Episode 98: Guest Michael Sandel Against Market Society

0:00 Wes: Hey, this is Wes Alwan here. If you'd like to learn more about my thoughts on Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, I've written an essay that should give you a better idea of some of my criticisms. To read it, please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com Sandel.

0:22 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 98 is something like, why should. Why should some things not be for sale? We'll be talking with Michael J. Sandel about his books What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets from 2012, and some more about Liberalism and the Limits of Justice from 1982. You can join the discussion, get links to the texts, and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer talking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, Not For Sale in Austin, Texas.

0:55 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:58 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: And Mike, where are you?

1:02 Michael: I'm in Brookline, Massachusetts.

1:05 Wes: Oh, I'm in Brookline as well, actually. I just say Boston.

1:10 Mark: Wow. We could have given you some on site technical support, but we did not. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:19 Wes: Thank you.

1:19 Michael: It's great to be with you.

1:21 Mark: So we had a very spirited discussion about liberalism and the limits of justice that I know you've not heard just last week. We can, I think, get some more into some of the points of contention about that later. But what I'd like to focus on, to start is the couple of main theses in what Money Can't Buy. I think if people don't read philosophy are a little intimidated by just picking up Descartes or Plato or especially an academic book like Liberalism, the Limits of Justice. This book is just made for popular consumption. It's just all concrete.

It's all current events. It's related to a specific point in time that you say that this book is being driven by the financial crisis and our what our should have been to it, which is to reevaluate completely the encroachment of economics on our lives. And so I think this is very manageable in terms of the number of ideas, as long as we don't feel like we have to reiterate the many, many, many, many examples that you go through.

2:14 Michael: Right. I did write this book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, in the hopes that it would address some big philosophical Questions in a way that is accessible not only to scholars, but to citizens generally and to interested readers. And so, as you mentioned, I use a lot of examples and illustrations and ethical dilemmas with an eye to bringing out some of the big philosophical questions that lie just beneath the surface of the debates we have about politics, about economics, and about the role and reach of markets.

2:52 Mark: Well, I think this book is a political act. You know, it's a push to say there are conversations that should be happening that should be driving our political decision making that simply aren't. Our political rhetoric is too empty. And you express some optimism while acknowledging that it's a long shot that you'd like a public discourse on values, really.

3:13 Michael: Right. I think the great missing debate in our public life is what should be the role of money in markets. In a good society today, there are very few things that money can't buy. Economic thinking and market reasoning have reached into spheres of life far beyond the domain of material goods in recent decades. So the question is whether we want to live in a society where almost everything is up for sale, where market values and market thinking dominate, for example, family life, community life, health, education, civic life, politics, law, and how can we think about where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong? Those are really the questions I'm hoping to encourage public debate about.

4:00 Seth: I wanted to ask about that motivation, if I could. When you talk about encouraging public debate, I've seen quite a few venues on YouTube where you've gone and done lectures. Did you want to try to use this to kind of insert yourself into the public discourse, maybe even in the political realm? Or did you have an idea when you got started that you wanted to sort of make this more activist or.

4:24 Michael: Well, I think so. I was drawn to philosophy in the first place through an interest in politics. Growing up, I was always a political junkie. I loved to follow elections and campaigns and debates from a very practical point of view. And it really wasn't until graduate school that I became interested in philosophy. But I always wanted, even after I became hooked by philosophy in graduate school and then found myself teaching it, I wanted always to connect philosophy to the world, to show that the debates we have every day in our public life and in our personal lives rest on big philosophical questions, competing principles of justice and ethics, even though we may not reflect directly or systematically on those questions.

And so with this book, I wanted to take an issue that has always interested me as a philosophical matter. Does market thinking miss important values, and does it undermine certain important social practices? I wanted to connect that debate to our contemporary public life because in recent decades we've seen, we've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity. But a market society is a place where everything is up for sale. And the question I'm hoping to generate discussion about is do we want to live this way?

And if not, how should we conceive the social goods and practices that we prize?

6:04 Mark: I'm wondering if we can sketch out. I found particularly intriguing the view that you were opposing, which you were saying it's not simply just a corruption, you know, that we've, we've had this drift and a lot of individual things. You know, airline says, well, let's, instead of making everybody wait in line, which is a very democratic thing, let's offer premium seats so folks can jump the line if they pay an extra amount. And then there are lots of other different cases like that that you give that. You could say that even if you're okay with those on an individual basis, they just build up to this idea that just about everything is for sale.

You know, we think immigration is something that you apply based on what, merit? On whether you're a refugee from somewhere. But the fact is that you say that if you invest this much money in the U.S. u.S. Companies to create so many jobs, then you sort of automatically get. There's a loophole there. So instead of looking at these as just loopholes, you've said that many mainstream economists, that this is sort of built into their, you know, they positively think that in a pluralistic society, the best that we can hope for in terms of maximizing the good for people, maximizing justice, is market thinking.

Any market exchange benefits the seller, it benefits the buyer. If it didn't benefit both, they wouldn't do.

7:16 Michael: Right.

7:16 Mark: That's the logic and that's the ultimate form of distributed power is instead of some central agency saying you can or can't make this kind of exchange, just let people make the exchanges they want. And it's an argument supposedly pro egalitarianism.

7:32 Michael: Well, pro choice, pro freedom of choice, as you've laid it out. And that's the rationale. It's the idea that markets embody freedom because they consist of voluntary choices among consenting adults to trade goods and sell services of whatever kind on terms they find agreeable. That's the theory. And that's a theory that works pretty well if we're talking about material goods, cars, toasters, flat screen televisions, but it doesn't work so well. It raises hard moral questions. When that logic is extended to the kinds of questions you were raising.

Should we put immigration, the right to live in the US up for sale as a way of resol the messy disputes we have about immigration? Gary Becker, who recently passed away, a Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago, proposed exactly that. He said, let's solve the immigration debate by simply putting a price on the right to immigrate, $50,000 or $100,000 and let the market decide. It comes up in debates about commercial surrogacy. Should paid pregnancy be a practice that is permitted or encour law? What about voting? If you take the principle of mutually advantageous voluntary exchanges, why not have a free market in votes?

After all, there are many people who don't care enough to vote. Half the people don't even use their votes in presidential elections. We know there are people who would like to buy them. So why not allow the same logic that you just mentioned of mutually advantageous voluntary exchanges to play out with regard to buying and selling votes, or babies for that matter, up for adoption? Now, we don't allow markets, at least not explicit outright markets in votes. But maybe that's simply because we haven't extended that logic consistently enough. I say the reason we don't allow explicit markets in votes or in children, let's say, has to do with certain limits to that logic of market choice.

Limits that I think should also apply to many practices where we don't interrogate the role of market thinking very closely.

9:58 Mark: So you're acknowledging these intuitions that we have. You know why we think you shouldn't be able to sell babies. But can you say a little more about the point of view that you were opposing in terms of the really thoroughgoing market thinking that this is not only it's good for freedom, it does end up fulfilling the utilitarian calculus. Right?

10:16 Michael: Right. Well, take a classic example about commodification. Sex. What about prostitution? Now, there are two familiar objections, ethical objections to prostitution putting sex up for sale. One of them is that typically the prostitutes are not really choosing freely. They're under the burden of economic necessity. Poverty, drug addiction, threat of violence. So the choice is typically not truly free. That's one objection. Worry about the implicit coercion in poverty or drug addiction. But there's a further objection that many people raise against prostitution, which is quite apart from the question of whether it's coerced.

