The Moral Limits of Markets

This is going to be a continuation of the discussion before lunch. In that discussion we heard about two different arguments, or kinds of argument, for calling a market ‘noxious’: an argument from equality and an argument from corruption. A market can be called noxious because it undermines human equality, either because some of its participants are vulnerable to exploitation or because it inflicts serious harms on some section of the population. Alternatively, a market can be called noxious because it corrupts the good it traffics in, by imposing on it a meaning that is not properly its own. Modern liberals are generally uncomfortable with this latter argument, because it implies, unpalatably from their point of view, that a voluntary, victim-free transaction can nonetheless be vicious. I want to defend the corruption argument, both because I think it is a valid argument and also because I think it is primarily a worry about corruption, and not equality, that underlies our fear of creeping marketisation. Here, as elsewhere, modern liberalism imposes a kind of hypocrisy on us. It forces us to voice our moral intuitions in a language alien to them.