities may be seen as degrading or demeaning, and they may be seen as a form of objectification or exploitation. As such, they can be seen as a violation of the principle of human dignity, which requires that every person be treated with respect and dignity.

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  5. These readings brought up many thoughts for me. Firstly, while I find Sandel’s argument fairly convincing, I also find that it is complicated by Pinker’s “The Stupidity of Dignity” and Roth’s “Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets” in that I feel it fairs to consider the nuanced ways in which dignity is navigated in the face of lived realities.

    Firstly, I find Sandel’s use of the word “good” in reference to a moral value slightly limited. As an anthropology student, I am constantly reminded of the fact that universal ideals of moral “good” are largely socially constructed and different depending on context or culture. Study after study has found that the idea of the “good” life and the meaning of life varies significantly depending on culture or religion. For instance, in Roth’s article, the use of horsemeat as an example of something that is morally constrained due to repugnancy is an example of a definition of the “right” way of living that is very different depending on a person’s socialization and context. In this way, to what extent must discussions of moral “good” always include a discussion of the importance of cultural and historical relativity? And where does the boundary lie between universal moral limits and pseudo-colonial ideas that prioritize western, contemporary values as a universal “good”? I find a lot of Sandel’s argument to be explicitly biased towards a judeo-Christian conception of “good” with little consideration of nuance.

    In thinking of these questions, I am inspired by a few examples in Sandel’s argument. Particularly, I found his argument regarding surrogacy to be particularly lacking in nuance. While he clearly argues against surrogacy in his article, he also implies that the historical practice of selling babies of unmarried women is more justified. This fails to recognize the wide-spread practice that existed throughout the western world over the last 150 years in which unmarried women’s babies were kidnapped from them and sold because the raising of a baby by an unmarried woman was considered morally “bad”. With this historical consideration, it seems like a far stretch to me to assert that the selling of babies is always better than surrogacy because the baby was not conceived with montary intentions. I argue for more nuance in both cases: the selling of unmarried women’s babies may be honorable if the woman genuinely desires for such an outcome in the same way that surrogacy can be dignified if the woman enters the agreement with a genuine desire to allow parenthood to a family that cannot have children while recieving money to care for her own children. It is hard to draw a moral line without considering the intention of each specific case and the lived realities, such as the ingenerent indignity that the surrogate mother may experience from living in poverty or the experience of infertility that the parents contracting surrogacy may experience. Each case can be very different depending on context, and in cases such as surrogacy, I tend to align with Pinker’s argument that individual autonomy may be more important than purely moral judgements on the basis of “dignity” for these arguments rarely consider other perspectives of lived reality.

    In contrast, other parts of Sandel’s argument are stronger in my opinion. I agree massively with his argument about military in his assertion that a “volunteer” army is largely a form of commodified mercenaries through coercion of poverty. However, as discussed in Roth’s piece, this issue is rarely met with outrage or repugnance because of the way it is presented as a a social “good”. Perhaps, therefore, the issue is not determining moral limits of what is “good” and “bad” but instead an issue of clearly identifying the social, cultural, and historical factors of intention behind every individual act of commodified behavior in determining the nuances of “good”