Some say it's degrading, it's contrary to human Dignity to sell one's body for sex independent of the question of consent. So these two different kinds of reasons, these two different arguments, is the transaction really free or implicitly coerced? That's the freedom question. And even if it is free, does this amount to a degradation, a violation of human dignity in some way? The second argument, I call this the argument from corruption or degradation of a good. These, I think, are the two main objections to putting everything up for sale. And while the first, the freedom argument, the one that worries about coercion, is the most familiar in our public discourse, it's the second, I think, that is the most far reaching, though some would say the most philosophically controversial, because it requires to speak of corruption or degradation, is to presuppose a certain conception of the good, in this case the good of human sexuality and of human dignity.

And people disagree about those judgments.

12:12 Dylan: Isn't it also true that the first one is addressable with market thinking in some respect? That the reply from a market based approach would be, it's a fine tuning problem of leveling the playing field.

12:25 Michael: You could level the playing field. That's right. So you could address that problem by saying, all right, let's establish fair background conditions in the society such that no one is so desperately poor that he or she is forced to sell sex or to sell a kidney or a cornea in order to feed his or her family. So you're exactly right. You could address what we might call the coercion objection or the poverty objection without in any way calling into question the market logic itself. You could say, all right, we're going to remedy the dire inequality that leads to desperately poor people making desperate, effectively coerced choices.

Which is why in the book I try to put the emphasis on the second kind of question. Because in some ways it's the hardest and it's philosophically, I think, the most challenging, because it requires us to reason, case by case, about the meaning of the good or of the social purpose in question. What exactly is the good being corrupted? And what counts as the relevant or the appropriate good? We've been talking about sex and the body. Take an institutional example. Should universities, say, private, selective, elite universities, sell off, auction off a handful of seats in the freshman class, admitting students who may not be so academically strong, but whose parents will give $10 million to the school or build a new library?

Now, some would say it's unfair to those kids who don't have the good judgment to be born to wealthy parents. That's the fairness object. But you might also ask, quite apart from that, does this corrupt the purpose, the mission of the university to auction off seats? So this corruption argument requires that we analyze and debate, come to a view about the goods, the missions, the purposes that give meaning to social practices and human goods.

14:35 Seth: One of the things I really liked about the book is that you're taking an extensive and kind of case by case approach without necessarily using those cases to advocate for one position or another, but sort of raise the questions. I think that's one of the virtues of the book over a sort of standard contemporary academic approach of the so called thought experiment.

14:56 Michael: Right, right.

14:57 Seth: Which we constantly struggle with. But using Dylan's point to talk about what you were just talking about with respect to sexual. That market approach of saying, well, anytime there's a failure of the market approach, it's because there's some issue with the implementation, there's not enough transparency or there's corruption, or it's not truly a free market. Right. The way that's. If you see a lot of economic discourse around the financial crisis, it was, oh well, we set up the wrong incentives. It's not that the system itself was structured in such a way that this was the inevitable conclusion, it's that the government did something wrong.

That seems to be the common response. I wonder whether they even have the context or the framework to address the second of your concerns or your criticisms, because I don't think that the advocates of the market approach have the language to address the notion of degradation. And it takes somebody coming from outside to say the system itself has that built into it. And that's part of what I was trying to get at, what your motivation for the book is, how to drive that conversation from within that paradigm or against that paradigm.

16:06 Michael: Right.

16:06 Mark: I want to add to that the perspective that you take throughout this book is evaluating social practices. Should we allow this or does that degrade the practice? I came at this thinking more as an individual. If you're making choices, do you make choices explicitly with something like an economic evaluation in mind? For instance, as a freshman taking sociology, I was informed that entering into college was an investment in my future. And I never actually thought about this in that way before. I mean, that was something that you just do because that's what people do that are next.

And quickly thought, well, that must just be my own lack of reflection. If you're really a reasonable person, then you evaluate everything, looking in terms of the long term and short term practical advantages and lining it up with what you really value, et cetera, et Cetera, it ends up, and this is a sort of the existentialist challenge of Ayn Rand. You know, if you're idling away your time or something, you're committing a sin against yourself because you should really be looking at every single thing you do from a pseudo economic perspective.

That is, even if you can't put a number on how much you value time with your spouse or any other things like that, they are all really potentially quantifiable. So that kind of thinking, you know, it's no accident that that individual attitude is tied to, with Ayn Rand into an advocation of laissez faire capitalism.

17:30 Michael: Yes, I think this makes a very interesting connection. It had never occurred to you until they gave you this bromide about college being an investment in your future. And this goes along with the language we often hear about investing in one's human capital. So even the language of individual and personal self development and education becomes assimilated to the language of building capital, human capital, making an investment in oneself. But I think this is an impoverished and a potentially pernicious way of describing the purpose of education.

I don't think we should be encouraging incoming freshmen to think of a college education primarily in those terms. Of course, the hope is that a college education will equip students to get good jobs, to be effective participants in economic life. But that's not the only or even the main purpose. And the language that you suggest implies that that's the main purpose rather than to become more effective citizens, to more fully develop one and explore one's own human capacities and to develop them. So I do think that the language insinuates itself.

The economistic way of looking at life insinuates itself into individual life to the way our aspirations are described. And just to go back to the earlier observation, I think, by Seth, about how many economists or those who speak in economistic terms are not alive to the questions of goods, of corruption, of degradation. I think one of the reasons for this, at least within the academy, is that economics today is presented and taught as if it were a value neutral science of human behavior and social choice. Now, economics has not always been conceived this way.

If you go back to the classical economists from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, despite their ideological differences, they all agreed that economics is really a branch, it's a subfield of moral and political philosophy. But in the 20th century, economics reconceived itself as a value neutral science and therefore by definition could take no account of questions of the meaning of goods. Or the way in which market relations and market thinking might corrupt or degrade the meaning of certain goods and social practices. So part of my aim in writing the book is to argue for a new way of doing economics, which is to reconnect economics with moral and political philosophy, and then beyond that, to work out the implications of this for the way we do our politics and the way we conduct our public life.

20:34 Seth: That's a really interesting point. We read Smith and Hume on Moral Sentiments, and it's very well documented how much, how important the theory of moral sentiment was to Smith's development of economic theory. But even Hayek, the champion of the Chicago School, was very politically motivated. His conception about the free society and the free market was in a lot of ways formed as a response to totalitarianism and fascism that he felt it was sort of an antidote to.

21:04 Michael: Exactly.

21:04 Seth: To that type of society.

21:06 Michael: Right. And so agree or disagree with Hayek, he was connecting economic questions with philosophical and political questions.

21:13 Dylan: And that makes more clear why, especially in response to totalitarianism, the subtext of the importance of freedom would ring loud and true. The further trajectory to make it into a value neutral science that then you say by its own structure, gives you the answers to all these questions that were previously moral and political questions. But you say, okay, well, now I have a value neutral approach to it, so I can backtrack and address all the questions that I originally used values for, and it, I guess, just becomes overextended.

21:53 Michael: Well, I think part of the temptation of this way of thinking goes beyond the academic economist's desire to quantify everything and to measure everything and to enjoy the prestige of science. I think it goes beyond that because I think we need to ask, why does this way of thinking have a kind of public resonance beyond the domain of academia? I think there is something that is powerfully appealing in the idea that we can avoid debating in democratic societies questions about the good life, questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices.

