Peter Jaworski and I just published an article by that name in Ethics. (You’ll need JSTOR access to read it, or you can email me for a copy.) This article also forms the basis of part II of our forthcoming book Markets without Limits, which you can pre-order from Amazon now.

One of the hot topics in philosophy right now is “commodification,” i.e., the question of what sorts of goods and services ought not to be for sale. This paper is a systematic response to and debunking of the most common class of objections to markets in everything, which we call “semiotic objections”. Semiotic objections rely upon the idea that markets in certain goods communicate, signal, express, or symbolize the wrong attitude. Markets are a kind of language, or a kind of social meaning system. Market activities like bringing goods and services to market, of buying those goods and services through financial instruments like money, the instruments themselves, and so on, all come bundled with meaning. According to the semiotic objection, the act of commodifying certain objects is essentially disrespectful and degrading of those objects (or of something associated with those objects) because of a meaning that attaches to market activities.

ABSTRACT:

Semiotic objections to commodification hold that buying and selling certain goods and services is wrong because of what market exchange communicates or because it violates the meaning of certain goods, services, and relationships. We argue that such objections fail. The meaning of markets and of money is a contingent, socially constructed fact. Cultures often impute meaning to markets in harmful, socially destructive, or costly ways. Rather than semiotic objections giving us reason to judge certain markets as immoral, the usefulness of certain markets gives us reason to judge certain semiotic codes as immoral.

Some examples of semiotic objections:

Sandel objects to adoption auctions: “Even if buyers did not mistreat the children they purchased, a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are not properly regarded as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care.”[i] Later he objects to gifts of money or gift certificates, claiming that “traditional gift-giving” expresses “attentiveness” while these gifts do not.[ii] He also objects to information markets in terrorism or death, saying, “If death bets are objectionable, it must be…in the dehumanizing attitudes such wagers express.”[iii]

Elizabeth Anderson claims that in order to produce the social conditions under which people can be autonomous, “Constraints may be needed to secure the robust sphere differentiation required to create a significant range of options through which people can express a wide range of valuations.”[iv] She says “people value different goods in different ways,” and to preserve their freedom we must create different “spheres that embody these different modes of valuation,” boundaries “not just between the state and the market, but between these institutions and other domains of self-expression.”[v] Anderson’s semiotic objections are less explicit than Sandel’s. However, as the previous quotations reveal, one of her main arguments against certain markets is that to preserve Kantian autonomy, we must separate different goods into different spheres so that we can express different modes of valuation.

Similarly, Michael Walzer says that distributions of goods are unjust when these distributions violate the social meaning of those goods.[vi] Different goods—such as office, honor, and love—are governed by different norms, and represent autonomous spheres that must be kept apart. Walzer complains that money can “intrude” into other spheres. He says, the “words prostitution and bribery, like simony, describe the sale and purchase of goods that, given certain understandings of their meaning, ought never to be sold or purchased.”[vii] So, for Walzer, as with Anderson, certain things cannot be for sale because that violates the meaning of those goods.

David Archard, following similar arguments by Richard Titmuss and Peter Singer, claims that selling blood is “imperialistic” because it involves a “contamination of meaning”.[viii] He says that if we allow blood sales, “the meaning of non-market exchanges would have been contaminated by the existence of the market exchanges. The monetary value which the latter attributes to any good exchanged would have ‘leaked into’ the former and changed its meaning.”[ix]

 

In the paper, we identify three major forms of the semiotic objection:

1. The Mere Commodity Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods or services shows that one regards them as having merely instrumental value.
2. The Wrong Signal Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods and services communicates, independently of one’s attitudes, disrespect for the objects in question.
3. The Wrong Currency Objection: Claims that inserting markets and money into certain kinds of relationships communicates estrangement and distance, and is objectionably impersonal.

Our basic response to these objections is to argue that we can and should put a price on meaning. We argue, on the basis of anthropological and sociological evidence, that in the absence of non-semiotic objections to commodifying certain goods, that the meaning of the good, service, or action just is a social construct. We then argue that such social constructs ought to be subject to cost-benefit analysis. In pretty much every case, these social constructs fail. We argue that we can judge codes of meaning by the consequences of such codes. So, when Michael Sandel complains that a market in kidneys violates the meaning of kidneys, we respond, “Sure, but that’s because Americans have adopted a dysfunctional and immoral code of meaning with regard to how they think about the human body.”

Our basic response to [these] arguments will be to argue that when there are no non-semiotic objections to commodification, then the consequences of commodification set the main standard by which we should judge our culture’s semiotics. That is, we will argue if there are no independent, non-semiotic objections to markets in certain goods or services, then the meaning of market exchanges in those goods and services is probably just a contingent, relative social construct. There is probably no essential meaning to market exchanges.

