Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a pric
e on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay peop
le to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenar
ies to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning adm
ission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pa
y?
In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel ta
kes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something w
rong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent mar
ket values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are
the moral limits of markets?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out
nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, San
del argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market socie
ty.
In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a mas
ter at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confron
t in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he 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 mark
ets do not honor and money cannot buy?