It's appealing because we know that in pluralist societies we disagree about competing conceptions of the good life. We disagree about the best way to live. We disagree about how properly to value sex or child rearing or family life or education or health. We disagree about those things. And so in the face of those disagreements, there's a powerful tendency to say, let's try to conduct our public debate without reference to them. Let's set aside controversial conceptions of the good life and decide our public policy and our law without reference to them.

The idea of Economics as a value neutral system, the idea that markets are mechanisms that don't presuppose, don't require that we engage with these questions, that is powerfully appealing. I think it's a mistaken impulse. But I think until we confront that impulse, that worry directly, we're not going to make much headway in finding our way to a morally more robust kind of public discourse from the kind we've become accustomed to.

23:43 Dylan: One place you see this in spades is in the discussion about education and in the attempts to come up with ways of evaluating schools or teachers or students in progressively more quantified ways, in which the measurements by quantification always trump any other kind of judgment about how the education is working, its relative success, whether the teaching process is working. And it also, I think, contributes to the commodification of education in what becomes an overarching way. So that education becomes just more and more naturally viewed as a commodity and the students are fundamentally only customers and that they ought to be getting value for their investment.

And then the fact that the student didn't get an A and didn't get a great job becomes the fault of their education because they paid for it. And so that's what they should be getting for it. And they paid a lot of money for it, so they should be getting those things out of it. And where I find that that kind of fails is in trying to think about the way we raise children. Maybe not the question of buying and selling children, but by the question of how we would decide to raise them properly. And even though we have that commodified market based discussion more and more about public and private education.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like we think that that's the way parents ought to be judging their children. Nobody's developed a standardized test to sell to parents so that they can decide whether or not their kids are ready to do something.

25:22 Mark: Yeah, well, I would take this as an objection perhaps to the strength, Michael, which you've been putting forward the thesis that everything is becoming commercialized. That one could easily say, well, the home life is central and is for the most part not commercialized, unless you are getting a divorce and trying to divide up the belongings and children's time and things like that. So there are certain sort of exceptional circumstances in which you might need to commoditize some of these things. When we're talking about life insurance or somebody, there's a lawsuit involved. But for the most part these are fringe elements upon a very solid foundation that involves Us not looking at our private lives and as commercial, that we have a sharp distinction between the private life and the public life.

26:06 Michael: Well, I think it's a fair point and I certainly do think there are important pockets and resources of non market thinking in social life, in family life, in civil society. And those pockets and resources provide the moral intuitions and understandings that I'm trying to appeal to in questioning many of the domains where we have introduced market mechanisms. But at the same time, I agree with. It may have been Dylan, I'm not sure who was making this point.

26:36 Dylan: It was me. Yeah.

26:37 Michael: That there is a tendency to commodify education, to conceive it instrumentally. I think the drive to assessment and what is often called accountability, which are powerful movements in public policy toward education, can easily slip into an instrumentalizing, commodifying view of education and its purpose that can crowd out the more intrinsic aspects of education to do with self development, inculcating the love of learning, cultivating the capacity of students to become citizens. And as for life insurance, as you've seen, I have a chapter in the book on life insurance, which may seem an arcane topic, but it's actually, I found it fascinating morally and philosophically that life insurance, which we think of as a way of protecting families against the untimely death of the provider, that's a traditional view, but most insurance these days, life insurance is not of that kind.

There is now, partly as a result of the commodification of life insurance and the financialization of it over the last 30 years, there is an enormous secondary market in life insurance policies where people, essentially investors and brokers, are engaged in the activity of betting on the lives of strangers on how long people or portfolios of people will live, far removed from the purpose that I think most people would readily accept of ensuring for the sake of the security of one's family. So even in this domain, if you actually look at it, what begins as an instrument of security and protection for one's family becomes just another financial instrument.

They now even have death bonds on Wall street where they securitize portfolios of life insurance, slice and dice them as they did with the home mortgage market, and sell them off. So these death bonds, of course, have nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the security of a family.

28:43 Seth: That was definitely a fascinating and eye opening section of the book.

28:47 Michael: There's now what they call spin life speculator initiated life insurance policies where brokers and speculators will enlist people, typically wealthy, elderly people who don't even hold life insurance. Insurance, lend the money to buy life insurance, then flip the policy back to the broker, and essentially the broker is making a bet with the insurance company about when that elderly person will die. So there are very few aspects of life that the impulse to financialize or to commodify have not yet reached.

29:20 Mark: Well, I think the whole issue of betting, I think really brings in the intuitions into stark display that that just seems like a prime thing. People should be able to bet about anything that that's just from an economic point of view, unless you're saying again that then there are people that are become addicted to gambling or something. And so you argue from a social perspective why you don't want gambling in general. But if you accept that gambling in general is okay, then there seems to be no specific reason available to the economic point of view for why you should restrict gambling in terms of what they can gamble about.

But that seems like pretty obvious from the point of view of decency. I guess the question is the reason that we seem to like a pluralistic society. Decency is too much of a judgment call. And so we like the idea that your speech, your expression is free, even if it annoys someone else. And that's maybe what this decency thing amounts to is these people betting about whether you're going to live or die, as long as they're not actually coming. And trying to influence the outcome of that is really just, it's an irritation. So do we have any grounds for outlawing or otherwise prescribing something that is merely an irritant?

30:27 Michael: Right. And the starkest example of this recently is that Wall Street Journal reported about 10 years ago that Walmart and other big companies were taking out life insurance policies on their workers, not their CEOs, who might be expensive to replace if they suddenly. But on their maintenance workers, on their cashiers, on their janitors. This was unbeknownst to the employee. And so when an employee would die, the company, Walmart, not the family, would get the proceeds. Now, from the standpoint of a kind of market logic, it's hard to object because it was Walmart who entered into the contract with the life insurance company.

They paid the premiums, so they, not the family, should get the benefit when the person dies. The moral objection is that essentially Walmart is placing a wager, a bet on when its maintenance workers will die and reaping the benefit when they do. So when it came to light, some states said, well, we can't allow this without the consent of the worker. Although strictly speaking, if someone's placing a side bet on when you will die and if they don't put a banana peel in your way to hasten your death, have they really harmed you? It's not clear that they have.

Unless you accept a certain idea about the proper relations, say, between an employer and the employee. Does this instrumentalize the employee, making him or her worth, in this case, more dead than alive? Is there something contrary to the appropriate relation between employees, say Walmart and its employees, embodied in this practice? I think it's hard to explain what's objectionable about it and why it shouldn't be permitted without engaging in that discussion, which of course is a moral discourse and people will disagree. But that's not a reason, I think, to avoid having the debate.

32:21 Dylan: Can we play this out a little bit more? Because the way we were just talking about it, the objection still focuses on the right relation of understanding the value of a life or the relationship between the individual employee and their employer and that sort of thing. But part of the concern in your book is not just the degradation of the value of human life, but the effect that it has on the community as a whole as being a place. Do we want to the language that you used earlier and you used in the book is do we want to live in a community that's like X?

And there's on the one hand the value of what kind of community that ends up being. And then there's, at the end of your book, there's the characteristic of the harm that market based thinking does to democracy as a whole. And I take your point to be eventually the very things that are valued in our democracy get undermined. And I don't know if you'd go as far as to say that eventually you just, just end up not having a democracy, that you end up with something altogether different if you pursue this out to the end. But could we just talk a little bit more about what that means in that bigger picture?

