Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades?
Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs?
What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to
for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to
immigrants willing to pay?
Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every
aspect of life-medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and
personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having
a market economy to being a market society.
In What Money Can't Buy, Sandel examines one of the biggest ethical
questions of our time and provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age:
What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the
moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?
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