“If you may do it for free, then you may do it for money” (10). So argue Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests. Plenty of markets, they grant, are morally objectionable insofar as they manifest features that are morally bad in any context, such as exploitation and rights violation. But no markets are inherently objectionable. Thus, although markets have moral limits, they do not have moral limits insofar as they are markets.

Part I is devoted to clarifying the book’s central question and basic strategy. After defining a market as any “voluntary exchange of goods and services for valuable consideration,” Brennan and Jaworski distinguish three kinds of grounds on which someone might object to a market (4). First, someone might object to a market because no one should possess (or perform) the good or service available therein. For instance, someone might offer such an objection to a market in nuclear weapons. Second, someone might object to a market because it possesses features which, though objectionable, are incidental to its being a market. For instance, if I have promised not to sell something, it would be wrong for me to sell it. Third, someone might assert that there are inherent limits to markets: there are some things that people should never buy and sell, period. It is this last kind of objection that Brennan and Jaworski consider and reject. According to them, it is always the “how” of markets, not the “what,” that determines whether a market is objectionable (29).

Part II, which arguably constitutes the argumentative core of the book, takes up a class of objections that Brennan and Jaworski call “expressive” and “semiotic” (they use the terms interchangeably). They frame this kind of objection as follows:

According to Brennan and Jaworski, if selling something symbolizes morally objectionable content despite lacking any further bad-making features, we should change our symbolism (or rebel against it, if it proves intransigent) instead of limiting our market behavior. I will discuss this portion of the argument at greater length below.

Part III is devoted to corruption objections, according to which markets cause such evils as selfish motivations, low levels of institutional integrity, and poor quality or availability of certain essential goods. Brennan and Jaworski point out that since corruption objections hinge on purported causal relationships, they are answerable to empirical research. And this research, they contend, is not in the critics’ corner. Brennan and Jaworski deploy social scientific data in conjunction with economic reasoning to debunk such claims as these, among others: markets in the location of public waste facilities crowd out selfless motivations; predictive betting markets for terrorism, in which people bet on the time and location of attacks, give people immoral preferences; and markets in education and medical blood produce lower quality goods in those domains. Markets as such make people and their interactions better, not worse, both morally and prudentially.

Part IV turns to exploitation, self-harm, and misallocation. Brennan and Jaworski consider a number of markets that purportedly possess these features, including organ markets, commercial queuing, commercial genetic engineering (i.e. “designer babies”), and vote markets. Concerning organ sales, they argue that there is no reason why such sales cannot be fair and mutually beneficial rather than harmful and exploitative, even if they currently manifest harmful and exploitative characteristics. In response to the notion that people should not buy their way out of queues, they point out that queuing weighs especially heavily on the busy, and that we cannot assume that monetary costs are the only kinds of costs germane to the morality of markets. Brennan and Jaworski then contend that if designer baby markets result in a minority of stronger, more intelligent people, everyone stands to benefit through trade and cooperation; such markets, like markets in general, are not zero-sum affairs. Finally, Brennan and Jaworski employ Brennan’s work on voting to contend that voting behavior, commercial or otherwise, is right if and only if it is well-informed and aimed at justice; this is the “principle of ethical voting” (184; cf. Brennan, Reference Brennan2011). Here as elsewhere, they argue that it is the how of buying and selling that counts, not the what.

Brennan and Jaworski close in Part V by reflecting on disgust. They suggest that regardless of articulable moral criticisms, some markets simply strike us as disgusting. But sheer disgust is a notoriously unreliable moral compass. After all, it was not so long ago that most people found homosexuality and life insurance morally repulsive. Brennan and Jaworski therefore urge caution in moving too quickly from felt disgust at a market to moral conclusions about it.

Markets without Limits is rigorous, timely, and provocative. Indeed, it throws down the gauntlet with such verve and clarity that it stands to restructure the notoriously messy commodification debate. Moreover, readers will recognize Brennan’s trademark, razor-sharp deployment of social science to debunk assertions from philosophers who have grown overconfident in their armchairs. Despite these virtues (and many more), I will devote the remainder to criticism. My aim in doing so is not to detract from the importance of Brennan and Jaworski’s work, but rather to sketch a few directions in which dialogue might proceed in light of it.

