 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today are Georgetown University professors Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski. They're the authors of Markets Without Limits, Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests. Welcome to Free Thoughts. I wanna begin by asking a question, so we've got experts on this topic. It's something I have, my wife and I have argued about. I've asked it several times and always been told the answers. No, but can I sell my children? Jay, why don't you field this question? That wasn't the first question I thought I was gonna get. Here's our official view. You can't have property rights in children per se, so you can't own a child the way that you can own, say, a cat or a guitar or a microphone. However, our view is something like this. There are a set of norms that determine who is sort of eligible to adopt a child. And so pedophiles shouldn't get children, serial killers shouldn't get children, and perhaps some other people shouldn't get children as well. So those norms restrict how you can distribute children for free. I shouldn't just give up my kids to a pedophile. Then our view is, once you have those constraints in place, then it's fine to sort of sell off the right to adopt the child within those constraints. So anyone who can adopt a child for free should be able to adopt a child for money. And in fact, if you look at the sort of empirical literature on this, there's reasons to think that if we had markets in adoption, that that would actually lead to better outcomes for the children and for others as well. But there would be markets in parental rights. There wouldn't be necessarily markets in people. Right. You wouldn't be owning. You're not actually selling the child per se. What you're selling is the right to adopt a child subject to the constraint that you're eligible to have a kid in the first place. So I can't buy you, then. Well, the whole point of the book is that I am for sale, and I thought that was pretty clear. I can be sold and I have a price, but it's a high price, that's all. You did sell the acknowledgements. What was it? You sold the... Yeah, we sold the acknowledgements in the book. We also sold the... What's the thing at the beginning? The dedication. The dedication was bought by the Business Ethics Journal Review, Chris McDonald, and Alexei Marku. To the readers of the Business Ethics Journal Review. Oh, okay. Did your publisher have any problem with you doing that? No. He liked it. He thought it was a fun publicity stunt. He talked about having advertisements and marketing, commodifying the book even further, but we decided the joke would go stale. They did, at one point, say, though, if you really are going to raise a huge amount of money on commodifying it and making all sorts of pictures and things, then you probably should share some of that money with us, but we didn't go that far. So we got to keep it all for ourselves, and we spent all the money on frivolous things. We didn't donate it to children or anything like that. That was part of the... You're saying that like we should be... We didn't donate it to children or anything. We just spent it on frivolous things. On metal. We were supposed to spend it on death metal. Yeah. We made a promise that it wasn't going to go to charity or something, so it really was commodification for frivolous reasons rather than out of a sense of nobility. I mean, we also had categories. So we sold like we had a gold level and then a platinum level and then also Daniel Silverman, a philosophy professor friend of both of ours. He put up a lot of money to make the highest level, the Silverman tier. This is like the Kennedy Center wall, basically. Well, that's what it was. Yeah, so we did that with the book. It was fantastic. So why were some people on there multiple times? They paid multiple times. They thought it would be funny if they paid $5 to have their name mentioned five times. And we... And they did. Yeah, they did. They could get in with just a dollar. Right? $1 and your name goes in the book. Yeah. We raised over $1,000 doing that. It was pretty good. We probably charged too little actually. In retrospect, given how many people jumped on board, we should have charged a higher price. We should have, yeah, but there wasn't really a market in book acknowledgments at the time. So we didn't have a standard. We didn't have like a shadow market or something like that. We had to create one on our own. Was there any pushback or any negative responses to selling? Not from your publisher, but just from other people. There was a philosophical critique that appeared on some blog or something and they said, I'm not really sure if it's metaphysically counts as a dedication if you sell it because a dedication is sort of by necessity, it's sincere and so you can't really sell a dedication. And then people were debating sort of the metaphysics of dedications and, you know, fair enough. I mean, I don't really buy the view, but if you want to call it a shmedication or something, I think the people who purchased it were not particularly upset about that. Yeah, there was a discussion on the Daily News philosophy blog about this, but most people thought it was all tongue-in-cheek. It was good fun. Nobody's confused that our acknowledgments are sincere acknowledgments. Everybody understands that people just paid for those acknowledgments, so it was good fun. I just wonder, because I guess my name appears as a paid acknowledgement in a lot of books because it's a standard thing on Kickstarter to you list everyone who backed the book and so it says thank you to all of these people. Yeah, a little bit different, but you were putting obviously your book to get to the kind of heart of it. There has been a lot of people who have written books in the last I would say 10, 15 years maybe about how certain things shouldn't be bought and sold and we opened up by talking about children or parental rights, but of course organs and a bunch of things we can get to, but what was sort of the state of that debate as you saw it when you guys started talking about what your book would contribute? Yeah, so every couple of years, someone comes out with a book on why you shouldn't be allowed to sell certain things. Unfortunately, all those people agree that you are allowed to sell books about what shouldn't be for sale. A few of them such as Benjamin Barber despite more or less being a communist and Michael Sandel have actually made quite a lot of money on these books, but pretty much everyone says things like the market is okay, it's a useful tool, but the problem with the market is that it tends to spread like pigweed and for immoral reasons we have to try to constrain its scope and so they come up with a list of objections or a number of different objections to why the market shouldn't be allowed to spread here and there and we read that and we thought their arguments weren't very good, their evidence wasn't very good and the arguments weren't satisfactory so we thought, you know what this debate could use is like a big fat dose of truth and we got paid to do it, which is even better. That's right, yeah. And actually one of the bigger criticisms that we had of most of those books is that they didn't make contact with the empirical literature. So one of the discoveries early on when Jay and I were working on the book is Vivianze Elezer. She's a sociologist, she's chair of the sociology department at Princeton and she's written a number of books on the meaning of money, the purchase of intimacy as a title of one of her books and you had somebody in particular, I mean both Jay and I were teaching Michael Sandel's book and also some chapters of his and Michael Sandel talks about being able to buy and sell intimacy, being able to buy and sell friendship. He also talks about like what it means, what money means. What does it mean when I pay somebody to do something? It's this magical thing, it has this meaning and he sits in his chair and he thinks about it. And I was talking to Jay about this and after finding Vivianze Elezer I was like well here's somebody who has done the research. Here's somebody who has looked at the meaning of money in different contexts and around the world and she's come to radically different conclusions about what people in general think is the meaning of money. So why not include that in the book and why don't we just make contact with the empirical literature in general because Michael Sandel sitting in his chair intuiting like oh here's what this means. Well that's not good enough. Yeah. So what is the basic argument of the book because I'm sure people are thinking here well like you can't buy love. Yeah. Like there are just things that you can't really buy so if you're saying oh everything is for sale whatever no but what is the basic argument? So the basic thesis, I'm not the argument per se but the thesis is anything you can do for free you can do for money. There's some way of being able to do it for money. So there are things you can't buy and sell such as trial pornography or slaves or assassination services or something because you shouldn't be doing those things period. If I gave you a gift of slaves that would be wrong but otherwise if you can do it for free then it is something that's eligible to be bought