Working around repugnance

The first type of economic analysis is supportive of ‘commodification’ in the sense of designing/supporting market exchange of goods and services commonly or previously considered outside the domain of commerce/exchange such as kidneys or human eggs. In designing new mechanisms to allocate valuable scarce resources, this project has generated social benefits in many spheres from health to the labour market for doctors (Roth and Peranson, Reference Roth and Peranson1999).

This type of economic analysis does not directly engage with moral attitudes or preferences as the reasons for repugnance, rather analyses their consequences. Nobel laureate Alvin Roth's work is a good example for this line of economic work. ‘Roth argues that economists can treat the fact that people view certain markets as “repugnant” as a constraint on market design, akin to a technological or information constraint’ (Hausman et al., Reference Hausman, McPherson and Satz2016: 97).

Market design is sometimes confronted with repugnance in the sense that significant groups of people resist or object to the introduction of markets. How do economists work around this? The cultural and temporal variance of repugnance implies that market design requires context-specific analyses. In this mode of analysis, the economist takes the sentiments of repugnance as given preferences or accounts for them as moral costs; engages in quantifying or measuring repugnance, as it affects characteristics of explicit markets and other resource allocation mechanisms. The models often represent analytically sophisticated social science or ‘technical’ policy analysis.

To accept and work around moral attitudes in a given society as exogenous constraints implies the perspective of a (mechanism) designer or (institutional) engineer, a limited ambition to give advice under the guise of technical efficiency and instrumental rationality, rather than grand theory. These are relatively humble interpretations of the job of an economist. The theorist tries to remain objective, neutral, or morally agnostic, adopting an external perspective, taking social morality as given. In short, Roth (Reference Roth2007) styles repugnance as a constraint in market design.

Occasionally, however, proponents of commodification go beyond mechanism design and provide an indirect challenge to these preferences of repugnance. Thus, Roth (Reference Roth2007: 54) assigns economists an ‘educational role of pointing to inefficiencies and trade-offs’.

Making sense of repugnance

The second type of economic analysis goes further and directly engages with anti-commodification arguments. This line of research is more wholeheartedly normative and concerns the significance of repugnance as a heuristic for good (instrumental or moral) reasons for limiting (market) transactions. To be sure, not only economists but researchers from other disciplines work at articulating (good and bad) reasons against commodification. They articulate these reasons, i.e. not only lament over or argue against commodification but try to make sense of sentiments of repugnance. In the last decades, philosophers such as Anderson (Reference Anderson1993), Radin (Reference Radin1996), Satz (Reference Satz2010), Sandel (Reference Sandel2012) have taken the lead on this enterprise but Musgrave's work on merit goods (Reference Musgrave, Eatwell, Milgate and Newman1987) could also be interpreted as an economist's engagement with anti-commodification sentiments in this mode. Furthermore, without explicitly talking about it, economists who suggest regulatory models for the exchange of ‘contested commodities’ such as body parts or sexwork also do so by identifying institutional solutions to actual or possible market failures. For instance, Becker and Elìas (Reference Becker and Elìas2007: 3) start the argument for legalising monetary incentives for organ donations, thus: ‘When an economist sees a persistent gap between demand and supply – as in the demand for and supply of organs for transplants – the next step is usually to look for obstacles to equilibrating that market.’

Unlike the first type of analysis, those who argue in this second mode do not simply take social attitudes as given but engage in both empirical and normative argument about which cases and forms of repugnance matter, and point out unintended consequences of markets or legal bans on markets. In explicating these grounds, the analyst assigns different degrees of normative relevance to ‘repugnance’. Some of them are ‘market failures’ that are easily overcome. To the objection that ‘payment for organ donations from living individuals would encourage impulsive and reckless provision of organs, because donors would not be able to calculate the risks involved’, Becker and Elìas (Reference Becker and Elìas2007: 21) respond: ‘We would require that donors be informed fully in writing and in person of the risks during surgery, the length of the recovery period, and other possible risks. If impulsive donations were a problem, a few weeks cooling off period could be required to give donors sufficient time to change their minds.’ Others discuss the consequences of introducing incentives in domains and contexts originally governed by internal motivation, the so-called ‘crowding out’ effect (Grant, Reference Grant2012; Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 39–40).

Some philosophers, in reconstructing the reasons behind repugnance, also build on economic analysis, insofar as they explore not only moral but also instrumental grounds for social attitudes against either the alienability or the market exchange of certain goods and services. This line of analysis promises to rationalise these sentiments and corresponding social norms and contribute to public discourse on policy decisions on economic activity. This is one of the modes how philosopher Debra Satz (Reference Satz2010) characterises and analyses ‘noxious markets’. Her arguments belong to economics insofar as they articulate the reasons against commodification in terms of instrumental reasons that are familiar to economists (externalities, information asymmetries, and other market failures).