33:37 Michael: Right. Well, to take the example toward the end of the book that you mentioned, I talk about how when I was a kid growing up, I'm from the Midwest, from Minnesota, and I was always a baseball fan and we'd go see the Minnesota Twins play. And back then, when I was a kid, say in the mid-60s, the price, they were always box seats that were more expensive and bleacher seats that were cheaper, but the difference in price between the most expensive seat in the stadium and the cheapest was about $3.50 for a box seat and a dollar for the bleachers. So it was about $2.50, maybe $3 difference.

The effect of this is that the experience of going to a baseball game was, it was a kind of class mixing experience. It was a place where CEOs sat side by side with mailroom clerks. That's not why people went. They went to see, in my case, Harmon Killebrew or Sandy Koufax. But that was the effect. And everyone rooted for the home team. Everyone had to wait in the same long line for the restroom. Everyone had to drink the same stale beer and eat the same soggy hot dogs. And when it rained, everyone got wet. That was just part of the experience.

But during the last 30 years, 35 years, almost every Major League Baseball stadium and most football and basketball stadiums and arenas have created skyboxes. Skyboxes enable those who can afford it, and often corporate CEOs and their guests, to watch in air conditioned comfort, high above the field and cut off from the common folk in the stands below. And the effect is that it's no longer true that everyone stands in the same long line for the restroom. It's no longer true that when it rains, everyone gets wet. I call this skyboxification. And it wouldn't matter very much if it only happened at sports stadia.

But something similar has been happening in American life, throughout American society during this last three decades, against a background of rising inequality, putting a price on everything. Commodifying every aspect of life has the effect of driving people apart, of leading the affluent and those of modest means to live increasingly separate lives. And so we look up and we find that we live and work and shop and play in different places. We send our children to different schools. This isn't good for democracy. It's a corrosive effect. This relentless commodification and inequality together are corrosive of the sense that we are all in this together.

And this brings me back to your question about the effect on democracy. Democracy doesn't require perfect equality, but what it does require is that people from different social backgrounds, different walks of life, encounter one another and bump up against one another in the public spaces and common places of everyday life. Because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good, to feel the that we are all in this together. And so, in this subtle but cumulative way, the relentless commodification of life, together with rising inequality, have undermined the social solidarity, the commonality that democracy in the end requires.

And so that I see as one of the deepest dangers of an unquestioned embrace of market thinking and market logic.

37:16 Seth: I think there's a sense in which there's an intuitive understanding of that. Even though, as you say, this has kind of happened, you know, it wasn't overnight and it's not something that people have taken notice of. It's just sort of evolved over time. But there's a kind of collective guilt that I think we in our specific democratic society have about our participation in that system. And that's why you see, you know, recently, things like fair trade, right? There's this sense in which we aren't actually saying, well, we're going to give up our $7.50 Starbucks latte because the only people sitting in this cafe are people who can afford to have that.

But we are going to say, well, as long as they donate some money to the people that produce that. And the system is somehow, somewhere, somebody is getting some kind of equity reimbursement out of this. Right? It's not totally exploitative that that somehow makes us feel better about ourselves. But I think it points to exactly that problem that you just highlighted. We sense that there's something wrong, and

38:19 Michael: so we undertake some gestures at least to try to do right or to assuage what you described as a kind of collective guilt. I think it's very interesting observation. One of the most telling instances of this is the way we now, in my view, rightly valorize and appreciate returning veterans and those who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is a kind of sentiment. Maybe this speaks to what you were describing as collective guilt. We made a decision, and it's politically uncontroversial, to use an all volunteer army rather than to have any system of universal service or conscription.

During World War II, there was conscription. Actually, during the Civil War, it was an interesting system. The first draft, Lincoln's draft, was by conscription. But if you didn't want to serve, you could hire a substitute to take your place. And people put ads in the newspapers who didn't want to serve offering certain amount of money, $1,500 in some cases, to hire a substitute to fight in his place. And I put this question to my students. Do they think this Civil War system, the buyout system, is fair? And most of them say no, they don't think so.

Then I ask them, how many think that the all volunteer army we have is fair? And almost everyone says yes. But then when I ask, why do people object to the Civil War buyout system? What's wrong with hiring a substitute? The answers are interesting. Some people say, well, is it fair that those with greater means pay those who are less affluent than themselves and who have fewer alternatives to, to risk and die and fight their wars? But if that's the objection to commodifying military service in the way they did it back in the 1860s, could that same objection raise questions about the way we do it now, which has been to consign military service to the labor market altogether?

We call it the all volunteer army, but that's actually a misnomer and maybe a euphemism. It's not a volunteer army in the sense that we speak of a volunteer soup kitchen where people go and contribute their labor for free. It's a paid army. So getting back to the question of collective guilt, it's almost as if in the outpouring of support for those who have fought and sacrificed, it's almost as if there is an undercurrent of a kind of unreflected question about have we outsourced war and civic sacrifice to a very small part of the population? And this is only heightened by the fact that we've outsourced further through the use of private military contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, there were actually more private military contractors on the ground than there were U.S. military troops. So this is another area bearing on civic life and shared civic responsibility, where without much debate at all, we've made some pretty far reaching choices about the use of markets to allocate the ultimate civic sacrifice.

41:26 Mark: I wonder if we should shift here to. You say a lot of things and the example you just gave is something right out of your justice lectures to get people to just reflect that there must be some alternative to market thinking, that we have to engage in some sort of moral deliberation. And that was largely the tack that you took in liberalism. The limits of justice as well, is just to counter Rawls, that we can't simply as a society be neutral with regard to different people's conception of the good and set up our laws just with the eye to maximizing or whatever, the ability of individuals to pursue whatever they think is the good, that we need to as a society somehow make some positive statements about what is good beyond the minimal.

You know, don't murder each other. But how do we actually do this? We do not have a social system set up to be able to do that without coming across as autocratic. And you know, in the same way that I was talking about that we don't want to prohibit things just because they're irritating. And I know Wes's Big objection in our last discussion was that it's entirely the point of Rawls system to figure out beforehand just setting up the basic structures of society. We need to acknowledge the fact that people have different points of view, different ideas of the good.

And so we need a system that will navigate around that. And so sort of beyond that, that's really all that's issue when we're talking about government action, period.

42:45 Michael: Right. Well, first let me, since we're stepping back and relating the discussion we've just had about my most recent book, what Money Can't Buy, to my first book, which was Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, seems ages ago. One clear difference between them is that liberalism and the Limits of Justice is philosophically much more demanding. It's more abstract. It takes up the version of liberalism presented in the philosophies of John Rawls and Immanuel Kant. Whereas what Money Can't Buy is concrete, topical, filled with examples, making philosophical arguments, but directed to non specialist readers.

And yet there is a connection between these two books philosophically. My argument against the version of liberalism that was worked out brilliantly by John Rawls and which harkens back to the philosophy of Kant, is the version of liberalism that says in defining justice, in defining the basic structure of society, in defining people's fundamental rights and liberties, we should set aside our disagreements about the good life or about virtue or about the best way to live. We should, as Rawls and Kant both put it, we should assert the priority of the right over the good.

And that's the question, is it possible? And if it's possible, is it desirable to define justice and rights without reference to, without taking sides on debates about the good and in liberalism, in the Limits of Justice, my argument was no, it's often not possible to do that. And even where it may be possible, it's not necessarily desirable to bracket or abstract from or set aside substantive moral conceptions in thinking about justice. That was the debate there. And we can come to that debate and to. Wes worries about my answer to that question.