and sold and then our basic structure to argue for that is two-fold. One is to say usually when people have a complaint about a market they're not complaining about the commodification per se. They're complaining about a particular way it's being bought and sold and so we can revise the way it's being bought and sold and that'll change the problem. So for example Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan complains about surrogacy markets and says that they're immoral and she has a bunch of complaints about brokers and the nature of the contract but my friends Jason and Ben recently purchased a surrogate to carry a baby for them and they didn't have a contract like that they didn't have a broker so it doesn't seem like she has a complaint about their particular market per se and the other strategy is to just list and categorize every single objection that the others have come up with. We come up with our classification of them and then just systematically take them down. I've read Sandel's book and it could use some rigor that's part of the thing too it's what money can't buy I believe and it's not really a philosophy book so you breaking it down to a taxonomy of okay well he's just sort of saying I don't like that but why is he saying I don't like that so what are some of the things I mean that Sandel says that you shouldn't be able to buy it's a pretty amazing list I'm standing in line yeah he's standing in line selling like the billboard at Yankee Stadium he doesn't like that the name of the stadium the name of the stadium he doesn't like that autographed copies of your baseball cards he doesn't like tickets for free events at the park the mixture of sacred sports and he's filthy money on a baseball sacred sports of course we'll never do that for money yeah I mean some of the important things are kidneys, blood, bone marrow just standard things like that you can't buy and sell sex or you shouldn't be allowed to buy and sell sex, friendship, those things as well there's an enormous list it would be much better if Michael Sandel had offered like a categorization a good categorization of the kinds of things that shouldn't be bought and sold he doesn't offer it and so I think for most readers like when you're reading his book it's actually a pleasure to read so I recommend that people go ahead and pick up his book and read through it but when you're reading it he has these amazing anecdotes this like here's a story and look did you know that you can did you know that you can buy a wedding speech? my goodness it's so horrible I'm shocked this is my shocked face yes and since most of the examples that he gives are things that the reader knows people are unfamiliar with you get this kind of initial surprise like oh you can buy a wedding speech wait that doesn't sound right probably you shouldn't be allowed to do that and since people have those initial intuitions they don't think through the case enough Michael Sandel can give you a series of these anecdotes and then by the end you're like you're right Michael the scope of the market is overly broad it's taking over too much of the important things in life and so maybe it should be restrained and here restrained means not necessarily illegal but just it's morally wrong to participate in it so many of the people that we're arguing against they'll say things like it's always morally wrong to buy sex but nevertheless prostitution should be legal the way it is in Germany so to be clear we're talking about the morality not the legality okay so that gets the question I was just going to ask because there's a number of ways to look at shouldn't and I wanted to see how that played out in yours so it's possible to say like you shouldn't be able to buy or you should this is it's fine to buy this you shouldn't be able to buy it but we can make it illegal that's okay but when you say it's permissible so you say anything that we could exchange for free we can it's permissible exchange for money do you mean permissible in the sense that you shouldn't be prohibited it would be wrong to prohibit you or that there is there's nothing morally problematic about it like there are situations where adding money makes it like maybe not as good but it doesn't rise the level of impermissibility yeah we're saying it's not morally wrong to sell it yeah so it's not about the law per se and for that respect in a sense not a libertarian book despite what people might say about it because you could be you could be like a radical leftist and agree with everything you say you should be like yeah all this stuff should be in the market but it should be heavily regulated that's compatible with our view Debra Satt's actually might think that like that might be her position she might actually be on our side and then you could be like a hardcore sort of conservative libertarian where you're like you know no one should be forbidden from buying and selling this stuff but I actually think markets are evil and people shouldn't engage in them but nevertheless they should be legal even though people shouldn't do it no one holds that position but you could yeah nice illustration of this point is I gave a talk at Brigham Young University on markets without limits and everybody in that room was a Mormon and if you'll recall our thesis is if it's permissible to have exchange do or possess for free then it's permissible to do all of those things we say for money but that's like a slogan version really the longer version is like it would be permissible to have a market of some sort of some description in that in that item so I was giving this talk at Brigham Young and the topic of prostitution came up and I said well look here's the real question is it permissible for someone to have sex with a stranger for free is that permissible and the people in the room were like wait a second you need to jump through these hoops in order to have sex with somebody there are all these hoops so it wouldn't be permissible to have sex with a stranger for free and so it follows that on their view it wouldn't be permissible to have a market of any description in that kind of service that fits within the thesis so if you have a morality that says casual sex anonymous sex is wrong then it makes sense that you would think it also can't be sold think of our book as like part one of a much longer series of books defending the market here's a bunch of people who think there are these inherent limits to markets so like markets make good things bad or they make bad things good Jay and I are saying no the market is neutral right like there is no introduction of immorality or improvement it's not like the market makes things better the particular exchanges and the market doesn't make things worse what makes it better or worse like you might think for example that a market introduces incentives that weren't there already but in the abstract you can imagine like suppose that somebody exchanged a particular item with the same incentives except remove the market here if that's okay then it's okay to have it on the market and that's kind of the central point and then part two would be the more aggressive like we want to defend prostitution right that would be part two or even maybe part three I want to get on that specific trading point why can things be so is the trading a market or is it just like so some people are okay with trading because you bought up trading a commodity is that what kind of market you're talking about yeah so one of the problems or we have to deal with this like what counts as a market and we basically do like a critic's choice kind of issue here we say when we're arguing against people like there's reasonable disagreement on exactly what we're going to use the word market to refer to what we're going to call an exchange what we're going to call commodification so we pretty much let the person we're arguing with at that moment or at that page determine define it their way and then we show their argument doesn't work on their own terms you know so it really like we don't have to like stick to any particular definition of a market that might be contentious because we can kind of win either way we do ship the ground like that but we do also offer definition of the market which is the voluntary exchange of anything for valuable consideration so that that then is a bit different from the specifics of bringing money in because that definition of the market doesn't require any sort of money and I'm curious about the role that money plays in the thinking about these issues because there does seem to be like people get turned off specifically by bringing money into it but but it seems like for a lot of these like say the organ sales there's it seems like the problem is more like you know these people are the reason that they're buying or selling this stuff is like bad reasons or reasons that we shouldn't endorse or they're acting out of desperation and so we're actually rejecting is like exchanges for bad reasons the money is just a way to kind of grease the wheels of those exchanges to make to operationalize them make them easier to engage in but but it is money doing kind of extra work on top of that couple points one is on that on that particular objection that people have like oh the only reason you're willing to do this is because you're so