Here is a list of things that you can buy, but which Michael Sandel (who I seem to recall doing a series of lectures for the BBC – yes) thinks it’s morally dubious for you to be able to buy.
I haven’t read all of them, but was immediately struck by this one, which strikes me as, on the face of it, a very good idea:
The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
To Michael Sandel, this seems to mean that South Africa is being bad. But to me it sounds like South Africa is serious about preserving its now endangered black rhinos.
I have a definite recollection of noted South African libertarian Leon Louw having recommended just such a thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he was partly responsible for this arrangement.
I myself won’t comment in detail on the rest of Sandel’s piece. It is complicated and I am about to go to bed. Parts of what he says strike me as true, parts not. But me saying only that needn’t stop other commenters going into more detail.
It would never have occurred to me, but it strikes me as an excellent idea.
Also, how about selling baby rhinos as pets? I remember reading sonewhere that there are more tigers kept as pets in the US than there are in the wild, which suggests to me that they are pretty safe from extinction.
I suggest this on numerous occasions for all the animals down here and get met with revulsion.
Why farm cows and sheep but not elephants and rhinos?
There’s a actually strange attitude (one of numerous actually) among the white community, they revere animals as something magical but don’t give a cr@p about or actually hate the human population of the continent.
Elephants are edible, and also good as working animals. maybe you could get some of that green subsidy using them instead of tractors on an organic wurzel farm ;0)
Aren’t elephants domesticated in India?
Um, isn’t this fairly standard in southern Africa? I have some vague memory of Zimbabwe, before the collapse in recent decades, giving black farmers et al an incentive to not kill off the local crop destroying wildlife by charging for hunting rights. Ditto Kenya.
Locals got cheap meat and made money from supplying food, transport and manpower to the big white hunter while he culled excess wildlife.
Ive been making the argument for quite some time that traditional Chines medicine will save the tigers.
Why?
Allow farming of the fuckers, when a tigers ball is available for consumption legally at $500 whos going to pay $700 for a dodgy, maybe, tiger ball?
I have a huge business idea along these lines, but it can never happen as export of parts is illegal (thanks UN)
Ok go back to the age of the dodo, if it had been farmed rather than left wild/eaten by rats, wouldnt the value of them seen them kept alive by their owners?
If a quarter million is what it costs to keep the local villagers guarding their animals and shooting anyone who tries to poach them isnt that a plus for conservation?
It’s actually a much more intersting and thoughtful article than the black rhino snippet would suggest. Sandel’s fundamental thesis is that we now live in a market society (not merely enjoying a market economy), and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. He thinks that because markets are inherently nonjudgmental, this causes us increasingly to eschew engaging in “moral and spiritual” arguments about “where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong.” And he clearly believes that there are areas in which markets do not belong. Consider the following:
“These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.”
That may be true, but go a lot back farther than 30 years and all of them were, at least partially if not wholly, private-sector, market-based activities. We are, in fact, reverting to more traditional practices which had been eclipsed by expansionary governments. I think that is a good thing. In fact, I have a problem with presuming to claim that any consensual* human activity should be summarily declared off-limits to market forces.
Sandel asks, “How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values?” To which I reply, who is this “we”, kimosabe? By what right to you, or any group of people, however large, presume to make that decision for anyone else? He avers that “Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.” Worth it to whom? And who decides? Of course, he never even considers these questions, let alone the fact that even positing the existence of such “nonmarket values” every individual would assign them different weights.
It’s an interesting and generally thoughtful piece, but in the end I think Sandel has a decidedly anti-individualist perspective. One which I reject. I don’t think we need “a debate about the moral limits of markets”, as he asserts, but rather a debate about the moral limits of majoritaryism.
* Human slavery is most assuredly not consensual, as is the sale of children, so those arguments are a complete red herring. Yet they are the only concrete illustrations he can give for activities which should be excluded from market processes.
Laird:
Re slavery. I’ve been doing some thinking about this, ever since the “workfare ” thing here in the uk( which wasn’t slavery, and still isn’t as it continues, just not at Tesco).
suppose some man, in great debt and facing the loss of his famiky home decides to sell himself into slavery to clear himself and his family’s debt or for some other reason? Isn’t that freedom of contract?
Obviously overrunning the next village and capturing slaves is still not on.
wh00ps: that, by definition (at least a moral and philosophical one, which is the one pertinent to our context) would not be slavery.
I agree with Alisa.
But that wasn’t at the core of Sandel’s essay (and was a mere footnote to my comment as well).
Mr. Sandal opposes the use of markets, principally I deduce in areas where markets do not produce the results he wants or not in the way he wants.
A market based system that induces children to read is wrong because it does not induce a love of reading- but if we only want children to read because of the love of it, the market solution is to pay nothing and let those who don’t like reading not read.
A market based approach to wildlife conservation is wrong because, again, the motives are impure in his view.
In short Mr Sandal cares about motivation far more than he cares about the results.
However, since we know of no way of obtaining the results without providing appropriate motivation, I doubt how sincerely he wants the results, as against a reputation for saintliness.
Property rights and markets are indeed the only way to save such animals – and the environment generally.
Nor is this “new” – preserving species by gamekeepers on British (and other) privately owned “shoots” has been going for centuries.
Sandal’s history is almost as bad as his political philosophy.
For example, markets in healthcare and education were not “unknown” 30 years ago.
Indeed many countries (including the United States – does he know nothing of this country) had more of a market in health care 30 years ago than they do now, and much more of a market in healthcare 50 years ago than they now.
Statism is health care has been on the rise – not on the decline.
As for education – some ten percent of American children were privately educated, for example in a vast network of Catholic Schools.
This is a market – because there are alternatives, and it is funded by private (voluntary) means.
Yet Sandal writes as if it did not exist.
As for slavery…..
As others have pointed out it is NOT slavery that seems to bother Sandal – it is a market (i.e. buying and selling).
All of his arguments are directed at the buying and selling – not slavery itself.
Against (for example) the Spartan system (where all the Helots were owned by the state – and could not be bought or sold) Sandal presents no argument at all.
Just as he presents no argument against recent slave societies – such as Mao’s China.
Because, although the people were slaves, they were not bought and sold by private individuals and enterprises.
Shades of Rousseau.
If one is owned (and totally controlled) by the collective then one is “free” (indeed far more free than even the voluntary employee of an individual or private organization – as one might only think one is happy with being an employee, “the will of all” is not the “general will” so one must force collectivist “freedom” upon people againist their individual wills – one must “force them to be free”).
If people are not bought and sold – and if all important things (education, healthcare….) are not subject to being bought and sold (but, instead, are under the control of “the people”), then there is true “freedom”.
Such is the state of modern “political philosophy”.
Plato would be proud of this totalitarian nightmare.
Oh by the way…….
An evil Tea Party rightwinger objects to slavery in-its-self (because it is wrong to prevent people leaving and to assault them – and all the other crimes that Salmon P. Chase pointed out that government statutes and court judgements “legalized”) not because of the buying and selling.
It is as fundemetally different way of looking at the matter.
It is keeping someone a slave that is the wrongness.
Not buying and selling that is the wrongness.