Arguably, philosophers' arguments are also relevant for economics insofar as they rationalise sentiments of repugnance in terms of public normative reasons such as justice, rights, or dignity: these are relevant analytical categories for any public policy, hence also to economics as policy science. For instance, Musgrave (Reference Musgrave, Eatwell, Milgate and Newman1987: 453) engaged in the same exercise when he tentatively rationalised anti-commodification sentiments in terms of Rawlsian basic goods, i.e., an argument from justice.

An important kind of repugnance stems from contingent background conditions of inequality and therefore, at least in principle, is easy to reconceptualise as a matter of distributive justice. As several analysts have observed, some goods are withheld from a pure market allocation because allocating them ‘through the prevailing distribution of wealth is highly undesirable to a significant number of people’ (Calabresi, Reference Calabresi2016: 26). In Calabresi's welfarist language, for these goods, ‘it is the capacity of the rich to outbid the poor that renders their allocation through the ordinary market unacceptable, utility diminishing, and therefore, “costly” to many people’ (ibid.). More generally, ‘in some cases, objections against commodification stem more from excessive inequalities of power, gender or wealth rather than from markets as such’ (Hodgson, Reference Hodgson2021: 159) Conversely, the idea is that objections to commodification would disappear with a less inequal wealth distribution. Or at least, as long as repugnance of commodification derives not from objections against (market-)alienability per se, rationalisation can point at the root of the problem. Many economists exclude questions of justice from the domain of economics: ‘[o]n this an economist has little to say, except as an ordinary citizen’ (Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 57). In section ‘Why we need two distinct stages of rationalisation’, I return to this strategy of rationalisation and discuss the range of relevant reasons that economists may or should consider. In sum, this second line of economic analysis explicates repugnance as a heuristic for good reasons for limiting (market) transactions.

Explaining away repugnance

The above line of anti-commodification arguments has given rise to a third stance that could be called anti-anti-commodification: a range of sometimes subversive responses to both social morality and moralised critics of markets. Rather than rationalising anti-market sentiments, representatives of the third type of analysis challenge them on both conceptual and empirical grounds. As opposed to the seriousness of the second group, the third one is often refreshingly subversive. Their most distinctive critical contribution is to lay bare the structure of anti-commodification arguments, emphasising the need to disaggregate, operationalise, and eventually empirically test them. In short, they suggest demystifying repugnance: ‘we need to understand the source of those beliefs.’ (Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 35).

One way of ‘understanding’ is by providing (or at least referring to) naturalistic accounts of repugnance in the sense of explaining them in terms of observable empirical (biological or psycho-social) facts as opposed to engaging with them in the domain of practical reason, as the second type of economic analysis does. This is a legitimate exercise: other (evolutionary or comparative) disciplines proceed in a similar manner and their insights should not be isolated from or disregarded by economics. Indeed, if the aim is to give a ‘positive’, i.e., descriptive or explanatory account of either the genesis of or changes in sentiments of repugnance and corresponding social norms, that requires a theoretical framework and empirical, possibly cross-cultural data. ‘We must better understand the foundations of morality and our fears about the commercialization of certain domains. That is what the academic community seeks to do’ (Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 46–47).

This ‘positive’ account is often accompanied by an implicit and often explicit criticism of these sentiments as irrational and hence rationally indefensible, following the slogan: there is no room for ‘romance’ in economics (cf. Buchanan, Reference Buchanan2003).

Nor is there room for ‘hypocrisy’ in rational market design. This is how Jean Tirole (Reference Tirole2017: 50) argues:

The conceptual work in this third mode of analysis is largely negative: it engages with anti-commodification arguments in order to ‘debunk’ them, implicitly or explicitly, as irrational. More positively, it is typically combined with institutional design claims, i.e., arguments as to ways to meet practical or instrumental objections to commodification.

To cite two examples, Brennan and Jaworski's more measured philosophical paper (Reference Brennan and Jaworski2015) and lively popular book on the subject (Markets without Limits, Reference Brennan and Jaworski2016) suggest deconstructing repugnance in this manner. On a smaller scale and in a simpler fashion, Becker and Elías (Reference Becker and Elìas2007: 21–22) respond to ethical objections to introducing payments for organ transplants by a similar combination of debunking and institutional design.

Brennan and Jaworski acknowledge that there are things that it is (morally) wrong to own in the first place (e.g., child pornography). The main target of their critique is the ‘asymmetry thesis’, namely that there are important goods that one can legitimately gift but cannot sell. As one of their characteristic slogans says: ‘if you can do it for free, you can do it for money’. They devote much of their work to debunking arguments against the use of money in those contexts where a free gift of the good/service would be unproblematic. They discuss this along with a related anti-commodification argument, the so-called ‘semiotic objection’. I shall comment further on this analytical strategy in section ‘Should there be a third stage of rationalisation?’.