desperate so here's a here's a kind of heavy-handed thing I believe if you see people who are doing something out of desperation and all you do is stop them from doing it you're a really really evil person like what the hell is wrong with you it's like by hypothesis this person is horrifically desperate and they're doing that and it's their best option and you took it away God how awful are you like someone's drowning in a pool and like they're reaching for something out of desperation and you start them from doing that that's what you do you are the scum of the earth but aren't you just stopping them from digging themselves deeper like that acting you know they're so desperate that this looks like a good option but it's only going to make them worse off so you're really helping them if you if you actually knew that where the case maybe you'd have an argument like but most of the time they admit that no no this is this is their best option but it's still wrong so we shouldn't do it but I think let's go back to the question of like the meaning of money and what what is money because people do often focus on money per se not just the exchange of other goods and I think it's because there is a view about what money means so people say things like there's this western perspective on money where money is impersonal to put a price on something is to declare it to have purely instrumental value is to say that it's fungible with everything else of the same value and so when you read the books on this everyone says no no when you put a price on this you're saying that like adopting a child is just equivalent in value to two thousand packs of spearmint gum right I mean and so therefore by putting a price on something you're degrading it because you're saying it's value is instrumental and can be sort of exchange perfectly with no loss with anything else of the same monetary value and so that's why you know Peter brought up Vivian Zelizar and it really turns out that this perspective on money this of imputing an impersonal utilitarian arms length of fungible kind of attitude towards money is a recent western perspective it is not the universal perspective of money money does not have to mean that we could think of it as having a different kind of thing and so for example Sandel really gets upset about the idea of giving personal gifts or impersonal gifts versus personal gifts like a personal gift would be something like I once had a girlfriend of Polish descent and I knew she really liked that and she saw this Polish Barbie and I saved it for Christmas and gave it to her like six months later and she was so pleased and look at how nice it is because I know about her preferences and so on whereas if I just give her $60 whatever like that would be impersonal with a note that said here there's a Polish Barbie or buy whatever else you want like isn't the sixth wedding anniversary $100 billers isn't that the traditional 10 paper would just cash but around the world you actually see people that like to give a cash gift is seen as just as thoughtful or even more thoughtful than giving a non-cash gift in fact even in the United States in the 1800s cash gifts were seen as especially thoughtful and non-cash gifts were not so this is a contingent social construct it's a way it's a meaning that we have placed on the good the meaning is not there and then when we realize that the meaning is something we've placed on the good we can start asking is this practice this practice of imputing meaning this way a good practice or a bad practice yeah that's right I mean it's interesting in my own case it happened to be Polish since we're talking about about Poland my grandparents on both sides on both my mom's side and my dad's side they used to give my sister and I cash gifts when we would visit in Poland and for us it was I mean it was extra special because it was always US dollars so they would have to go to it so it's not the same it's just like a gift of cash but that's part of what made me think like look it was it was deeply meaningful for them to have saved up $50 and then to give it to us and you know a friend of mine Matt Buffton he wrote down on a dollar bill he was like blue jays because that's something that I like and so he wrote down something that I like on a gift for me namely a US dollar and he handed it to me and look notice it communicates something personal it's like I know about you but we've skipped the right we've skipped all the nonsense where we've got to like just the gift that's thoughtful why don't I just write it down on the dollar bill and for me I mean that I still have that dollar bill so I haven't spent it so I obviously think that's special even if this way that we think about money is social construct it's not necessary it's historically contingent it wasn't always that way so many of the objections to commodification are about it's commodifying this clashes with our values it sends the wrong message it has different meaning and those themselves are all social constructs this is to some extent it's like saying you know in a world where our values weren't what they aren't what they actually are then money shouldn't have this thing but you know human values or western values the United States values are what they are and so within this value system money has these problems well we're not pushing for relativism all the way down right when we think like if you're gonna have a debate about what's right and wrong you're presupposing that there's some sort of truth of the matter that's not just me or opinion but we are a relativist about or social constructivist about are things like the meaning that we attach to certain actions so people will say things like the market in this good even if it doesn't hurt anybody even if it doesn't exploit anybody even if it doesn't violate anybody's rights or lead to a misallocation of resource or have any sort of other real moral problem is wrong because of what it expresses and in that case we can go look it looks like what it expresses is merely a social construct and now we can ask whether it's a good one so imagine take the following case suppose we learn that if I like right now it's a social construct that when we say go to hell that that expresses contempt but if we were to discover that there's this weird law of physics that when you say go to hell it causes like vibrations and air molecules which when they hit your body cause vibrations and the molecules in your body and then kills cancer the morally right thing to do would be to revise the English language and make saying go to hell a way of expressing respect for people so we can revise it in that case we should similarly the Forrape tribe of Papua New Guinea had a social practice of eating the brains of their dead they practiced endocannibalism if you read the justifications for endocannibalism it's really quite beautiful it's that you're having part of the dead live on with youth for every generation whenever I think about that I tear up a little bit and I say oh I hope that my kids eat me except except that there's actually reasons not to do that it turns out that that practice of imputing meaning in that way kills people it spreads a certain type of disease and causes further death and when the Forrape discovered this they had the good moral sense to revise their practice in order to save lives which is what really matters so similarly we look at this and go there are a bunch of markets where like markets and kidneys and other things that we have imputed meaning to them in such a way that we do things or we forbid people from doing things that would save lives our practices of imputing meaning are literally killing people so the right thing to do is revise the practice to change the meaning we attached to things which is useful to do so shows like a lack of concern for real morality and overwhelming concern for surface social constructs well we're talking about these kind of symbolic things but you missed mentioned misallocation which is one of the things that people get concerned I think I Sandell if I remember correctly I think Sandell is against scalping tickets or secondary ticket markets on allocation problems so Bruce Springsteen is playing and then you some rich person can just you know just buy a ticket so someone stands in line and gets seat one front row all the way rich person is like oh but I'll give you $5,000 for that and or goes to a scalper or whatever and so now the rich people get all the good seats and that's a misallocation problem is that a valid concern when it comes to markets and those things well it's a weird I mean do you want to take this one or should I do it I mean the only thing that I would say to that is you can set up the rules differently if you want to if you want a certain distribution of people by socio-economic categories to attend your concert you can do that but it is okay for somebody like I don't know George Soros to buy a ticket for $5,000 and get front row seats at a Brittany Spears concert if that's what he wants to do I don't see anything wrong with it yeah some of these particular goods that people think should be distributed fairly and equally and so the example that Sandell gives is there's a thing called Shakespeare in the park in New York City and the people producing it would like for it to