Jaworski and Brennan on Markets in Everything

Peter Jaworski and Jason Brennan write,

put philosophers out of the business of talking about the moral limits of markets. The interesting questions about markets are not what we may buy and sell, but instead how we should buy and sell it. Certain ways of buying and selling things might be wrong, but that does not mean the thing in question must never be bought or sold. Perhaps buying sex from a desperate woman exploits her, but that does not imply buying sex is always wrong — you could buy it from someone who is not desperate.

The title of their piece is, “If you may do it for free, you may do it for money.”

In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich endorses the view that traditional customs surrounding marriage and sex served to tamp down violence. In the absence of other cultural norms, the natural propensity of men would be to compete to have many wives, and this competition would be violent.

A lot of the cultural tension concerns what you may do for free. Extramarital affairs are still frowned upon. Norms about premarital sex appeared to loosen for a while, but perhaps the “yes means yes” movement can be viewed as a sort of backlash.

Perhaps some of the fear about allowing markets in sex is that what people can do for money might affect how other people who are doing it for free. For example, there are those who suggest that pornography has adverse effects on the way people behave in relationships.

7 thoughts on “Jaworski and Brennan on Markets in Everything

  1. It is funny that paying a woman for sex is either exploitation or inducement depending on party affiliation.

  2. What Arnold does here is what the cited comment does; frame these issues about markets as issues of relationships. However, relationships occur in circumstances (which often involve externalities).

    On the example Arnold cites, there is a contra circumstance:

    My father had a ranch in AZ before it became a state. A very successful adjoining rancher friend was a Morman, a bit older than my father, who had 4 wives, each with their own household. He told my father, that there being more single women than men in their community (otherwise destined to spinsterhood) that to the extent of his economic ability, he had a duty to provide each of these women the dignity of marriage, their own children and families, rather than service in the household of another woman, however kind.

    Lest this seem a fable; I am not a Morman, I’m in my 90’s and my father was 45 when I arrived in his life.

    So, in this form of relationship, in those circumstances, that relationship did not involve violence, even had a religious aspect.

    The friend’s major problem was that all the wives tended to gather for extended periods in the home of his first wife (an older sister to one of the others) and he would have to shoo them back to their own domains.

    • A lot of scholarship on the evolution and typical cultural patterns of moral sentiments shows a close connection to the preservation of the most common or important personal interests in the social and economic circumstances of the time.

      The trouble is that moral codes do not command reliable restraint of behavior away from vices and temptations unless most individuals has a sense that they are based in something more transcendent and metaphysical than ‘social agreement’ about mundane and pragmatic interests.

      Otherwise people are only restrained by the incentives of expected consequences, and can’t be trusted to conform to norms when they can get away transgressing them. They will lack the strong psychological restraint of an aspect of their personality and character that, like a habit, is difficult for them to overcome. That’s how morality works.

      So while monogamy may make more social sense than polygamy in one context, and vice versa, a person wedded, as it were, to either system often has to believe it is the exclusive and single best correct system, for all people in all places and all times, and cannot acknowledge the potential suitability of the other one without ‘breaking the spell’ that underpins the level of commitment.

      From what I’ve read about Jaworski and Brennan’s book so far, they acknowledge the existence of a a strong intuition against marketability and ‘commodification’ of certain behaviors with powerful moral valences, but present it as a mere superstitious impulse or deriving from some anachronistic circumstances and obsolete institutional arrangements which can now be relaxed without worry.

      I don’t think they’re taking the origin and functional importance of this psychological impulse seriously enough, as if we can ignore it without worry of spawning all sorts of unintended consequences to the social normative equilibrium.

  3. My view of the sexual world is, sadly, extremely limited.

    From what I have seen, though, one of the demographics fighting against prostitution and even stripping is that of older married women. They really don’t want their husbands to face temptation.

    I would not generalize too far from this observation. I haven’t exactly run a careful poll on this! I would, however, look for people who are still, in today’s world, interested in preserving the existing norms. There are certainly lots of people *breaking* those norms, and not even feeling guilty about it, so it wouldn’t stay illegal without a counter-veiling force. It’s not just momentum.

  4. In most of the world, visiting a prostitute is regarded as being a lighter offense than having an affair.
    Married people having sex for free implies they are getting something out of the affair besides money, i.e. things which you’re supposed to get from your spouse. Spouses don’t want to be replaceable.

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