What Money Can't Buy - The Moral Limits of Markets

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, or auctioning admission to elite universities? Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? In recent decades, market values have crowded out non-market 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 Justice, Michael Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he 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?...