be free and open to everyone now they completely and totally fail at doing that even out of their own accord because what ends up happening is people stand in line for a very long time to get the ticket so rather than distributing it according to the scarce resource of money they distributed according to the scarce resource of time and now people start exchanging time for money I'm rich and I can't afford giving my schedule to stand in line for three hours to get a ticket but you can and I can pay you to do it so Sandell says oh it's just too bad that now rich people are getting to see this again but by hypothesis the poor people standing in line would rather have the money than to see the show and also there is a third party here so even if they're people that weren't going to stand in line like what you're having is a system in which rich people redistribute cash to poor people right so what's interesting also about Sandell is almost every single example he gives in the book like this about oh it's misallocated there's insufficient only rich people get it they're all publicly provided goods you know Shakespeare in the park doctors in Beijing and the free medical care there and a number of other like express lanes on the high on the public highways and stuff it's all like this is supposed to be a critique of the market but it's always a case of a market like trying to fix a problem scarcity introduced by under provided government provision well seems like a lot of people would like those tickets to be distributed according to either Bruce Springsteen or Shakespeare in the park or whatever how much they want to see it that would be a metric of doing that so maybe standing in line conveys that more than money is that something we should be concerned I mean maybe we just can't distribute things by how much people want it but standing in line is saying a lot yeah standing in line says a lot but so does spending money say a lot and you know for some people it's really hard to make these interpersonal comparisons without something like a market actually you need a willingness to pay right you need to express a willingness to pay or a willingness to stand in line in the communication if I was like A you know J I got tool tickets and I stood in line for two and a half weeks or if I was like I got tool tickets and I paid seven thousand dollars for them the first one makes me seem like more of a die-hard fan you're a second one yeah exactly and so this is like you deserve those tickets I don't know I feel like that's partly an illusion because like if I spend seven thousand dollars on on tickets like that's you know a certain amount of work I had to do so it's like I didn't stand in line but the way that I got it was by you know doing my work I guess I'm not a good example that because no one thinks my work is particularly tedious or hard but like you know if I imagine I'm like a waiter at Denny's or something and I'm like I instead of standing in line my idea is I serve people sandwiches for three months like that's how I earn the tickets yeah yeah or for I mean but the worry people have here well there's some people that can earn that money really really quickly hundred fifty dollar tickets that's an hour's worth of work for other people that's like fifteen hours of work and similarly like standing in line if you get their first come first serve if you manage to get their first thing in the morning then you might not have to stand in line that long but others might have to stand longer so we don't really have a good mechanism that really tracks people's desire for things neither one of these is particularly good does this mean that we should we should change the mechanism based on all of Sandel's examples but the other thing is they seem to be finite goods like they're really there's there's only so much supply of Shakespeare and the Tartt Park tickets that are possible there's only so much supply of express lanes like you only pack so many cars into it and so if if it's something that we can't that the extra money that people would be spending would just increase the supply of goods that's one thing but if there's a finite then maybe the money does create problems I don't think distribution according to need is what people need to quote David Schmitz I don't think distribution according to desire is what people desire so imagine like you're coming to a four-way stop like we have rules for four-way stop signs like whoever gets there first gets to go simultaneous arrival then the person on the right gets to go etc. I forget what happens when literally all four people arrive at once I think you just point each other through but we also have a rule that says like if you're in dire emergency you get to go first like if your lights are flashing we're supposed to sort of stop and let you go and if you have a siren we let you go to need all the time well imagine how awful that would be imagine everything we got to a four-way stop sign there's another car there you had to like get out and talk to each other figure out who the neediest person is or instead the most desirous person the person who really wants to go first because they really have somewhere they need to get to go that system would suck it would be terrible to be incredibly inefficient and everyone people wouldn't get their needs met and their desires met I think something similar goes with a lot of these other kinds of allocation mechanisms like we might very well think that ideally we have goods distributing according to like whoever's going to get the most utility out of them and we don't have a perfect way of doing that but empirically speaking markets are much better at tracking that than queuing which is super duper inefficient just keeping things off limits to markets perhaps help as a buffer zone so if you if your thesis is that anything that it is permissible to have or sell for free have or exchange for free markets ought to be but maybe maybe that one of the things that happens is as we commodify things the more things we commodify the more willing we are to then commodify things or exchange things that should have been off the table all along you know see it's like it's a slippery slope to dystopia and so by just roping off a whole bunch of things we're kind of providing a buffer yeah I think that's a common criticism that people make the criticism says something like here we are on a slippery slope if we allow all of these different things on the market then eventually more and more things will be on the market but I'd like to know exactly what we need the buffer for because what really matters in a lot of these cases are the actual attitudes that people have towards these objects so take the following example I think people have an obligation to care for their pets I think people have an obligation to not harm their pets I mean in fact Jay and I might disagree but I have a different view about whether or not pets at least certain kinds of pets count as property in the first place but people should have certain attitudes now the question is like what does money and markets do to the attitudes that people have towards their dogs or their cats and I think the answer to that question is exactly nothing like people buy their dogs and then they love them like members of the family so what is this buffer that people want I mean there's also different ways to sell things so for example we want people to look at works of art in a particular way right we want them to appreciate the Renoirs the whatever's right we want them to have that attitude and yet those things are sold on a market except they're sold on an auction market and auctions are special because what they do is they mark out the items up for auction as unique and distinct you can't participate in the auction unless you read a booklet about the items that are up for auction in the first place so if you want people to look at objects as being unique and special non-fungible non-instrumental one option for you is an auction market right so sell it via an auction rather than just at a Walmart so maybe we do want a buffer zone I guess but there's just these different kinds of markets that you could use to preserve the attitudes maybe that's just an example of why people don't like pet store dogs but they go to a breeder so it's still a market so but you know pet store seemed like Walmart and the breeder seems like more individualized actually on that very point I read an article that said recently that there's such a high status now for having so-called rescue dogs these would just be called dogs from the pound but now we call them rescue dogs because why not engage in some moral grandstanding while we're at it that breeders are now selling the there's breeders selling the dogs two pounds in order to have them get rescued because they don't have to go anywhere otherwise oh gosh that's shocking and very sad but kind of more broadly one thing we found was that like most of the people in this literature make an empirical claim which is that participating in certain markets or commodifying certain things has a negative effect on our character and for some reason they don't seem to have access to the same journals that we do because they didn't go and read them they mostly cite one sort of ambiguous study that took place in Haifa