Michael Sandel - The Moral Limits of Markets

There are some things that money can't buy... for everything else... oh crap, there's no anything else! Over the past couple of decades, and without almost anyone noticing, we have turned from a market economy—one in which we use capital as a tool to achieve certain ends—to a market society: one in which market values replace all other values, and in which profit becomes its own end and the standard against which everything else is measured.

Philosopher Michael Sandel is worried about this growing trend. You might think that if people were paid for their services, their abilities, their bodies, and that if this is done with the consent of all involved, everyone benefits and it's all good. But if that's how you think, you've been bitten by the market society bug already... When we think that it's okay for corporations (or presidential candidates) to pay people to tattoo their bodies with company logos, for instance, or when we think that it's a good idea to privatize prisons and strip people of their civil rights so a bunch of corporate shareholders can maximize their profit, we have ceased to think of people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect, and we have started to think of them as commodities that can be bought and sold, used, abused and discarded like garbage.

There are some things money can't buy... and in the end, those are the things that really matter. Don't let the market society cheapen them by turning them into commodities to be sold to the highest bidder...

This could present problems for my endorsement of the legalization of prostitution... crap...

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Michael Sandel on The Colbert Report

Questions of right and wrong confront us all the time and from all directions. Unfortunately, most of us are not equipped with the necessary philosophical background to think about them consistently, systematically and with a view to their logical implications.

Luckily, Professor Michael Sandel from Harvard University has an entire course (which we have already featured in its entirety) devoted to thinking philosophically about everyday moral issues.

But as if that weren't awesome enough already, Professor Sandel recently paid a visit to Stephen Colbert to talk about how to think philosophically about questions of justice ranging from whether it is fair for ARod to make so much money while teachers barely manage to scrape by to whether it's fair for Harvard students to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a course that you can watch freely on youtube :)

The Colbert Report
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And if you want to watch the Justice course, here are all the episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

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