What Money Can’t Buy.Michael J. Sandel

What Money Can’t Buy.

The Moral Limits of Markets.

Michael J. Sandel

 

複雜多端하지 않은 平易하고 조용한 論說

美國的 삶의 斷面-尖銳한 商業主義, 市場優越主義 對 公共善

 

P202

Once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong- and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the value that should govern them.

Such deliberations touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread. For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave them undecided. It simply means that markets will decide them for us. This is the lesson of the last three decades. The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance. Our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of goods and social practices we prize.

In addition to debating the meaning of this or that good, we also need to ask a bigger question, about the kind of society in which we wish to live...... The more things money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another.

 

p203

At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places...

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.

And so in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

 

2013.11.10.(日)

올해 가을도, 또 접히었다.

창밖의 바람과 소리를 내다보다.