Israel in the 1970s as a character and in fact one of the things we do in part three of the book is just say well it looks like Peter and I actually have access to more empirical stuff than everyone else so we went and read it and it's surprisingly in favor of markets it's like well it turns out participating in markets doesn't make you more selfish it actually makes you nicer what is that study the story is interesting some experiment done in Haifa Israel in the 1970s they found that there are a lot of parents who are picking up their children late from day care so then we try introducing a financial penalty for picking up your kids late and we'll start it off very very low and then we'll raise it so I forget the exact numbers but let's say like 20% of people are picking up their kids late every day then they introduce a very small financial penalty it was like the equivalent of like 5 bucks in current dollars so then what happened was the number shot up and went higher rather than lower and then they kept raising like the number of people who picked up their kids late and then when they raised even higher than fewer and fewer people picked up their kids late so one reading of this which is consistent with the evidence is that what happened was I felt bad that I was picking up my kids late like I felt like you and I had a sort of more than transactional relationship and I was putting you out but when you put a price on it I switch over from thinking in a moral way just to a purely transactional way and I'm just willing to pay the price okay fair enough here's another interpretation the fact that the price was so low communicated I was wrong about how much I was putting you out money so the problem the weird thing about this is that the people who make these arguments are all talking about the meaning of money and they miss that money means something and prices mean something so for example if I suppose like I just get mad at my wife for continuing to leave dishes out and I'm like damn it Lauren henceforth like if you leave a dish out you're gonna have to pay me for the cost of bearing your mess and I'm like and you're gonna have to pay me a nickel what happened was she'd go oh I thought I was really putting you out by like by leaving the dishes out but if it all it takes to compensate you as a nickel I was wrong I guess it really wasn't that high of a cost you're only a nickel mad that's it so it like it's like the problem with that particular study is that it's it's consistent with both of those particular readings it doesn't decide between them so when you go and look at the other literature it seems to suggest that no actually markets tend to make us nicer and friendlier and more trusting and more caring they don't make us more selfish in small group settings sometimes introducing money can lead to a degree of impersonal and like a degree of mistrust but in large group settings introducing money actually greatly increases trusts etc etc I mean if anything the literature goes the other way in fact for what's worth there is an exchange between Michael Sindel and Herbert Gintis on this very point in the Boston review and Gintis just called Sindel on this he's like Sindel you're just wrong about the empirical lit and why are you keep saying why do you keep saying the same thing and then Sindel kind of like waved his hand at it and then two weeks later he talked at Brown where he completely ignored Gintis all the stuff that Gintis brought up and just said the same thing to his audience so maybe he read the stuff and wasn't convinced or maybe he just knew the people at Brown wouldn't know better I don't know I'm curious if the people who use that study to say look introducing these small penalties just commodifies things would then also argue against government fines for violations of laws and regulations well at least if they did they would be consistent but you're right we don't see that and actually now that J brought up Herbert Gintis it's worth pointing out the other side of this particular discussion so Gintis and his colleagues went to like small scale societies in remote parts of Africa and they played different kinds of economic games like the ultimatum game the dictator game and so on and what they found is that in some of these small scale societies people would behave more fairly and they would care more about the other side of the transaction like who is harmed and who is not harmed they would divide the dollar more close to equal and Gintis and his colleagues regressed on a number of different possible differences so how religious were these groups whether they were you know the gender disparity in the groups all these different things and what they found is that the one thing that explained the groups that were more fair in their distribution of the dollars it had to do with how frequently they made contact with markets how integrated they were with markets the more interaction that people had with markets the fairer and the more concerned with what was going on inside of other people's heads these people were that was the one discovery that they had you know in the 19th century there was a popular thesis called the do commerce thesis my French teacher is going to kill me it's the gentle commerce thesis used to be very popular and it said that like markets make us better people you know right now Michael Sandel maybe Elizabeth Anderson and others worry that markets make us worse they change our character from good people to bad people and Jay gave a nice explanation for why they think that but it turns out in the 19th century they used to believe that like markets would make us better people well this is obviously a cool question and now Jay and I cite Herbert Gintas on our side we say look Gintas and his colleagues have discovered that markets make people better people right and and it should be small wonder you know like I go to the store and I buy something and I say thank you for the thing that I've bought and the other person says thank you isn't that like in a way magical and how do I make money on the market isn't it about like figuring out what you people want right and isn't it about catering to what you people want and so now I get into the habit of thinking about what other people want what would make other people happy and if I get into that habit then I become a better person I start caring about other people more so that's our story here and the empirical literature I think is on our side but that's an ongoing debate it's not just Gintas it's a bunch of other studies and we cite basically all of it and part of the commerce thesis I didn't take French even worse than me okay thanks for that how is the spelled by the way je n'ai pas les français that's all I know so pourquoi les enfants you should keep Canadian but this doesn't count so yeah that's not real French anyways so anyways like like part of the part of the commerce thesis is that I'll become more tolerant because I have a market in fact empirically speaking that is correct there's a paper in APSR a couple years ago just on this very point so the markets make us more tolerant of difference and the idea is something like I'm Christian and you're Muslim and you're an infidel and you think I'm an infidel and I hate you and you hate me but man you really kind of want my wool and I really kind of want your spices so we're willing to overcome our aversion to one another in order to make the exchange and then upon interacting with each other we discover hey you're really not so bad you're really kind of like me so despite like you know if you go to like Marxists in like the universe and they're not empirical anyways they just ignore evidence like they'll say things like markets are responsible for racism and sexism and all this other stuff and it's like nope empirically actually they're not empirically they actually tend to undermine it in fact the reason you're talking about this here and not about people in other societies is because it's in these market societies where people start thinking this is a problem on the gintas findings I'm curious because it I could see them at least as you described it not supporting the conclusion that you just drew about markets making people more fair because is it do we know if these people so the people who were who didn't have as much of an integration with markets and so therefore in these games were behaving less fairly were they in fact less fair in other non-market sorts of games like were they uniformly less fair or were they simply less fair when they were engaging in market activity because you could also interpret it as basic human decency and fairness are powerful drives but markets when markets are novel they kind of screw with all like we're not really sure how to react in them so you're bad at it the first couple of times but once you get practice then your basic human decency reasserts itself well I think people have done these kinds of studies other ways it's not just gintas and henric and others and so you can go they've gone around the world kind of playing games with people and you find like a nice correlation like the more market oriented your society it's measured by like the phraser index the more market oriented your society the nicer you play these games the less market oriented the worse so it's not