But I just want to make an observation about how that debate is related to the question I take up in what Money Can't Buy? What should be the role of money in markets in our society? The reason it's connected is that I think that version of liberalism, going back to Rawls's famous work A Theory of justice, that version of liberalism in some ways makes its peace with markets and market thinking of the kind we've been discussing, and I think it makes its peace too quickly and too uncritically with that way of thinking. Here's a political observation.

Then we can get back to the arguments for and against Rawls's view. I think if you look for the recent origins of this emphasis on markets, you think first of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher coming in in 79, 1980, with the explicit argument that markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. But even after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher passed from the political scene, their successors, left of center parties, did not fundamentally question that premise. They moderated but consolidated the faith that markets and market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good.

And so I think that contemporary liberalism has in large part been unable to raise serious questions or engage in serious debate about the proper role and reach of markets because it draws on an assumption not of Reagan and Thatcher, but of a deeper philosophical assumption that derives from Rawls and Kant, namely, that in at least deciding the basic structure of society and in shaping the essentials of public discourse, we should not get into messy debates about the good life. But if I'm right about the argument from corruption and degradation with regard to markets to rule out questions of the good life or a virtue, or of the proper way of valuing goods or of being a citizen or of conceiving education, to rule all of those questions out as belonging to the realm of private morality or substantive moral conceptions that we have to set to one side to rule all that out is to ill equip us.

It's to disempower us from questioning the market logic that we've been discussing. So that's what I see as the philosophical connection between the first book and the most recent one. Before we actually go to Wes's worry about the debate with Rawls, does that make sense to you guys?

47:26 Wes: Yeah, I think that makes sense.

47:28 Michael: All right.

47:29 Wes: Yeah. So why don't I explain my.

47:31 Michael: Yeah, go ahead.

47:32 Wes: My objection to this. Okay, So I think your claim in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice seems to be that liberalism, at least this sort of deontological liberalism, is inconsistent with the existence of real communities because it's grounded in this sort of Kantian conception of an unencumbered transcendental ego that can't be constituted by its ends and. And so on and so forth. But what worries me about that is Kant's conception of the self is actually much larger than that. Right. There's the empirical self, which you do mention early on. And everything about the empirical ego or the empirical self is entirely consistent with a self that's constituted by its ends, and that has communal attachments and so on and so forth.

So I don't think Rawls, and I'm not sure, by the way, that Rawls is even depending on the Kantian conception of the self so strongly. But, you know, even if we assume that, for the sake of argument, it's unclear to me that when I say for the purposes of setting up a state, I'm going to think about only this minimal conception of the good, the thin theory of the good, and I'm going to treat of only one very thin slice of the self, let's call it the transcendental ego. That doesn't imply to me that there's some metaphysics that all there is to the self is the transcendental ego.

It just says for the purposes of setting up a state, because we know the society is going to be pluralistic. That's what we're going to think about. And so we're going to avoid legislating some conception of the good. We're not going to have an Islamic state or a Christian state or however you want to put it. And so it seems to me that a liberal society in that sense is entirely consistent with real communities, real communities in which people have not just transcendental egos, but empirical selves that are strongly constituted by their communal attachments.

Now, I mean, you might make the argument that, well, there's something about liberalism, the ethos of liberalism, which discourages that, that has a kind of disintegrating effect. But I think that would be a separate sort of argument. I don't see that even if, for the purposes of setting up state, you've grounded it in this very thin conception of the self, that you've ruled out the existence of a thicker conception and all that goes along with it. So that's one objection. Then. The other part is just a question about. It's kind of vague to me what it means to.

Because I take it you're a liberal of some sort, although it's unclear to me. But if we do say we're not going to bracket out very specific conceptions of the good for the purposes of setting up a state for a pluralistic society, how exactly does that change the way the state is set up? What are the practical implications of that? Because obviously, I don't think any of us are thinking we want to see the state enforce religion or enforce some other specific theory of the good life. So if the state's not going to enforce that, what is the practical upshot?

Because if we're just Saying that, well, we ought to take the good into account for the purposes of public discourse. That seems to me we can do that in the liberal state. So those are my thoughts.

50:14 Michael: Okay. All right, Good. Let me start with the first point. One way of putting this is to ask what is the connection between liberal neutrality? And by neutrality I mean neutrality toward the good, toward moral and religious and spiritual conceptions. What's the connection between that and the idea of the unencumbered or the freely choosing independent self, a self conceived of as independent of its purposes, aims and attachments? Well, one way of thinking of that connection is this one way of arguing, and this, I think, one finds in Rawls's work, a theory of justice.

One way of arguing for neutrality toward the good. One reason for insisting that the basic framework of rights should not rest or depend for its justification on any particular conception of the good would be to say we are above all freely choosing independent selves. And so to respect what it means to respect freedom, what it means to respect persons as free and independent selves is to create a framework of rights that allows them, each of us, to pursue our own ends, however we may choose them, consistent with respecting a similar liberty for others.

That's the standard view. And that would offer one reason for insisting on neutrality, a basic framework of rights that didn't bake in or rest for its justification on anybody's moral or spiritual convictions, but simply enabled people to choose their values for themselves and their way of life for themselves. That's the view. So there are a couple of things that can be said about this. First is, is it possible to do that? Suppose that were a desirable. And it's certainly an understandable aspiration. Is it possible to define a basic structure or framework of fundamental rights without passing any judgment on substantive moral or religious conceptions?

I don't think so. Take the example of abortion. Now, what is the neutral position on abortion, the position that's neutral in the sense that it doesn't take sides in the theological dispute about the moral standards status of the fetus, some would say some policies, such as Roe v. Wade or a legal position where you leave to each woman the right to decide for herself without imposing any particular answer. Now, I think something like the Roe v. Wade policy is the best policy. But I don't think that I can defend that policy or that anyone can while claiming that I'm being neutral with regard to the moral and theological convictions of people who believe that from the moment of conception we have a human person worthy of respect if they're right, I'm wrong.

And so I think there's something disingenuous in to take this one particular right which has been at the heart of much constitutional controversy in the United States. I think there's something disingenuous, disingenuous for those who favor, let's say, relatively permissive abortion laws to claim that they're not presupposing any particular answer to this theological or moral question about the moral status of the fetus. We are, and therefore we should own up to it and articulate it and defend it. And consider the counter arguments from those who disagree.

I think something similar is true in the debate about same sex marriage. Now you might say, well, it's simply a matter of non discrimination that we don't have to pass any judgment about the moral worth of unions between members of the same sex as compared to unions between a man and a woman. I disagree. I think that the argument for same sex marriage, which I'm very much in favor of, requires that we contend with, engage with questions about what the purpose of marriage is. And there are those who claim for moral or religious reasons that the purpose of marriage is to provide a framework for procreation and to encourage and honor procreation, and that therefore same sex marriage is at odds with the purposes of marriage.

And there are other views that say that the purpose of marriage is not only the raising of children and the honoring of childbearing and procreation, but also lifelong loving commitment between two dedicated partners regardless of their sex. Now, choosing between these two accounts of the moral purpose of marriage as a social institution. Choosing between those accounts takes us to contested moral terrain that implicates in some cases religious views, in other cases strongly held moral views about the telos or the purpose of marriage. It takes us, in other words, onto the terrain of the good.

