Contested Commodities Paperback by Margaret Jane Radin

Product Details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press (2001-11-06)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 296 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674007161
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

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.

About the Author

Margaret Jane Radin is Professor of Law at Stanford University.