MARKET REASONING RENDERS MORAL CONSIDERATIONS IRRELEVANT----Episode 12

                         HOW MARKETS CROWD OUT MORALS

     Are there some things that money should not be able to buy? If so, how can we decide which goods and activities are properly bought and sold, and which are not ? The better way to approach these questions is by asking a different one : Are there some things that money cannot buy ?

                   WHAT MONEY CAN AND CANNOT BUY

   Most people would say that there are some things that money should not be able to buy. Consider friendship. Suppose you want more friends than what you have. Would you try to buy some ? Not likely. A moment's reflection would lead you to realize that it wouldn't work. A hired friend is not the same as a real one. You could hire people to do some of the things that friends typically do ---picking up your mail when you're out of town, looking after your children in a pinch, or, in the case of a therapist, listening to your woes and offering sympathetic advice. Until recently, you could even bolster your online popularity by hiring some good-looking "friends"for your FaceBook page ---for 99 cents per friend per month. ( The phony-friend website was shut down when it emerged that the photos being used, mostly of models, were unauthorized.) Although all of these services can be bought, you can't actually buy a friend. Somehow, the money that buys the friendship dissolves it, or turns it into something else.
   Or consider the Nobel Prize. Suppose you desperately want a Nobel Prize but fail to get one in the usual way. It might occur to you to buy one. But you would quickly realize that it wouldn't work. The Nobel Prize is not the kind of thing that money can buy. Nor is the Most Valuable Player award of the American league. You could buy the trophy if some previous winner is willing to sell it, and you could display it in your living room. But you could not buy the award itself.
   This is not only because the Nobel committee and the American League don't offer these awards for sale. Even if they auctioned off, say, one Nobel Prize each year, the bought award would not be the same thing. The market exchange would dissolve the good that gives the prize its value. This is because the Nobel Prize is an honorific good. To buy it is to undermine the good you are seeking. Once word got out that the prize had been bought, the award would no longer convey or express the honor and recognition that people receive when they are awarded a Nobel Prize.
   The same is true of baseball's MVP awards. They too are honorific goods, whose value would be dissolved if bought rather than earned by a season of game-winning home runs or other heroics. There's a difference, of course, between a trophy which symbolizes an award, and the award itself. It turns out that some winners of Hollywood's Academy Awards have sold their Oscar statuettes, or left them to heirs who have done so. Some of these Oscars have been auctioned off by Sotheby's and other auction houses.  In 1999, Michael Jackson paid $1.54 million for the best-picture Oscar for Gone With the Wind. The academy that awards the Oscars opposes such sales and now requires recipients to sign an agreement promising not to sell them. It wants to avoid turning the iconic statuettes into commercial collectibles. Whether or not collectors are able to buy the trophies, it is obvious that buying the Academy Award for best actress is not the same as winning it. 
   These fairly obvious examples offer a clue to the more challenging question that concerns us : Are there some things that money can buy but shouldn't ? Consider a good that can be bought but whose buying and selling is morally controversial --- a human kidney, for example. Some people defend markets in organs for transplantation ; others find such markets morally objectionable. If it's wrong to buy a kidney, the problem is not, as with the Nobel Prize, that the money dissolves the good. The kidney will work (assuming a good match) regardless of the monetary payment. So to determine whether kidneys should or shouldn't be up for sale, we have to engage in a moral inquiry. We have to examine the arguments for and against organ sales and determine which are more persuasive. 
   Or consider baby selling. Some years ago, Judge Richard Posner, a leading figure in the "law and economics" movement, proposed the use of markets to allocate babies put up for adoption. He acknowledged that more desirable babies would command higher prices than less desirable ones. But he argued that the free market would do a better job of allocating babies than the current system of adoption, which allows adoption agencies to charge certain fees but not to auction babies or charge a market price. 
   Many people disagree with Posner's proposal and maintain that children should not be bought and sold, no matter how efficient the market. In thinking through this controversy, it's worth noticing a distinctive feature of it : like a market in kidneys, a market in babies would not dissolve the good the buyers seek to acquire. A bought baby differs, in this respect, from a bought friend or Nobel Prize. If there were a market in babies for adoption, people who paid the going price would acquire what they wanted --- a child. Whether such a market is morally is a further question. 
   So it seems at first glance, that there is a sharp distinction between two kinds of goods : the things (like friends and Nobel Prizes) that money can't buy, and the things (like kidneys and children) that money can buy but arguably shouldn't. But it is suggested that this distinction is less clear than it first appears. If we look more closely, we can glimpse a connection between the obvious cases, in which the monetary exchange spoils the good being bought, and the controversial cases, in which the good survives the selling but is arguable degraded, or corrupted, or diminished as a result. 

          BOUGHT APOLOGIES AND WEDDING TOASTS

   We can explore this connection by considering some cases intermediate between friendship and kidneys. If you can't buy friendship, what about tokens of friendship, or expressions of intimacy, affection, or contrition ?
   In 2001, The New York Times published a story about a company in China that offers an unusual service : if you need to apologize to someone---an estranged lover or business partner with whom you've had a falling out --- and you can't quite bring yourself to do so in person, you can hire the Tianjin Apology company to apologize on your behalf. The motto of the company is, "We say sorry for you." According to the article, the professional apologizers are "middle-aged men and women with college degrees who dress in somber suits. They are lawyers, social workers and teachers with 'excellent verbal ability' and significant life experience, who are given additional training in counseling."
   I don't know whether the company is successful, or even whether it still exists. But reading about it made me wonder : Does a bought apology work ? If someone wronged or offended you, and then sent you a hired apologizer to make amends, would you be satisfied ? It might depend on the circumstances, or perhaps even the cost. Would you consider an expensive apology more meaningful than a cheap one ? Or is the enactment of the apology by the person who owes it constitutive of contrition, such that it can't be outsourced ? In no bought apology, however extravagant, could do the work of a personal one, then apologies, like friends, are the kind of thing that money cannot buy.