And yet I don't think we can decide the same sex marriage question or even make a convincing case for same sex marriage without engaging with those arguments. Just as I don't think we can be neutral, morally neutral on the question of abortion, so my main argument against the Rawlsian claim to neutrality is that even to define our rights, even to design the basic structure of society in a constitution, requires that we engage with rather than ignore or set aside certain sometimes controversial and contentious moral, spiritual, even theological questions.

55:52 Mark: I just wonder about what the status of teleology is in those arguments. That is teleology being used as the ultimate justification for claims about the good? Or is it just a way of expressing particular claims about the Good.

56:06 Wes: Let me add to that in talking about what the purpose of the institution of marriage is, is there an ontology to marriage and there's somehow a purpose built into it? Because I think most of us would think, well, the conception of the purpose of marriage changes over time. It changes historically. And there was a time when the strongly held agreement was that it had something to do with procreation. But for a liberal, we would want to say that such views ought not to trump certain fundamental rights, which, by the way, I don't think are morally neutral.

I don't think the Kantian or liberal framework is morally neutral. It's just a minimalistic conception of the good, which I see as consistent with more robust conceptions of the good. But the question is, what if the telos of marriage did have something to do with procreation, then would it be right to ban same sex marriage? I think a liberal would strongly resist that kind of conclusion.

56:57 Michael: It would depend on whether that were the only or the primary good, or whether these other goods were plausibly constructed as being part of what marriage was for. I wouldn't press too strongly on the distinction between ontology and sociology in this respect. Marriage is a social institution, but it's a social institution of normative significance. That's why we have these fierce debates about who's eligible for it. But the debates about who's eligible for it are unavoidably debates about the moral meaning or the moral purpose of marriage, which is partly, but not only a sociological question. It's also a normative philosophical question.

57:42 Dylan: I took part of Wes's objection to be something like, well, look, we're having that debate in the case of gay marriage. And we're doing that in what seems like a deontologically liberal society of the sort that was being criticized. And that the practical structure of our society is recognizably Rawlsian, even Kantian, in terms of the design of its institutions and the arrangements of those institutions. And that design doesn't preclude us from talking about values. And in fact, we're having that discussion. So the second part of Wes's question was, how does the criticism of liberalism and the primacy of right over the good cash out practically in terms of our institutions and so forth. And if it doesn't cash out in terms of our institutions, but affects really the way in which we have public conversation, then it's maybe less strong of a criticism.

58:43 Michael: Well, it is certainly true that we are having some debates about the meaning of the good and some of Those debates show up in the debates over same sex marriage. They come up implicitly, though not explicitly, in the debate about abortion. And so I think that the way our institutions are designed and our public discourse proceeds is conflicted insofar as we understand ourselves as debarred from engaging with constitutional or public purposes, competing conceptions of the good life. That abstention from a moral engagement reflects a kind of Kantian, Rawlsian impulse or structure, but it doesn't have a full grip on the way we do things or the way we think about things.

And the reason it doesn't is that it isn't really, I think, possible entirely to observe those strictures or to conduct a democratic life without them. And yet we tend in that direction. But I think, and this brings me to a second objection to the idea that we should conceive the right as prior to the good. The second objection has to do with the constraints on public reason that are required. And Rawls discusses these in a book he wrote, after A Theory of justice in Political Liberalism, where he said that he did not want, after all, the case for the priority of the right over the good to depend on any particular conception of the self, the freely choosing, unencumbered self or otherwise, but instead on a certain conception of public reason, according to which we agree to set aside when we enter debate about constitutional essentials.

At least we set aside our comprehensive moral views, our substantive conceptions of the good, and we observe these constraints of public reason as a way of respecting the fact, as he calls it, the fact of pluralism, the fact of reasonable pluralism about the good. But I think this way of defending his position is unpersuasive for another reason. It preserves the asymmetry of the right and the good. It preserves the priority of the right over the good on the grounds of respecting reasonable pluralism about the good. But isn't there also reasonable pluralism in our society about justice, about the right?

Look at the disagreements in the five to four decisions, for that matter in the Supreme Court. Look at the disagreements about the meaning of the First Amendment, about affirmative action, about abortion and same sex marriage. All of these involve questions of rights, questions of justice. And yet, is it really the case that in a pluralist society we disagree about the good life, but not about rights, not about the meaning of free speech, not about the meaning of privacy rights? I don't think so. So if the fact of reasonable pluralism is what should prevent us from engaging, bringing to bear conceptions of the good, why shouldn't it also prevent us from bringing to bear competing conceptions of justice and rights.

So that's one objection to the case for liberal neutrality, or more precisely, for the priority of the right over the good presented by Rawls in political liberalism. I would just make one other point. We pay a great political price for this, and I think liberals in particular have paid a political price by requiring that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public square. The result is to contribute to a kind of empty, impoverished public discourse which is very much, I think, where we are today. So much of public discourse consists either of managerial, technocratic talk or of shouting past one another, or to go back to the first half of our conversation to economistic market technocratic talk.

And I think one of the reasons for this, I think this emptiness, impoverishment and public discourse, our inability to engage with serious substantive moral and ethical conceptions, is that we are trying, not consistently, not successfully, but we are trying to bracket or leave aside or not to engage with our substantive moral and spiritual convictions. And I think this has created a kind of vacuum in public discourse that is and will be filled by narrow, intolerant moralisms. I think it's no accident that we see the rise of right wing Christian fundamentalist groups, for example, in the 1980s and 90s at just the time that the attempt to insist on the constraints of liberal public reason delegitimate morally and spiritually engaged public discourse.

So this is a further worry I have with the attempt to insist that the right is prior to the good and that we should require citizens to leave their moral and religious and spiritual convictions outside when debating fundamental public questions.

1:04:13 Dylan: Would you say that that accounts for the absence of the politically liberal Christian in public dialogue and Christian politics? Back 50 or 60 years ago, there was a whole school of thought of politically liberal Christians.

1:04:29 Wes: They're still there. Marilynne Robinson, for instance.

1:04:31 Michael: Right. But not with the prominence. You look back at the civil rights movement and the discourse surrounding it, and you look at the public discourse and speeches of Martin Luther King, and you find explicit reference and appeal to universal moral values, to liberal values, but also to Christian conceptions and ideals. And this was done in an unembarrassed way, and it was part of what gave moral and spiritual energy and resonance and depth to the civil rights movement. You look at the discourse of Robert F. Kennedy when he was seeking the presidential nomination in 1968, and there too you find from within here liberalism, broadly conceived.

You find a kind of public discourse that engages with questions about soulcraft, about the right way to live, about civic virtue and not just freedom of choice and respecting rights by refusing to engage people's moral views. And I think this has changed. I think the tone, it's true that it's not been completely lost, but the tone, if you look recently to take us back to why there's been such an absence of moral reflection on the economy, one of the most powerful moral statements about inequality and about capitalism in the reach of markets was the recent statement of Pope Francis, which drew explicitly on religious themes, not in ways that were opaque and inaccessible to those who are not Catholics.

But this is an example, I think, of the kind of contribution to public discourse, including public reason, about constitutional essentials, is Rawls says that we should welcome, not refuse.

1:06:20 Wes: I think the liberal might respond that there's nothing about liberalism that's inconsistent with or that requires people to leave more robust moral considerations aside when it comes to public discourse. It's just that it puts some very, very fundamental constraints on what the state is going to do. So we can have a debate about what kind of society we want to live in, and we can even legislate that to some extent the liberal would say just, but not to the extent that it violates rights and so on and so forth, or it involves killing people.