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  6. Sandel talks about the changes in the market, raising the issue of commodification, commercialization and privatization of the things, which should not be bought for money. In discussing this problem, he uses two main unconnected concepts such as coercion and corruption. Specifically, coercion suggests that the market is not as free as it suggests to be because the people are selling things under the condition of severe inequality and economic necessity, meaning that some people have no choice. For instance, the simplest example of prostitution is coercive as it is rarely voluntary because the prostitutes need to do this activity due to poverty, drug addiction and etc. If they were satisfied with their lives or at least lived in sufficient conditions, they probably wouldn’t sell their body. Hence, their choice is coerced by economic conditions. The second concept is corruption, which shows that regardless of the circumstances the essence of some goods is lost or diminished. If we take the same example of prostitution, the context and the background don’t matter for corruption as it suggests that prostitution is wrong just because it is a corruption of the moral worth of human sexuality. Despite these objections, nowadays so many uncommodifiable things became the product of the market. For instance, the great tendency goes for commodifying the effort of the tutor by tipping, corrupting the choice of the readers, the judgment of critics and general appraisal of books by payment for the owners to the placement of books in front of the windows. Similarly, public services are privatized and governments and universities are commercialized by advertisements, trademarks and licenses. Particularly, Sandel provides an interesting example of commercial surrogacy and the Baby M case. Surrogacy is looked at from the perspective of corruption more, suggesting that by paying money for the biological mother or surrogate, the parental relationship is degraded because procreation is treated as a means for profit rather than the product of love, intimacy and responsibility. This was the main argument in the Baby M case in the decision of giving the baby to the surrogate mother. From the perspective of coercion, it was said that the surrogacy contracts are not truly voluntary because the birth mother is unlikely to be fully informed since she cannot expect the strength of the bond with the child.
    Roth provides similar ideas to Sandel from a slightly different perspective. He shows that people can be repugnant to some kinds of things or activities, which can be different across space and time. For instance, dwarf tossing can be acceptable anywhere else, but not in France as citizens of France feel repugnant for it because of the violation of human dignity, and the public good. However, the interesting thing is that similar activities to the dwarf tossing as wife carrying are not prohibited in many places. Slavery which once was one of the great businesses, now it is considered repugnant and illegal. Oppositely, lending money which was repugnant once is now widely implemented.

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  7. Sandal’s “Moral Limits of the Market,” argues that coercion and corruption are two main arguments for why the market should be regulated. The corruption argument states that assigning a price to something has a morally degrading effect in which the object is equated to its price. Therefore, When you put a price on it, something else takes place which degrades the thing. For instance, if nurseries begin to charge parents for not picking up their children on time, and parents consequently start showing up on time, it raises the question of morality. Are the parents there to keep their children from waiting, or are they worried about being charged extra? This demonstrates how a relationship between a parent and a child can be corrupted once a price is introduced into the argument. On the other hand, the coercion argument says that individuals are not driven by choice but the rather economic necessity to purchase goods. This can be seen in coercion consent with surrogacy. In one case, a woman agreed to carry a baby for this couple but got attached to the child. was conceived. This raises the question: Did she know what she was signing? She did not know how she would feel after carrying the baby for nine months. The court argues that it was not a free informed consented choice. However, the clause saying she can keep the baby if it’s abnormal, overturned the argument because it blurs the line between who owns the baby. The effect of coercion in this case reflects socioeconomically unequal societies that compel buyers to put aside their morals to support themselves. In Rother’s “Repugnance as Constraint on the Market”, he comments on how the price fluctuates with public opinion on the moral value of an object. He argues that public opinions such as disgust towards these transactions can even prevent objects from being sold. This ranges from selling organs to selling horse meat. As public opinions change, the acceptability of these transactions is also bound to change.

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  8. In this week’s readings, we covered the idea, that the market mechanism may not be suitable for governing all kinds of social transactions and that there should be limits on its applications. Michael J. Sandel in his writing emphasized the idea of coercion and corruption in relation to markets. He explained how when people are usually repulsed by certain kinds of transactions, we usually try to explain their immorality by finding the easiest explanation, coercion. In such a situation one of the parties does not have the real possibility of giving consent since they are bounded by some outside factor. It can be a power imbalance, financial situation, lack of understanding or any other circumstances that restrict their choice. While this explanation is easily understandable and anybody can relate to it, he argues that certain transactions should be limited by a more fundamental restriction, that of corruption. In corruption regardless of the circumstances of the transaction, it degrades the essence of the object commodified. The most potent example for this mentioned was surrogacy in which rather than the child, father- and motherhood were commodified, and their dignity was threatened.

    In contrast to this very rigid framework of morality, Roth argues that repugnancies in the market are more dynamic and subject to change over time in either direction. Among others, he mentions examples like interest on loans, marijuana and alcohol or ticket scalping which were all once thought to be repugnant but nowadays are widely accepted. This can be used as a counterargument for conventionalist ideas.

    Finally, linking back to the writing on the moral limits of the market, there is the idea of civic, republican citizenship. It is not based on tolerance, but rather on the notion of being part of a group, respecting each other and be willing to make sacrifices. In this framework of defending the community, civic virtues, fighting for rights, even when it is not your own interest, protecting the community and those who cannot protect themselves can we find the motivation of establishing the boundaries on what is morally acceptable in our transactions.

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