Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2012
On Sale: April 24, 2012
256 pages ISBN: 0374203032 EAN: 9780374203030 Kindle: B00633PFQC Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades?
Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute
the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky
new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring
mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite
universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to
pay?
In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel
takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time:
Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is
for sale? If so, how can we prevent market 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—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. Is this where we want to be?In his New
York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed
himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and
verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday
lives. Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes an
essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need
to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic
society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods
that markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?