Harvard's Michael Sandel is a rock star political/moral philosopher. I've never read him. All I know about him is from this review of his new book, What Money Can't Buy, in The Guardian.
So just a brief thought about the article, not the book. It seems to me as if Sandel has created a straw man of money - or maybe of markets, and wishes people would consider more elevated, more moral views of life.
But don't markets simply reflect what people want, and the decisions and choices people make? Many people seem to want to buy his ideas, which is why his book is making him big bucks in the marketplace of the bookstores.
Sandel makes the illuminating observation that what he calls the "market triumphalism" in western politics over the past 30 years has coincided with a "moral vacancy" at the heart of public discourse, which has been reduced in the media to meaningless shouting matches on cable TV – what might be called the Foxification of debate – and among elected politicians to disagreements so technocratic and timid that citizens despair of politics ever addressing the questions that matter most.
"There is an internal connection between the two, and the internal connection has to do with this flight from judgment in public discourse, or the aspiration to value neutrality in public discourse. And it's connected to the way economics has cast itself as a value-neutral science when, in fact, it should probably be seen – as it once was – as a branch of moral and political philosophy."
"Illuminating observation"? That's new?
It may be true that profs of Economics have attempted to make their area of study as value-neutral as physics, but economics as practiced by the individual person in a free society is as far from value-neutral as can be. After all, there are "markets" in values and morals too and everybody seeks different versions of these products.
Free markets in everything, from ideas, to religion, to dating, to education, to health, to business. That's America to me. Just don't expect me to approve of your choices.
Help me out, gentle readers. What contradictions can you see in Sandel, as seen through the article?