When it comes to institutional design, they concede that ‘some things should only be bought and sold in regulated or highly regulated markets’ (Brennan and Jaworski, Reference Brennan and Jaworski2015: 1058). The beginning of institutional design is to identify those market parameters that would allow to sell what is otherwise legitimately alienable. A large part of their argument is to demonstrate that as long as anti-commodification arguments target contingent features of specific markets, these can be defused one by one. They claim that the rational core of anti-commodification arguments is nothing else but a list of contingent features of certain (actual or mostly hypothetical) markets ‘that could be designed out of the market or regulated away’ (Brennan and Jaworski, Reference Brennan and Jaworski2015: 1058). If there are valid objections to certain market practices, such as information asymmetry, unequal bargaining power, or exploitation, careful institutional design based on cost–benefit analysis should eliminate those.

This ambitious version of the anti-anti-commodification stance suggests that for every good and service, there is a possible set of parameters that would allow to design a morally unobjectionable market. Yet, it remains to be seen whether this is possible in every significant case. In fact, we are justifiably sceptical about this: ‘the authors have not shown that there is a policy proposal that could create a market that would assuage all the worries of the anti-commodification theorists. It may be true that one moral evil, say rights violations, could be fixed by fine-tuning one feature of a market. However, it does not follow that there is a policy that could modify all the market dials in such a way as to avoid the array of moral concerns that motivate the anti-commodification theorists’ (Stout and Carothers, Reference Stout and Carothers2016: 206).

Why we need two distinct stages of rationalisation

While all three types of economic analysis introduce certain conceptual or terminological innovations in the service of different aspects of theory-building, the redefinition strategy we discuss here implies rationalising cases of anti-market objections by rephrasing them in terms of underlying instrumental and moral reasons that can be discussed in reasonable public deliberation. More broadly, we refer to rationalisation here as the process of distinguishing what is a ‘healthy’ gut reaction (a heuristic that stands for and can be given a rational justification) and what is moral panic or self-serving misinformation. An important contribution of economic theory to public discourse is the rationalisation of moral sentiments of ‘repugnance’ in terms of intelligible practical reasons for action. This eliminative redefinition strategy is arguably a reasonable method to channel the substantive problem of repugnance into economic analysis. I suggest distinguishing two stages of this strategy.

The first seemingly easy stage of this ‘redefinition’ of repugnance is in terms of instrumental reasons against certain (trans)actions within a standard economic framework. As long as anti-market sentiments are supervenient on negative third-party effects, specific transaction costs, and/or informational imperfections, the limitation of market transactions is considered economically justified: they remedy market failures.

If it can be shown that the opposition to or the lack of some (legal) markets is explicable not only by adherence to sacred values or unintelligible feelings but by (ordinary) market failures (information asymmetry, externality, or ‘internality’) then repugnance is rationalised, i.e., made tractable in terms that are not only familiar to economists but intelligible to any reasonable person.

This stage of the eliminative strategy provides both epistemic and practical benefits.

As far as epistemic benefits are concerned, this stage is conceptually easy but often technically complex. To the extent that we discuss these matters within economics, there is an epistemic benefit in formulating these in the ordinary terms of economic analysis. In other words, if there are reasonable arguments for limiting the scope of markets and invalidating certain kind of transactions that are based on structural or other features of a specific market, in demonstrable consequences of commodification, etc., then we should not assign independent weight to anti-commodification sentiments. When it comes to a rational assessment of sentiments of repugnance, we need both empirical data on the presence and strength of such effects and conceptual and normative tools to analyse and eventually criticise such sentiments – as not all of them deserve respect, let alone legal sanctions. Indeed, it is an open empirical matter whether in a specific context there are indeed demonstrable relevant market failures such as tangible negative external effects (Krawiec, Reference Krawiec2022).

As far as practical benefits are concerned, this strategy provides a common denominator or overlapping consensus for public policy in the context of reasonable ethical disagreements, even though the identification of market failures does not make this rationalisation strategy ethically neutral.Footnote ¹

A further practical benefit becomes clear when we consider its implications for institutional design, more particularly, the practical task of designing incentive-compatible institutions for large anonymous groups. To assume, as ordinary economics does, that even self-regarding rational agents would want to regulate the matter (as a market failure) serves as an incentive-compatibility constraint in an exercise of institutional design (Kornhauser, Reference Kornhauser2002).

