Book description
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, auctioning admission to elite
universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?
Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for
sale?
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.
In What Money Can't Buy, Sandel 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?
Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of
Government at Harvard University. His legendary 'Justice' course is the
first Harvard course made freely available online (www. JusticeHarvard.
org) and on television. Hiss work has been translated into 15 languages
and been the subject of television series in the U. K., the U. S.,
Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the Middle East. He has delivered the
Tanner Lectures at Oxford and been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne,
Paris. In 2010, China Newsweek named him the "most influential
foreign figure of the year" in China. Sandel was the 2009 BBC Reith
Lecturer, and his most recent book
Justice
is an international bestseller.