If certain markets express disrespect or selfish motives, in light of a culture’s socially-constructed semiotics, but if those markets do or would lead to good outcomes (or if prohibiting those markets leads to bad outcomes), then (pro tanto) people in that culture should revise their social practices governing what counts as expressing disrespect or selfishness. Failure to do so—that is, taking our cultural practices for granted when they impose great costs—is itself morally misguided. We will further argue that if it’s not possible or too difficult to revise the culture’s social practices, individuals may conscientiously choose to reject their culture’s social practices and instead participate in those contested markets. They will express disrespect or selfishness, but they will be justified, not merely excused, in doing so.

In short: our view is that when there is a clash between semiotics and consequences, consequences win. But we are not just saying that consequentialist arguments on behalf of markets trump or outweigh semiotic arguments against them. Rather, we will defend the stronger, more interesting claim that if there are no other deontic concerns about markets aside from semiotics, if there are no worries about wrongful exploitation, harm to others, rights violations and so on, then consequentialist considerations allow us to judge the semiotics of market transactions.

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Some excerpts from the counter-argument:

Certain forms of symbolism are socially destructive—they cause great harm. Others could have high opportunity costs—they could prevent us from doing things that would be beneficial. Either case gives us strong pro tanto grounds to revise the current practice or at least to stop complying with it. So, for instance, if a culture regards contraception as expressing contempt for life, then it will tend to perpetuate poverty and low status for women. If a culture regards anesthesia as expressing contempt for a divine will, then people will suffer needlessly. And if a culture regards life insurance as expressing the desire to profit from death, then it thereby tends to leave orphans and dependents at the mercy of charity.

To illustrate, consider that the meaning of words is a social construct. The word “cat” really does refer to cats and not to dogs. However, it is a contingent social construct that the word “cat” signifies what it does. It could have signified nothing or something else, and in the future, it may well change to mean something else. In light of that, imagine it turned out—thanks to bizarre laws of physics—that every time we emit the sounds “I respect you as an end in yourself!” or “Some things have a dignity, not a price!” to others, an infant died. We had better then stop talking that way. If it also turned out that every time we emit the sounds “I despise you and hope you suffer forever in Hell” a person was magically cured of cancer, we would have every reason to start talking that way.

….In some cultures women are expected to undergo genital mutilation. Now, these cultures offer many (mistaken) consequentialist reasons for female genital mutilation: they think it improves hygiene, prevents birth defects, eases child-birth, or prevents marital infidelity. But they also usually have semiotic reasons. In some cultures, mutilation marks fidelity and respect for the group, or fidelity and respect for the religion. Some versions of this practice (such as cliterectomies or infibilitation) are especially harmful. The cultures in question have strong moral grounds to revise the semiotics they impute to genital mutilation.

Now apply this kind of reasoning to questions about commodification and what markets mean. As an example of symbolism with a high opportunity cost, consider the issue of organ selling. Many people claim that organ selling would cause exploitation or the misallocation of organs, but we ask you to put those aside for the moment and focus only on the semiotic objection. Thus, to test whether such semiotic objections have any independent force, imagine instead that organ selling works the way that proponents believe it would.

To review, the argument for organ sales begins by noting there is a huge shortage in organs. People are simply not willing to give away the organs others need. The government sets the legal price of organs at $0, far below the implicit market equilibrium price. Thus, an economist might say, of course there is a shortage—whenever the legal price of a good is set below the equilibrium price, the quantity demanded will exceed the quantity supplied. Many philosophers and economists thus think that markets in organs will eliminate the shortage. For the sake of argument, suppose they are right. Suppose markets in organs make sick people healthier, make poor people richer, and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths per year.[i] Suppose also that we are able to design or regulate such markets in such a way that no wrongful exploitation or misallocation takes place.

Perhaps, in light of pre-existing Western interpretive practices, markets in organs would still count as “commodifying life”, as Sandel would say. But rather than this giving us reason to refrain from selling organs or to judge organ markets as immoral, we conclude it instead gives us reason to judge our interpretative practices as morally dysfunctional. If markets in organs did have such good consequences, this would be compelling grounds for us to revise our interpretative practices. Rather than saying that organ selling shows disrespect for the body, we should say that our culture’s semiotics impute disrespect in a harmful way. if organ sales really do save lives, and if there are no other serious, non-semiotic objections to organ sales, then people should get over their aversion to these markets, just as they got over their semiotics-based aversion to life insurance and anesthesia.

[i] E.g. Brennan 2012a , 91-92; Taylor 2005.

 

[i] Sandel 2012, 10.

[ii] Sandel 2012, 106.

[iii] Sandel 2012, 146.

[iv] Anderson 1995, 142-3.

[v] Anderson 1995, 141.

[vi] Walzer 1984, 7-10.

[vii] Walzer 1984, 9.

[viii] Archard 2002, 87-103.

[ix] Archard 2002, 95.