Contested Commodities (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780674007161)

Not only are there willing buyers for body parts or babies, Radin observes, but some desperately poor people would be willing sellers, while better-off people find such trades abhorrent. Radin observes that many such areas of contested commodification reflect a persistent dilemma in liberal society: we value freedom of choice and simultaneously believe that choices ought to be restricted to protect the integrity of what it means to be a person. She views this tension as primarily the result of underlying social and economic inequality, which need not reflect an irreconcilable conflict in the premises of liberal democracy.

As a philosophical pragmatist, the author therefore argues for a conception of incomplete commodification, in which some contested things can be bought and sold, but only under carefully regulated circumstances. Such a regulatory regime both symbolizes the importance of nonmarket value to personhood and aspires to ameliorate the underlying conditions of inequality.

Author: Margaret Jane Radin
ISBN-10: 0674007166
ISBN-13: 9780674007161
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/05/2001
Pages: 296
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.99lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.68d