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  • Published: 2 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141969800
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

What Money Can't Buy

The Moral Limits of Markets




Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything's for sale?

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life-medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

In What Money Can't Buy, Sandel examines one of the biggest ethical questions of our time and 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 markets do not honour and money cannot buy?

  • Published: 2 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141969800
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Michael J. Sandel

Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at the University of Harvard. Sandel's legendary 'Justice' course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard with up to a thousand students enrolling every year.  In 2011, BBC4 will air a season on Justice, featuring eight of Sandel's Harvard lectures and his new documentary film, 'Justice: A Citizen's Guide to the 21st Century.' Michael Sandel has lectured widely in Europe, China, Japan, India, Australia and North America. He has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, Paris, and delivered the Tanner Lectures at Oxford. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sandel is the author of many books and has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic and the New York Times. In 2009, he delivered the Reith Lectures for the BBC.

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