just like complete non-market participants don't play very well it's actually like people in sort of somewhat marketized countries who do participate in markets but not as much also play less well but there are also things like the amount of money people give for a charity per capita is positively correlated with how market oriented your society is even when you control for income so it's not just because you're richer things like your degree of tolerance for difference your degree of liberalism is higher based upon how market oriented your society is even when you control for other kinds of factors and so you find lots of kind of positive character traits are correlated positively with the market orientation of your society negatively correlated with being in a non-market society it's the phraser institute and kato institute economic freedom of the world index so we talk about things like like kidney markets which make a lot of people uncomfortable and we're talking about a lot of symbolism what these things symbolize what people think about money what it does to your thought process but a lot of people would say this isn't necessary my concern my concern is waking up in the bathtub with ice with your you know the scar my concern is poor people selling their kidneys for money my concern is like we're now distributing based on money so like the Bruce Springsteen concert which maybe was like a funny joke but now we're actually saying that like rich people are going to live and poor people are going to die when it comes to who's going to get kidneys like these are real exploitation distribution like treating human beings as a market commodity and meet problems that have nothing to do with what I think of money it's just what will actually happen I think that you've raised what to me was the biggest motivation for writing the book in the first place the questions that I'm most concerned about are things like a market in kidneys a market in bone marrow a market in human blood these things have real life and death kind of significance so we should split the like how do we acquire the kidneys from how do we distribute them right first the bathtub people in a bathtub kind of question look the worst kind of market we can have is a black market and the kinds of things that you're worried about are descriptions of the black market and not really the like above ground market if you think that like if we legalize the sale of kidneys in the United States do you think suddenly hospitals would just buy a kidney from someone who has a kidney and a cooler you think somebody with a kidney and a cooler can go to the local hospital and be like hey guys go ahead and risk your license go ahead and risk everything and just buy this kidney from a cooler no of course that's not going to happen it's like one kidney one kidney right here it's like an old snake oil salesman with a kidney I got a kidney for that I don't know fell off a truck somewhere exactly so I see that people are worried about you know waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing but that's not a description of like the market as it would exist here in the United States isn't that more a problem in the market or in lack of market as it exists now I mean if you can buy one then you can buy one but if you can't well then maybe you'll try to incentivize somebody to give you that kidney so you don't need to steal it right you can do it okay now I said split the like acquisition of the kidney from the distribution of the kidney because notice that we have a market in food and what do we do with people who are poor we give them food stamps right the fact that like people are subsidized to purchase an item like food doesn't mean that we don't know that we no longer have a market in food we do we could have something like kidney stamps so if you're poor we could keep the distribution constant namely we could continue to distribute on the basis of need or something like that but have a market in the acquisition of kidneys and we would save like look the following is uncontroversial we could save thousands of lives every single year if we had a market in kidneys so the arguments against having a market in kidneys better be worth thousands of lives per year I don't know why people don't realize this like here's here's an argument if we introduce money into the kidney exchange that'll treat people like objects or something like that I'm like okay that's a pretty good argument are you willing to pay say 1500 lives per year to avoid this outcome the answer almost uniformly is no so if you compare the two sides of this particular exchange you know it better that we save 1500 lives and that say 1500 people are regarded as objects say then that we let those 1500 people die also empirically Peter who right now gets the kidneys in the lottery is it actually distributed equally according to socioeconomic status no actually there have been slaves on this only rich people get the kidneys so in a sense the whole poor people won't get them isn't actually an objection because they don't already don't get them so since they don't get them there's not a worry about taking them away distributed if the rich people are getting them the reason for that is that richer people tend to be better candidates like they're healthier so they're better candidates for receiving the kidney part of it might be that there's no one really knows why this is maybe there's some double dealing on the background like some furtive markets that are going on people using their connections to slide $20,000 into the table to whoever makes the decision if it's by for death for you and you have $20,000 the issue here is pretty big there's now over a hundred thousand people just in the states alone who are waiting for a kidney and the overall majority will not get one and that that's true and the numbers are increasing but the reason why the numbers are increasing is actually in a way good news it's because our dialysis technology has become better although people who are on kidney dialysis it's basically it's basically really close to torture you have to go there like three times a week you sit there for two hours and then a machine filters your blood for you and that's a significant cost so here's a way to save the medical system a lot of money pay for the kidneys the cost of dialysis swamps the cost of a kidney transplant operation even if people are paid for kidneys the U.S. government spends an enormous amount of money on dialysis in the U.S. every single year so it would save the government money it would just be better all around the price of a kidney is we know the estimates of what the price of a kidney in the U.S. might have to be in order to clear the market right so it would be somewhere around 80 to 100,000 and by the way people say things like oh well the poor are all going to sell their kidneys right away and so they're going to get a really low price and first of all there's a couple of problems with this one is like the thing that determines the price is not so much desperation it's the amount of competition if you read Ricardo competition dominates the bargaining power but here's another thing you could say I don't think the poor are the poor are so desperate that none of their transactions count as consensual I guess that means you can't sell them a sandwich either because by hypothesis that's not consensual but if you really believe that then here's a way of legalizing kidney markets and thinking that they're morally permissible everyone can sell a kidney provided they make $30,000 a year now in that world where we had that law there would be some poor people selling them on the black market for a low price still but nevertheless the predominately markets would be coming from upper class people or people who are doing pretty well and there are a lot of people that still be willing to sell their kidney for like $80,000 under that kind of system so you can constrain the market in a way that will alleviate the objection and this is often the problem that people have it's like they're complaining about the market per se on the basis of contingent features of the market that we can eliminate so if you're like I don't think that you should buy chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A because they hate gay people it's like you're not objecting to chicken nuggets per se you're objecting to chicken nuggets from that particular vendor you guys cover a lot of the anti-demonification arguments in the book and I'm curious which one or maybe ones you've heard since you wrote the book do you think are is the most they're interesting I guess because these are two different things interesting and or the strongest I'll go with interesting Peter can take strongest so my brother-in-law is a surgeon and my sister-in-law is a medical dietician and they were talking about this stuff and they're like but you don't understand you see a lot of the people they see the people who come in and need organs and they're like a lot of these people they're just kind of like human train wrecks and the reason they're so sick is because they take bad care of themselves and we shouldn't allow those people to get a kidney they should just die and they're like what do you think of that and I said you know to be honest they hadn't considered like