The poor have benefited the most from capitalism. The sheer, first-act, unanalyzed equality that Sandel advocates would have killed the modern world and kept us in the appalling poverty of the human condition down to 1800. In fact in some countries it did, such as India after 1947, under Gandhi-plus-London-School-of-Economics egalitarianism, the "License Raj" and "the Hindu rate of growth," as the Indians themselves bitterly described their munitarian economy. When I talk to friends who think like Sandel I worry that their dispositions will kill, quite unintentionally, the only chance for the world's poor to achieve the scope for a full human life.
andel is not untutored. He knows such arguments, I imagine, and anyway they are not rocket science. Perhaps he tells them to the kids in the fifth week of his course. I hope so. But in the present book, the better to cast doubt on a neo-liberalism he detests, he has chosen not to reveal the other side, and to rely instead on a non-philosophical notion of schoolyard fairness as a First Principle. It is as though he has contempt for the mon reader, and is unwilling to assume that she could adjudicate the serious arguments, pro and con, if they were presented.
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His Second Principle, and his much better argument for what money can't buy, is that it can cause the Sacred to be spoiled by the Profane. Sandel does not actually use the theological words. He would have benefitted from studying theology, and would have gotten further in his moral philosophy. Since he has nice things to say about the religious tradition elsewhere, I suppose, if he would only work at it, he could get serious about the sacred and profane.
Meanwhile, though, his theory remains at the simpliste level of an unanalyzed contrast between the two, up/down. His only analysis is that "we corrupt a good, an activity, or a social practice whenever we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it" (p. 46). Sensible. But Sandel provides no philosophical framework for deciding what is lower, and why we are disgusted when professional ethics in banking, say, is corrupted by sheer maximization of profits.
One framework, for example, might be the virtue ethics mon to the West and the East since the sixth century BCE. It would note that some goods (devotion to God, to parenthood, to philosophical analysis) are neither self-goods arising from the virtues of prudence and temperance or other-goods arising from the virtues of justice or human love. They are tertia, giving point to human lives. Perform the mental experiment, as Aquinas did in the 1350s, and as Elizabeth Ansbe did in the 1950s during the revival of virtue ethics (a feat performed mainly by female British analytic philosophers, together with a few honorary women such as Alasdair Macintyre). Imagine a life without the transcendent virtues of hope (having a project) or faith (having an identity) or spiritual love (having a reason to strive towards God or Baseball or Science). As the early Anglican theologian Richard Hooker put it in 1593, "Man doth seek a triple perfection. . . . For although the beauties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues [i.e., powers], and perfections of all men living, were in the present possession of one; yet somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for" (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, First Book, XI, 4).
andel does, again, give many good examples of the danger from slipping the profane market into matters best left to a sacred somewhat beyond yet earnestly thirsted for. His book is mainly raw examples, scores and scores of them. We can agree in 2012 that parenthood is sacred, and therefore selling children is nowadays regarded as disgusting, and even "trafficking in the right to procreate promotes a mercenary attitude towards children that corrupts parenthood" (p. 71). Paying a child to read a book may give her the idea that reading books is "way of making money [though in truth it is], and so erode, or crowd out, or corrupt the love of reading for its own sake" (p. 61). Paying for the daily paper is one thing; paying to have a second child in China is another (though again it is notable that Sandel does not reflect on the direct solution, which would be to drop the One Child Policy itself; he believes, with many on the anti-economic left, expressed in eugenics, that the munity has an interest in stopping births).
His examples suggest why the growing fashion for what the professor of economics Robert Frank calls approvingly "libertarian paternalism," the "nudging" that the professor of law Cass Sunstein has brought into the Obama administration, might be mistaken. "If cash can cure us of obesity," Sandel asks rhetorically, channeling the nudgers, "why cavil about manipulation？" "One answer," Sandel notes, "is that a proper concern for our physical well-being is part of self-respect," and that "paying people to take their meds does little to develop [the proper concerns for one's physical well-being]. . . and may even undermine them" (p. 59). Yes.
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