BUS 3262 - Profit, Poverty, & Justice: Should Everything Be For Sale?

Should you be able to buy a kidney? How about a baby? Should you be able to sell your vote to the highest bidder, or your body for the sexual pleasure of someone else? Should you be able to sell yourself into slavery? Should someone under the age of 15 be able to sell their labor (more than 2 hours per day)? These are questions that someone who believes in the genuinely liberating power of markets has to answer. And answering them helps us make sense of why markets are powerful, and perhaps also why they have to be limited as social and political instruments. And since the market is an arena for the exercise of liberty, what principles may a sovereign give in order to legitimately restrict the exercise of market exchange? to enable us to answer such questions, we require understanding some basic concepts of economic theory (several concepts of efficiency), as well as a number of ideas in political philosophy. This will be the first goal of the course. The second, and larger goal in this course will be to understand the arguments put forward by Debra Satz in her book by the same title as this course. we will read passages from Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Amartya sen before moving to analysis of the arguments of Satz's book.