responding to just pure misanthropy in the book so that's the most interesting objection I've gotten in terms of the strongest I think an objection from the philosopher Mark Wells is I still think it's the best and I think Jay and I might be on different sides of this issue but here's our thesis if it's permissible for free it's permissible for money Mark is Mark's response is like okay well take the category of things that are obligations like here's things that I'm obligated to do so in a sense I owe it to you already well if you're obligated to do something then you're permitted to do that thing right? so it follows that you can do it for free but you can't then make it contingent on money so here's a concrete example suppose you're walking along and there's like a baby drowning in a puddle and so you're obligated to pull the baby out of the water let's suppose that you and I agree about the ethics of this particular issue never mind the people who think that we're not obligated to save drowning babies or something we'll just ignore that let me just say to that fringe group you're wrong despite what Murray Rothbard said despite what Rothbard said right so I'm obligated to pull the baby out of the water and in fact I have to do it if I were to stand there and say well pull this baby out of the puddle for five dollars no I can't do that so I have to pull the baby out I owe it to that baby to save it I can't have a market in those things now go ahead Jay because Jay has a good response I think it's true that you can't threaten not to do it in exchange for money because you're not allowed to threaten not to do this but you can still get money for it let's say you think that you have an obligation to fight during a draft I don't think that but suppose you think that or imagine a case where I would think that nevertheless we still pay those people if somebody saves the baby we're going to give you a cash reward he's not obligated to say no I can't take that because then it would be introducing a market so again you can actually receive money for doing things that you're obligated to do you can receive rewards for it I mean like within a marriage you might like reward each other for taking good care of the children even though like you owe it to the children to take good care of them for free so you do have reward systems for people doing their duty you just can't threaten not to do your obligation well that would seem to be, that would just add the extra badness and so you just see a baby and then you act the threat is the bad, is the wrongness but getting rewarded after the fight is not exactly the same as getting paid to do something it's essential to something's being a market that it's a quid pro quo like I will do something just in case I will quid if you quo so I make it contingent in that way another example that Jay came up with in response to this objection is the case of the lifeguard like we pay lifeguards to sit on alert and then when people are drowning they're obligated and you know just like all of us I guess would be obligated to save the drowning person but we do pay a person to kind of sit there on alert is that really a counter to it because we're not paying them in the moment we're paying them to make their time available just like we could pay people to wander around looking for babies who are drowning but then if that person said okay now that the baby's drowning in front of me give me five dollars of the lifeguard said okay okay I'll save this person but you give me five dollars that seems different in troubling in a sense yeah because he's already agreed to save the baby now that he's there but I mean he's supposed like we stop paying him he just didn't show up that day because he's like you guys haven't been paying me I've worked here for six weeks I haven't got a paycheck so I'm not coming to the pool that day and a kid drowns but if he was there and the kid was drowning and he said well you haven't paid me in a week so I'm not going to hop in he goes on strike but I think this illustrates like what I'm worried about this is that it's going to come down to like oh whether we're going to call it a market or not but we still have an example of a person who is doing something and getting money for it and in some cases they're only willing to be there to do in the first place because of the incentive of money yeah Jay's response goes something like this Jay interrupt if I'm wrong about this it's something like look take a look at the nature of the thing that we're talking about namely saving children from drowning is there a way to have a market in that particular good the answer is yes and of course that's right we do have lifeguards and nobody thinks there's anything to matter with paying somebody my own gut tells me that I'm sort of your last point Aaron is exactly how I feel about it too it's like no I'm not talking about the nature of the good right I'm talking about this like moment to moment like right now I have this obligation I have to do it and I can't make a contingent on anyone paying me but that I think brings us to like one class of objections we consider early in the book because like the first part of the book is to really clarify what the debate is about and actually in doing so we knock out about half of the things can people complain about so we say there are what we call contingent objections to markets there are about incidental features of markets so you could point to particular examples where it would be wrong to sell something even though you know Peter you gave me a lunch box and I promise never to sell it well then I can't sell that thing even though by giving my promise I could still give it away for free and so like ah there's a thing you can do for free you can't have for money it's like yeah that very specific thing given that very specific promise I can't do but it's not very interesting because it's still in general you can sell lunch boxes and so there are only all these kind of cases like this where it's like no right now in this particular case you can do it for free you can't do it for money but nevertheless that is the kind of thing that can be bought and sold so if we make it about sort of interesting natural kinds it's like yep that kind of thing can almost always be bought and sold if it's the kind of thing you can do for free sorry to interrupt but two things first I did give Jay a lunch box in fact it's like human live kidney inside is a funny lunch box no kidney though unfortunately second this might call for what might seem like a tiny little change in our thesis but we say you know if it is permissible but not obligatory to do for free then it's permissible but not obligatory to do for money right so if we change if we make that tiny change that covers all of those cases now for philosophers like us that's a really big deal like I still think that objection is a beautiful objection to a book of philosophy right it's significant and we would have to adjust like our thesis in light of it so it's a big deal but it would be a way to deal with it if Jay's response about natural kinds isn't good enough let me give you another example like this like the Mark Wells example so this was brought to me by Lauren Lemasky who's a boisterous professor at UVA and he said well look I'm obligated to give my students a grade so can I just now say to them something like I'm an auction off grades in my class and give you an A because you paid me not because you actually earned it and I said no in light of previous existing agreements that you've made and in like representations you've made like you've now acquired an obligation to distribute grades according to merit not according to like how much students pay but nevertheless grades are the kind of thing that can be bought and sold like if I want to start a new university let's call it like you know University of Phoenix or something like I want to start a new university and there I make it clear up front like you're gonna have classes at the end of the day like the grade that you get is dependent on how much money you pay for the class and we're not going to lie to people when we tell employers like what grades mean on transcripts we'll say oh by the way the auction off grades like and I make that all clear I don't lie about it and I start the university and to my surprise a bunch of people enroll in it and they start buying their grades and then employers for some reason hire them even though like I haven't lied I'm like look it's weird but I think that's perfectly permissible so it's like I can always find a way to sell that thing in a permissible way even if I can point to be wrong to do so is there anything that is permissible to sell now or we think of as permissible that you think should not be look I had there's probably a number of cases where I say oh we shouldn't sell that thing in that particular way the new garth brooks album probably should not be for sale my only objection to some things out on the market I'd have to I'd have to sit and think but but my gut tells me that probably there's a bunch of things where I say don't sell it that way sell it differently like arms deals that you might like let's sell a bunch of weapons to this particular dictatorship oh yeah nuclear weapons just simply should not be for sale period right