markets and morality
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
A few months ago I went to the Veritas event in Cambridge (UK): Can Capital Markets be Moral?. It was a ’round table’ discussion with a diverse set of speakers — with some coming from the city, some from theology and some from a social entrepreneur angle. All interesting, but perhaps a little frustrating at times as the issues they addressed were so wide ranging there was no clear debate and I’m not sure the question really got address head on.
One view put forward by a couple of speakers was (roughly) ‘markets are structures and structures cannot be moral or amoral — only people.’ (I’m not sure how consistently this was held — the line between market and the people in the market seemed to blur places. Speakers also said things like ‘regulation is no use, the market gets around regulation’. But leaving that aside…)
All this raised a question for me: if we changed the subject to something like Can Brothels be Moral? would the speakers have taken a similar approach? It seems to me that that is a structure that has some moral content.
Perhaps we need to say that when people develop structures those structures tend to embody their values. So, a structure will end up encouraging or discouraging certain values, certain moral stances.
Interestingly, the first Reith Lecture this year was also on Markets and Morals. The lecturer — the excellent Michael Sandel — noted this:
…markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market incentives.
The whole lecture is worth a listen/read. His view is that we need to have a proper debate about the morals and what areas of life should be market-free, rather than allow market-creep to distort our lives.
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