1:06:51 Michael: That begs the question. You're right to draw the connection between public discourse and legislation, but therein comes the rub. If you want to say you can legislate so long as you don't violate people's rights, well, the whole debate is what are people's rights? Was Roe v. Wade rightly decided or not? Is there a right to same sex marriage or not? Should hate speech be protected under the First Amendment or not? Even in deciding what counts as respecting rights, we have to engage in debate and bring to bear in the legislation or in the constitutional adjudication, in some cases, particular conceptions about the good.

It's not as if we can define and defend those rights in a way that is detached from the public reason and the public discourse and the legislative enactments that you concede. We should welcome comprehensive moral and spiritual views if we're prepared to welcome them in public debate about what the law should be, and if we're prepared to allow them to figure in legislation, then it won't do to say, but so long as we don't violate anyone's rights, because what counts as violating rights in many cases can't be determined except in reference to those very debates.

1:08:11 Mark: You're advocating something like the use of reflective equilibrium for legislation as well as for moral deliberation among people that though it would be nice if there are some core principles that we could just say we can do everything as long as we don't cross this line, the line itself is inevitably going to be a result of the same deliberative ongoing process. So we just need to acknowledge that. So it bugs me to no end when politicians stress how given to principles they are as opposed to their unprincipled pragmatist opponent. No, we shouldn't be using principles that will then substitute for thinking. We need to use thinking to engage social problems.

1:08:52 Michael: Yes, I agree with.

1:08:54 Wes: Obviously it's not as if it's always going to be clear. So the case of abortion is a good example because whether or not, and I think you're right, liberals often do simply they avoid what many conservatives see as a central question, which is if the fetus is a human being and a person, then they ought to be afforded the same rights as everyone else. But I think in answering that question, society actually maintains a certain agnosticism. It's not as if the Christian view wins out over some other view or vice versa. Roe vs. Wade simply tries to accommodate all points of view by stepping back from any substantive claims about when does a fetus become a person?

Because that is probably not answerable. There's no philosophical or religious framework that's going to. Some people think they know the answer, but I think in the end it's not an answerable question. So Roe versus Wade says as this something that begins as a single celled organism gets closer to looking like a baby, then we treat it as if it were closer to being a human being. But that's not a substantive decision about whether or not a fetus is actually a person. It's a sort of agnosticism.

1:10:04 Michael: Are you sure about that?

1:10:05 Wes: I think it's a practical way of saying we don't know. Or maybe it's substantive in the sense that it says there is no firm dividing line when someone crosses over into personhood. But really it's a kind of jerry rigged solution, isn't it?

1:10:17 Michael: Well, if it's true that there is no clear dividing line, then the Catholic Church position is false and the law is based on that claim. It's not agnostic. Take another example. I was involved in debates about embryonic stem cell research. I was appointed actually under President Bush to his bioethics council. And we were thrust into the debate about embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and I voted in favor of the idea that the federal government should support embryonic stem Cell research. There were many on the council who disagreed and we had fierce debates for six months about these questions.

But I readily conceded that if the position of the Catholic Church is right that an embryo from the time of conception, even an early embryo, is morally equivalent to a human person, if they are right about that, then embryonic stem cell research should be banned, despite its great medical promise. So we do have to decide whether they are right or wrong in that claim. And I don't think it's an arbitrary matter. It's a matter that involves reflection and debate and considering the full moral implications of the one view or the other. But if they are right, then put it this way, if a six day blastocyst which is destroyed in the course of embryonic stem cell research is morally equivalent to a two year old child, none of us would say, few of us certainly would say that for the sake of great, you know, important medical research, we should yank out the organs of the two year old child, thus killing it.

We wouldn't say that. So insofar as we defend federal support for, well, permission, but also for that funding for embryonic stem cell research, we are implicitly or explicitly taking the position that the Catholic Church's doctrine on this question is false. If the Catholic Church is right that destroying a six day blastocyst is morally equivalent to yanking out the organs of a two year old, if they're right about that, then embryonic stem cell research should be banned, notwithstanding its great medical promise. So to permit embryonic stem cel presuppose an answer to this theological question, and I'm saying we should address that question more explicitly and deliberately than trying to claim that we're just making a practical accommodation and taking no view on the underlying question.

1:12:49 Wes: Again, although I think there is more of a hedge here, to the extent that, for instance, in abortion restrictions increase as the fetus develops, there's more of a hedge. It doesn't obviously fully honor, let's say, the Catholic position. And I think this is a good clarification because this, this idea isn't explicit. I don't think in liberalism and the limits of justice, which is that to determine, to talk about rights and to determine, for instance, who's a person who has rights involves thornier philosophical conceptions and we have to bring to bear more robust conceptions of the good.

But I don't see how liberalism is inconsistent with that because obviously you were appointed to a panel and had those debates and those sorts of debates go on with abortion and then so on and so forth. So Again, I see liberalism as a sort of minimalistic framework in which more robust conversations can actually occur. It's not that legislation simply reflects the minimal tenets of rights. In the liberal point of view, legislation is obviously much more than that, and it does reflect our more robust sense of the good. The fact that prostitution is illegal in most states, for instance, is one example of that.

1:13:55 Michael: No, it would depend on what grounds prostitution is illegal. A liberal could support a ban on prostitution consistent with the priority of the right over the good if it turns out that there are significant third party harms. Or the liberal could be troubled by the argument from coercion, the argument that prostitution typically is unfree. It doesn't reflect a truly free choice if it's against a background of inequality, let's say, and dire poverty. Those are arguments that a liberal who believed in the priority of the right over the good good could accept for banning prostitution.

But the arguments that we were focusing on earlier, that prostitution, even without the background inequalities and coercion, is an improper way of treating the human person or our sexual human capacities, that it involves a kind of corruption and degradation of the proper understanding and respect for human sexuality. That's an argument that does not easily fit with the view that the right must be prior to and independent of the good. So the grounds for banning prostitution, certain grounds are consistent with neutrality toward the good. But the one based on corruption and degradation that we discussed earlier, that does not fit so easily with the idea that the right is prior to the good.

1:15:22 Seth: May I jump in here about that topic? Because I think this is a critical point that you bring up up the idea that you would interject into the public discourse around an issue such as this, a discussion around the good as opposed to rights. I think there is a way in which that happens currently that sets people up who speak about the good sets them up to be dismissed. And this is the kind of big connect the dots thing that I was trying to do with your. Your what Money Can't Buy book is why is it that we've lost that discussion of the good in public discourse and so favored rights?

And part of it is this pretense that you guys just discussed about rights being built on this edifice where you can ease your way into a sort of thin conception of the self. But isn't it that because most of our conceptions of the good are rooted in some kind of religious tradition, or at least inside some sort of value tradition, that it used to be okay and fashionable to espouse, but now it's not precisely because the dominant paradigm of the economic growth or the economic world view dominates has made it unfashionable for you to say, well, I'm a proponent of this particular view which espouses this conception of the good life and that it's just we're now dismissed.

If you come out and you say, I'm Jewish and these are the values of my community or I'm Catholic and these are the values of my community, I find prostitution to be corrosive of the moral fiber of the community and means that we can't raise our kids to be virtuous individuals. It used to be acceptable to have that conversation and now it's not. You used to be acceptable to posit yourself as coming from that position and now it's not. And it seems to me that that's somehow related to the idea that our political system as it was founded has become essentially a stand in for this market society, that the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is simply manifested in the notion of a value neutral, market based society.