First, Brennan and Jaworski frequently elide the distinction between market exchanges and market institutions. Consider the following two questions. First: what kinds of things is it permissible for me to buy and sell? Second: what kinds of things is it all right for a society to distribute though markets? As far as I can tell, Brennan and Jaworski mean to address both questions. However, they frequently claim to have exonerated a market despite addressing only individual acts of buying or selling. For instance, Michael Sandel contends that markets in elite higher education corrupt its proper structure and purpose. “Higher education,” he urges, “embodies certain ideals” whose “integrity” is at odds with membership in university communities being distributed through markets (Sandel, Reference Sandel2012: 110, quoted at 135). Brennan and Jaworski reply that it is no more wrong for someone to offer elite education to anyone who can pay than it is for BMW to sell luxury cars to anyone who can pay (136). Although it would be silly to claim that morality forbids individuals to sell elite education to paying customers, this is not really to the point. The question (on which I take no stand here) is rather whether a society’s distributing its elite education via markets accords with the best social ideals for education.

The same kind of problem appears in Brennan and Jaworski’s discussion of vote selling. Even if we grant that it is morally acceptable for individuals to sell votes to one another so long as they continue to observe the principle of ethical voting, it doesn’t follow that it is morally acceptable for a society to have its votes distributed, to some considerable degree, through market institutions. For this could easily create a state of affairs in which some (poorer) people’s political liberties are worth much less than other (richer) people’s political liberties. To borrow some language from Rawls, such a market institution might violate the “fair value” of political liberty (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005: 356-363). Now, Brennan argues elsewhere that the political liberties are not very important (Brennan, Reference Brennan2012). But even if he is right about this point, it is not meant to bear argumentative weight in Markets without Limits.

Let’s now turn to expressive objections (cf. Layman, Reference Layman2016). I agree with Brennan and Jaworski that we should reject objections to markets that depend solely on what markets symbolize. If the only thing wrong with some kind of commercial transaction is that it does, as a matter of contingent social fact, possess objectionable symbolic content, then there is no serious moral reason to condemn it. Nevertheless, I believe that most objections Brennan and Jaworski label “semiotic” do not really hinge on symbolism. Rather, most such arguments—and certainly all of the plausible ones—turn on the idea that certain markets implicate people in valuing things in the wrong way. According to these objections, some markets are morally suspect due to a poor fit between (1) a deliberative norm that conditionalizes exchange on valuable consideration and (2) the deliberative standards appropriate for the goods or services at hand. Even if such buying and selling lacks symbolic significance, it is nonetheless objectionable, because the deliberative stance it employs is objectionable. Or so goes this kind of objection.

Let’s consider an example. Brennan and Jaworski offer as a paradigmatic semiotic objection the following claim from Sandel: “A market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them” (Sandel, Reference Sandel2012: 10, quoted at 48). There are two claims at work here. The first is that if people were to take part in the buying and selling of children, they would value children in the wrong way. The second is that if such a market were openly present in a commercial culture, this would communicate that buying and selling children is compatible with valuing them in the right way. The second claim is indeed semiotic. But the first claim, which gives the second claim whatever moral bite it might have, is not about symbolism at all. It is no more appropriate to read “buying and selling children involves valuing children in the wrong way” as “buying and selling children symbolizes valuing children in the wrong way” than it would be to read “dull knives cut in the wrong way” as “dull knives symbolize cutting in the wrong way.”

Now, it is a further question whether Sandel or anyone else has shown that there are goods that one values wrongly by applying to them a deliberative norm that conditionalizes their exchange on valuable consideration. Moreover, in order for such an objector to succeed, she must heed Brennan and Jaworski’s sensible warning not to conflate treatment of some good as saleable with treatment of that good as a mere means (53-4). My point here, though, is merely this: anti-commodification arguments grounded in how we ought to value certain goods, services, and people are not fundamentally about symbolism, so the moral insignificance of symbolism is not relevant to whether such arguments succeed.