Contested Commodities

by Radin, Margaret Jane

• ISBN13: 9780674007161
• ISBN10: 0674007166
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-05
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Commodification as a Worldview	1	(15)
Market-Inalienability	16	(14)
Problems for the Idea of a Market Domain	30	(16)
Compartmentalization: Attempting to Delineate a Market Domain	46	(8)
Personhood and the Dialectic of Contextuality	54	(25)
Human Flourishing and Market Rhetoric	79	(23)
Incomplete Commodification	102	(13)
Conceptual Recapitulation	115	(8)
The Double Bind	123	(8)
Prostitution and Baby-Selling: Contested Commodification and Women's Capacities	131	(23)
Commodification, Objectification, and Subordination	154	(10)
Free Expression	164	(20)
Compensation	184	(22)
Democracy	206	(19)
Notes	225	(46)
Index	271