"Markets without Limits" Jason Brennan, Hayek Lecture Series

On September 19, 2016 Professor Jason Brennan of Georgetown University visited Duke University to give a Hayek Lecture. Professor Brennan began with an overview of “anti-commodification” arguments from philosophers like Michael Sandel and Elizabeth Anderson. He distinguished several different ways they criticize markets, include market exchange leading to a misallocation of resources, harm to others, or harm to the participants themselves. He put aside these arguments as legitimate worries, and focused on symbolic objections to markets, which argue that the exchange of some things – like money for sex – is wrong because it signals disrespect to some of the participants, or because it changes the meaning of the same action when money is not involved. Brennan disagrees, arguing that the meaning of any exchange is a socially constructed fact, so that there’s nothing timelessly true about an exchange sending bad signals rather than good signals. If the norms that create the meaning of an exchange produce net harms rather than net benefits, Brennan argues, we have reasons to try to change the norms rather than submit to them. A case in point is kidneys. Many people in the world die waiting for kidney donations that never come. Brennan concludes that rather than deferring to the common view that it’s wrong to exchange money for kidneys, we should criticize the norms that suggest there is something inherently wrong with trading kidneys for cash.

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Produced by Shaun King, Duke University Department of Political Science Multimedia Specialist