and when you have them yeah when the US and other countries strong claim when the US and other countries make sales of certain arms I think probably they shouldn't can you give one away for free no no I mean okay so I think we have before given a nuclear like maybe hey here's a free nuclear weapon is real I mean I have no idea maybe because I think nuclear disarmament is a good idea all around the world but that brings a question about about practicality because you raise a little bit is like I think the really clear and excellent part of the book which is very good is you say you sort of clean out the cobwebs and say your objections to this thing being bought so most of them have actually not about the thing they're about other effects that are come with the thing so we will just say we can regulate that market in a different way and fix that problem so if your problem is as you said the kidneys you can't sell kidney under $30,000 all this stuff but is that a realistic thing to expect from government maybe one reason we don't actually have that market in some of these things is because I mean I'm Libertarian I don't really expect government to do a good job of fixing all these little problems that we may have with the distribution and with whether it has effects for poor whether they're being exploited and so we just don't have a market in that and so realistically we just prohibit a market because we can't fix it yeah there's two senses in which a system could be unrealistic I was just writing about this because we boss van der Waas and I've been writing about open borders and people say that's not realistic because people don't support it right so there's two senses of the realism one is the policy isn't going to happen because people don't like it and the reason they don't like it is because they don't understand it and that might be that's the case for a lot of policies they don't understand the market so they're not going to vote for it they're not going to support and the politicians will cater to it and that's a problem but the way you fix that is hopefully by informing people though if you read my other recent book I don't think that's going to work either but then there's another sense of your realism where it's like the reason this isn't going to work is because all of the incentives are wrong like if you have the policy in place then the incentives would cause people to create conflict so that's why like communism is unrealistic because the incentives are all wrong and the things that we're advocating don't have that problem they have the problem of lack of support but they don't have the problem of creating bad incentives that undermine the very institutions so if we could wave a magic wand and legalize or kidney sales and legalize prostitution and legalize a bunch of other things we think should be legalized and then like and then we forbid people from changing those laws those markets would operate just fine they don't have any kind of internal dynamic that it's problematic inherently problematic and in addition Trevor I mean that magic wand it's like the courts so let's take a concrete case the case of human bone marrow right the DC circuit Court of Appeals for the what is it Ninth Circuit Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals okay that that order in 2012 a case was brought before them by the Institute for Justice and they ruled that it is permissible it's legal for people to be compensated for giving a bone marrow donation provided that they use a procedure called aphoresis rather than aspiration aspiration is the giant needle that goes in your hip and then we suck out the bone marrow aphoresis is you get injected with a synthetic protein called filgrastum I think it is and then we take like a regular blood donation and then we separate out the baby bone marrow from the rest the rest goes back into you and we keep the bone marrow so at issue before that court was whether or not that's too close to like just basically paying somebody for blood for it to be illegal for one to be illegal but the other one to be legal and the court did find in favor of the Institute for Justice and the plaintiffs in that in that particular court case and so now it is legal in the U.S. to compensate people for bone marrow a former student of mine Doug started a company called hemios which unfortunately this year went under so it went under it couldn't it couldn't put the fight because it takes a lot of resources but it's available and it's a legal option right now in the United States it's only a matter of time before some company comes along and begins to compensate people for bone marrow and so now the question of like market design is top of mind for a lot of these companies so in the broader picture you mentioned sort of Peter that the first in a 27 part series about marketing this first one is whatever you know but what is this getting into the commodification area because I've always thought that objections to money were a huge part of objections to capitalism and if I and if someone said you know that the only reason I'm a doctor is because I want to go to the strip club every night and make it rain they would kind of think that that was bad but if it's like only reason my doctor is to buy fine art they're like oh that's okay but money allows you to do either one of those things so it seems kind of crappy you learn all these objections like the meaning of money what did you learn about markets broader for like the general libertarian thesis even if this is not a libertarian book like what we can how we can communicate or what we can like focus on better when we're just talking about how markets can make lives better yeah I think the main thing is like if you're making purely economic arguments what's going to happen is you'll win because the economic arguments are right but the other side will always shift it over to moral arguments where they're going to say yeah that works but it's bad and you really do have to be able to make those moral arguments so this book I think you know my former book why not capitalism and others they're there to meet them on their own terms and you have to play their game and you have to play it play it better but then what the thing the biggest thing we learned I think about markets is just how how often the meaning of money and the meaning of markets can change and how much variation there is and in a sense the other people on the other side their complaints are extremely parochial it's like they've seen very little of what markets can be and how money can work and so their complaints are based upon that at most and often misunderstanding even the small tiny sphere of the world that they're seeing I also just to add I think it would be wise for libertarians to focus a bit more on business ethics and here's what I mean by that right like here's a question should prostitution be allowed the answer I think is yes and libertarians are going to say yes but there is a separate question about how you go about buying and selling sex and it is true that there are better and worse ways from a moral point of view to offer sex for sale right once you realize that like when I say that a company shouldn't be selling sex or shouldn't be selling tickets or whatever in that particular way when I make a kind of moral objection to that particular bit of behavior I'm not suggesting that it should be illegal right I'm not saying oh the government should come in and like regulated and make it be in accordance with my own conception of the right way to buy and sell sex that's not that's not the point but being neutral or like leaving it up to the market to decide how people buy and sell all of these like sensitive things I think I don't think there's any reason for us to be silent about those particular issues I think we should be vocal about like no this is the wrong way of selling this thing it should be sold in this way rather this other way yeah I mean it's weird because if you think about the history of libertarian thinkers none of the major important libertarian thinkers have believed the following that all morality is is about rights that's reduced simply to the question of rights right nevertheless it's very common among say libertarian lay people to sort of talk about as if all that is there that's all there is to morality and it's not yeah I mean the resistance to like is it a moral obligation for me to pull the child out of the puddle I think if anything is obviously a moral obligation it's that one it's hard to resist the obviousness of it I think too many people kind of look at that case and if it's an obligation then they think that my view is that the government should enforce baby saving but of course that doesn't follow that's a non sequitur right so the fact that it's an obligation that you pull the baby out out of the you know keep the baby from drowning doesn't mean that you need to institute good Samaritan laws so you don't have to deny the strong intuition that probably most people except for like maybe sociopaths or psychopaths feel that like yes obviously I have an obligation here you don't have to deny it to avoid the conclusion that government should institute it thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and Evan Banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org