Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi, Do markets corrupt our morals?
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Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi, Do markets corrupt our morals? New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xiii + 281 pp, USD 34.99 (paperback) Michael Munger1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Philosophers and social theorists have long been skeptical about the morality of market exchange, especially when that exchange is motivated by a desire for obtaining wealth. Aristotle, in both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, argued that exchanging to obtain the things that the household–or by extension, the city–requires to satisfy basic needs is natural. Such exchanges can therefore be morally permissible, or even perhaps a quotidian techne. But participation in markets cannot be a real virtue, and to the extent that such activity in markets is motivated by the pursuit of wealth rather than the pursuit of needful things. As Aristotle put it: One kind of acquisition therefore in the order of nature is a part of the household art, in accordance with which either there must be forthcoming or else that art must procure to be forthcoming a supply of those goods, capable of accumulation, which are necessary for life and useful for the community of city or household. And it is of these goods that riches in the true sense at all events seem to consist. For the amount of such property sufficient in itself for a good life is not unlimited…for a limit has been fixed, as with the other arts, since no tool belonging to any art is without a limit whether in number or in size, and riches are a collection of tools for the householder and the statesman. Therefore that there is a certain art of acquisition belonging in the order of nature to householders and to statesmen, and for what reason this is so, is clear. But there is another kind of acquisition that is specially called wealth-getting, and that is so called with justice and to this kind it is due that there is thought to be no limit to riches and property. (Politics, Book I, 1.1256b.) In this view, the activities of the household are necessary, and the use of markets to obtain things for the household—value in use—are perfectly sensible everyday activities. But “business” activities are the pursuit of wealth, engaging with market activity above and beyond what is necessary to obtain only the necessities of the good life–i.e., exchange motivated by “wealth-getting,” or value in exchange. This sort of business, particularly financial
* Michael Munger [email protected] 1
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
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business, is unnatural, because it is most removed from physical goods. Wealth-getting of this sort could never be a routine activity of a virtuous person, at least for Aristotle: [I]t is the work of nature to supply nourishment for her offspring, since every creature has for nourishment the residue of the substance from which it springs. Hence the business of drawing provision from the fruits of the soil and from animals is natural to all. But, as we said, this art is twofold, one bran
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