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站前 英文 | 全球經濟分析權威Michael Sandel [錢買不到的東西]

Michael Sandel, the superstar Harvard moral philosopher, wants people to spend more time queuing. Well, he wants people not to spend money to avoid queuing, which amounts to the same thing. Except sometimes the money option is ethical. When a bus arrives at the stop, it should be first come, first served; but he agrees I should not be under an obligation to sell my house to the first buyer who arrives at the doorstep.

"There's no reason to assume that any single principle – queuing or paying – should determine the allocation of goods," he writes. In which case, practical moral philosophy needs to indicate which principle applies in which circumstances. Professor Sandel does not give an answer, although he is very clear that the market principle applies in far too many cases, and many readers will agree wholeheartedly.

Perhaps we can figure it out from his examples. He objects to some people being able to buy the right to board airlines faster than others; or to pay for better service from a call centre; to paying someone else to stand in a queue on your behalf; to reselling concert tickets at a higher price. He thinks children should not be paid for attaining good grades at school.

This entertaining and provocative book is full of examples of vulgar commercialisation, including US towns that have sold advertising space on police patrol cars, the Washington lobbyists who pay homeless people to queue to see a congressman, the sale of a forehead as advertising space, and the purchase of naming rights to New York subway stations by (among others) Barclays Bank. A lot of us will agree that there is far too much of this in modern life.

However, there are examples in this book of the expansion of markets in ways that many people, especially economists, would mostly regard as beneficial, but the author argues are degrading. Life insurance is one. Sandel describes it as a "wager on death". He shares, it seems, the opposition of religious authorities to life insurance before it became increasingly widespread from the mid-19th century.

There are certainly some commercial excesses in the life insurance market. These include so-called "dead peasants insurance", whereby corporations take out policies on the life of their employees, originally without their consent; and the investment index of "viatical" insurance policies, whereby the investor buys at a discount the insurance policies of people who are dying and trades them. Yet to put normal life insurance policies in the same category, even though they may create a theoretical incentive to murder, seems extreme.

Sandel is particularly opposed to the idea, attributed to economics, that all human relations are market relations. His opposition to market relations stems not from an argument about fairness (that rich people can afford more), or about blackmail (poor people are effectively forced to make unpalatable choices because they need the money). Instead, his argument is that introducing market choices into domains where civic values ought to prevail has a degrading and corrosive effect.

The fact that a market might lead to outcomes that improve welfare is irrelevant to the over-riding importance of civic virtue, he argues. Thus a global scheme for a market in carbon dioxide is morally unacceptable, even if it reduces the level of emissions, because it does damage "to two norms: it entrenches an instrumental attitude toward nature; and it undermines the spirit of shared sacrifice that may be necessary to create a global environmental ethic."

I would rather see an effective scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but then I'm an economist. Economics is firmly grounded in utilitarian ethics, which can conflict with Sandel'smoral principle of virtue for its own sake. So at some point he and an economist are bound to part ways in making ethical judgments

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當金錢買不到的東西愈來愈少，
　　我們面對的，不只是財富的分配不公，
　　而是必須去思考市場的極限，以及我們要選擇怎樣的人生！

　　當每樣東西都能買賣，是否有錢就有了天壤之別？
　　當生命中各種美好事物都被標上價格，事物的價值也跟著變質了？

　　三十年前，沒有人認為：
　　囚犯只要付費，就可以升等住進好的牢房；
　　病患只要多付費，可以獲得醫師的手機號碼，全年無休醫療諮詢；
　　役男不想當兵，政府可以花錢請外國傭兵去打仗；
　　富國的獵人只要付費，可以射殺瀕臨絕種的非洲黑犀牛。
　　然而如今，這一切都已成真。

　　金錢交易的市場機制，已經滲透到日常生活的各面向，大舉侵入了原本非屬市場的領域。從健康醫療、教育、法律、政治到人際關係，一旦事物變成了「商品」，就會失去某個很重要的「什麼」。過去我們不曾關注過這個問題，但也許這個「什麼」，正是建構一個美好社會所不可或缺的。

　　桑德爾教授提醒，我們應該自問：世上有什麼東西是無論如何都不該用錢去買的？我們也必須決定，應該以什麼樣的價值來管理社會及公民生活的各領域。當今的市場機制已與道德脫鉤，而我們需要將兩者重新連結起來－－面對金錢的蔓延，我們必須選擇，如何劃定正義的防線，以守護我們都渴求實現的美好生活！

資料參考：
柏克萊書店http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010558765
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/what-money-cant-buy-the-moral-limits-of-markets-by-michael-sandel-7711785.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/17/what-money-cant-buy-michael-sandel-review
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/BuyT

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