In his new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (more of which in due course from Theos), philosopher Michael Sandel details a number of jaw-dropping examples of people making money for doing some really quite strange things.
These are serious commercial enterprises, not eccentrics trying to make money for cat charities by paying Der Ring des Nibelungen on the kazoo. If you have the right amount of money (and live in the right place) you can pay someone to stand in a queue for you, or to apologise for you, or you can place a bet on when a celebrity will die, or you can pay to hunt rhino (which is a challenge) or to shoot a walrus (which is not; they can’t move very fast on land and constitute quite a big target).
Sandel uses these and other examples to explore the question of whether there are things that money shouldn’t be able to buy, and why. He doesn’t spend much time exploring why it is we have got ourselves into this situation in the first place, short of talking about trends in economic thought, which simply begs the question.
Why is it that so much of society has become “marketised” over the last two generations? I would hazard that the answer is the same as why so many cases about religious freedom find their way to court today.
Both Maleiha Malik and Peter Jones, the academics who presented papers at the last Westminster Faith debate, for all their subtle differences, agreed that we should, if possible, “avoid the law” (Malik) where possible over these matters because it is “too clumsy an instrument” (Jones). The majority of people do still (avoid the law) but you do not need to be an avid newshound to sense that we are becoming increasingly litigious over these matters.
Some cases will merit formal adjudication, of course, but our willingness to go to court over such matters reflects a wider trend towards contract as our relational modus operandi. Whether it is because we feel ourselves so different from one another that we share only limited common goals or, which would be more ominous, we distrust one another, believing that each seeks his own good at the expense of others, we feel less and less inclined to work together and resolve our differences through compromise and discussion.
As with law, so with commerce: better, simpler and – if you are an economist – more efficient to relate to one another through the medium of freely-chosen exchange than through agreeing to do one other favours or something similarly primitive.
We shouldn’t get too misty eyed about this: both money and law have had somewhat contentious reputations since, roughly, the dawn of recorded time. Yet, the growing presence of both today, slipping into arrangements where once, not so long ago, they were largely absent, does suggests that formal contract is encroaching on informal contact as the standard form of public interaction. And that should worry us all.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