Whereas before, I think we used to at least acknowledge that people came from these traditions where the good could be expressed and now we don't.

1:17:39 Mark: Well, I want to add to that that it's not just. I think the particular examples you referred to to some extent come from just our bad experiences with religions in particular communities abusing their majority power to place undue restrictions on people, to condemn homosexuality or any other behavior that they consider immoral, et cetera. But the kind of thing you're talking about even rules out what you might consider more progressive claims to the good. So I wanted to make sure to make the connection before we got out of here of the Robert Skidelsky's Money and the Good Life.

How Much is Enough? The love of Money and the case for the good life. If you want to argue as he does that just the fact that we use so much of our time for economic pursuit is itself a. It's not pursuing the good life, it is not focusing on meaningful activity, blah, blah, blah. Well, the response when we had an episode on something related to that from folks, you know, we had one guy in particular who an economic student was well, if you think that there are better ways of living, why aren't people already doing that? Right? Because the assumption is that the economy works to give people what they want, what they prefer.

And so you shouldn't have to argue things about values like that because people already will exert their values through their pocketbook. So we Think that the transformative power of economics is supposed to make these discussions of the good life unnecessary? Yes, they're inefficacious and unnecessary. Money is the thing that makes the world go round, right?

1:19:03 Wes: Yeah.

1:19:03 Dylan: If you really valued it, then you would spend money on it.

1:19:08 Michael: Well, yeah. I think this is bringing together the two parts of our discussion, and for that matter, the two books, in an interesting way. I think that today the deep appeal of market thinking and market logic applied to more and more aspects of life, the deep appeal is not just that markets deliver the goods or a rising standard of living. I think the deeper appeal is that markets seem to be mechanisms that spare us the need to engage in messy, controversial debates about how to value goods, about the meaning of the good life. Now, I think that's an understandable appeal, but a spurious one in the end, because I don't think we can outsource or should outsource our moral judgments to markets.

In fact, what happens when we do that is not that we really avoid answering the moral questions with which public life confronts us. We simply let markets decide those questions for us. Now, I think this impulse to outsource moral judgments or to avoid engaging in public discourse, controversial conceptions of the good life, I think that the market mechanism and the market reflexes so familiar in our time express this reticence toward engaging with the good. And so what I've been trying to do in my writings from Liberalism and the Limits of Justice up through what Money Can't Buy, is to show that this doesn't lead us to a good place.

It contributes to a kind of emptiness in our public discourse. It dulls our ability to engage as citizens with the moral and spiritual convictions of others, including those with which we disagree. It makes us less and less good at listening to the moral and spiritual convictions of others, sometimes learning from them, sometimes sharpening our own arguments in disagreements. And I also think it makes us vulnerable to the dominance of market thinking and market reasoning, which seem to spare us the need to engage in these debates. And so I think what we need is to find our way toward a kind of public discourse that is more welcoming of moral and spiritual arguments, including ones that may, for some people, come from religious traditions and including others who may derive their moral views from secular traditions.

I think we need a more capacious, more welcoming kind of public discourse that engages, rather than avoids the moral and spiritual views that in a pluralist society, we disagree about. I think that would make for a healthier democracy. And I also think it would help us have a more serious debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong.

1:22:07 Mark: Well, that sounds like an excellent nearly closing statement. Do other folks have some last questions or comments?

1:22:15 Dylan: I'm good. I enjoyed the discussion. Thank you very much for coming on.

1:22:18 Wes: Yeah, thank you.

1:22:20 Michael: Well, thank you all. I really enjoyed the discussion and really appreciate it.

1:22:24 Mark: All right. Well, folks should definitely go out and get one of those books. Or both of them. Or the one, the justice book in between. If you get them all together, it'll increase your moral status, I think.

1:22:40 Wes: Yes, it's all about status. Keeping up with the philosophical neighbors

1:22:46 Seth: I was just going to ask if Michael was still in the throes of a book tour, if he's gearing up for the fall semester.

1:22:53 Michael: Well, I'm sort of recovering from the book tour, which stretched on longer than I thought, in part because the book comes out in different languages at different times. But it's about 18 months to two years now. I think. I'm in recovery and looking forward to the fall semester.

1:23:10 Mark: Are you finding any difference in the way this is received in different areas internationally?

1:23:14 Michael: What I've found is that I find the greatest resistance to questioning of market thinking and market reasoning in two places. Do you want to see if you can guess what they might be?

1:23:27 Mark: Former Soviet Union.

1:23:29 Michael: I've not been there. One of them is in the US Maybe, not surprisingly, and the other is in China, where the moral intuitions in favor of market thinking and market logic and market reasoning are as potent as ones I found anywhere apart from the US Actually. Poland also has very strong pro market intuitions, whereas the rest of Europe, Britain, the rest of Asia, including Japan and South Korea, India. In Latin America, there seems to be a great hunger and willingness to engage with questions about the moral limits of markets. There is, I should say, I find, a hunger and an eagerness for debate about these questions wherever I've gone, including in the US and in China.

But the market intuitions, the market faith, I think, runs deepest just based on a purely unscientific assessment, just based on talking to people and traveling to various places discussing the book that runs deepest in the US and in China.

1:24:35 Mark: Coming up for episode 99, we'll be looking back at Pel. So far covering no reading in particular, but for episode 100 we're covering Plato's Symposium, which I encourage you all to read. Partially Examined Life is supported by your donations. Recent big donors have included Mohamed El Bahiri, Mark Fienne, William Saxby, Sebastian McGrier, Patricia Cook, Jack Sheppard, Tim Sullivan, Robert Tabb, Omog Hasahu, Heather Brook, Gozdem, Gurbuzati, Harold Johnson, Jeffrey Rabar, Max Bulmash, Eric Hovland, David Kraftsau, Patricia Broccolina, Thomas Kaiser, Jacob Baird, Lucinda Walker, Todd Costa, Carson Larson, Don Parker, Cynthia Lira, Molly Blades, Joseph Kenney, Robert Mahoney, Brian Gilbert, Nate Emmons, and Andrew Leadon.

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1:25:47 Seth: It was a true pleasure.

1:25:48 Michael: Thank you all very much.

1:25:49 Mark: All right, good night everybody.

1:25:50 Wes: Good night. Good night.

1:25:51 Dylan: Take care.

1:25:51 Wes: Bye bye.

1:25:51 Seth: Good night.

1:25:58 Mark: I'd like to sing you a love song but all I know are. Stare below the surface But I kinda like the color of that haze

1:26:15 Michael: I

1:26:16 Mark: could cast you in the movies I call you dreams I've heard the mad name. Well I'm sick and bored and tired with all those preview buzzing scenes and

1:26:29 Michael: if I'm finding it hard to compete

1:26:31 Mark: for your art it's cuz it's just beyond my means. Premier Kazu if this does enough to leave you alone I shall have to resort to something a bit more purful Therefore I block my trusty stethoscope so you may hear my heart as it sings. I like you, I really really. I make you, I really really do

1:27:50 Seth: but you better make it quick girl

1:27:51 Mark: Cuz not too far down the road we'll both be dead and then you'll grow ugly but I'll still like you. There's a lot more than those other

1:28:01 Michael: guys would say, isn't it Sam?