Academic Philosophy
Can We Pay You $25 to Think of a Better Title for Our Paper?
Peter Jaworski and I recently had a paper accepted at Ethics on the question of commodification. (This paper is part of our larger project, Markets without Limits.)
In the paper, we attack what we call semiotic objections to commodification. Semiotic objections to commodification hold that certain things should be not be for sale because putting those things for sale communicates disrespect, or a lack of respect, or a wrongfully impersonal attitude, or violates some sort of social meaning attached to those things. Semiotic objections are independent of other worries about commodification. So, “Buying people communicates disrespect because it violates people’s rights” is not a semiotic objection. Saying, “We shouldn’t sell organs, even if saves lives and even if it can be done without exploitation, because it just treats the human body as a mere thing,” is a semiotic objection.
Our thesis, to put it in a cute way, is that codes of meaning have a price. When the codes are too costly, we mustn’t play along with them.
Our working title when the paper was accepted was “The Meaning of Markets: Against Semiotic Objections to Markets in Everything”. But we don’t much like that title,and we should be able to change it.
Right now, we’re thinking of “Markets without Symbolic Limits: Putting a Price on the Semiotics of Respect”. Here’s our idea, though. If you can come up with a better title that we use, we’ll pay you $25! So, leave suggestions in the comments, and if we like it, we’ll send you $25 via Pay Pal.
An earlier version of that paper, as it appeared in a draft of the book, appears here: http://www.peter-boettke.com/ppe-workshop/spring-2014/ It’s since changed significantly, in part because the Ethics review process is the most brutal thing I’ve seen.