To be sure, this argument is subject to some potential complications. As mentioned in the Introduction, economic analysis does not simply map human behaviour into analytical categories; it has an impact (‘performative effect’) both on outward behaviour and arguably on motivation as well. Discussing attitudes of repugnance in public as ‘justified’, ‘misguided’, ‘worthy of respect’, or ‘irrational’ may have an impact on the prevalence and expression of these very attitudes, irrespective of any actual policy. The analysis of these performative effects is beyond the scope of this paper.

In sum, the first stage of the eliminative redefinition strategy could be seen as a ‘realist’ reconstruction of what ‘really’ goes on behind a surface of moralistic ‘cheap talk’ or ‘hypocrisy’ (Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 50), namely market failures.

A more radical formulation would be to claim that moral repugnance is a contingent fact about the attitudes of a particular culture (or social group) with little or no independent normative weight. As we have seen, this is the core of the anti-anti-commodification arguments. It is certainly true that not all sentiments (of repugnance) deserve respect, let alone legal sanction: ‘disgust is an unreliable source of moral knowledge’ (Brennan and Jaworski, Reference Brennan and Jaworski2021: 172); ‘feelings of revulsion are an unreliable source of ethical inspiration’ (Tirole, Reference Tirole2017: 46–47). Furthermore, one could make the case that, at least in the context of a market economy, the ‘anti-romantic’ impulse of economics is a good presumption for institutional design, in terms of where the burden of argument should lie. Anti-market sentiments need to be rationally scrutinised and a compelling moral or prudential case against commodification or privatisation is required.

However, this should be seen as an invitation to a second stage of rationalisation, rather than a debunking argument against moral limits to markets shortcutting rational discussion.Footnote ² This second stage of rationalisation is distinct from the first one because, as a conceptual matter, not all reasons against commodification can be properly analysed in terms of preferences or costs only.

As we have seen above, as long as the sentiments of repugnance derive from underlying inequalities, at a minimum economic analysis can identify the root of the problem. The second stage of this strategy, however, requires economists to engage in a rational critique of repugnance even outside the conventional welfarist normative framework. The morally and prudentially justified parameters of interpersonal transactions need to go beyond considerations of welfare and need to be formulated in terms of rights and justice (Shiffrin, Reference Shiffrin2000; Stone, Reference Stone2014). Economists who follow the eliminative redefinition strategy are bound to engage in moral reasoning of a certain kind. It concerns identifying non-instrumental or non-welfarist moral reasons for not engaging in or collectively prohibiting certain transactions.

Economists and economically minded legal scholars sometimes conceptualise the fact that some people find certain conducts morally offensive or simply disgusting, in terms of other-regarding preferences or ‘moral externalities’ and argue for including them in an instrumentalist policy analysis in terms of social welfare. These ‘moral externalities’ would in turn potentially justify public intervention. Thus, Shavell argues that ‘the existence of moral beliefs should itself influence the design of the law, given that moral beliefs constitute tastes the satisfaction of which raises individuals’ welfare’ (Shavell, Reference Shavell2002: 255). In a working paper on ‘Moral Commitments in Cost-Benefit Analysis’, Posner and Sunstein (Reference Posner and Sunstein2017) explicitly discuss how and why moral externalities should be included in a welfarist calculus for public policy purposes. This is not a mere academic exercise – they are suggesting specific operational methods of making and justifying public decisions that have serious real-world consequences. They argue that third-party preferences, motivated by moral commitments, and measured by willingness to pay, should, as far as practicable, be part of any cost–benefit analysis pursued by administrative agencies. For instance, the question how much social benefits are attached to protecting dolphins depends not only on the direct ‘welfare effects’ of the policy but also on the ‘moral effects’ on those who care about dolphins.

Like any welfare-based theory, reductive redefinitions face difficulties in delimiting, in a non-arbitrary manner, the kinds of third-party effects that would justify a welfare-enhancing intervention. Third-party effects are potentially infinite and practically incalculable. Once one goes beyond tangible harms to third parties, many activities might be viewed as generating some externality. But as externalities are ubiquitous, regulators need additional criteria to determine what kind of externalities matter and how much weight should be attached to them. Welfare-based analyses alone do not provide tools for selecting between relevant and irrelevant externalities. Without further analytical tools, economics cannot determine what to do with moral repugnance.

Furthermore, the reduction of moral beliefs and attitudes to preferences or costs flattens the normative landscape, and as such is problematic both analytically and normatively. The reductionist way of talking about values as tastes and moral commitments as costs conflates categories. As Zamir summarised, ‘There is a fundamental difference between preferences and normative judgments. Individuals have the final say on the content of their preferences, but their judgments may be sound, or unsound. Whether a judgment is right or not depends on its justifications, not on the number of its supporters or the intensity of their support’ (Zamir, Reference Zamir2017: 116). Judgements, including moral judgements, are, and should be, aggregated differently than preferences. Beliefs can be updated in response to new information and there is scope for rational argument about what is the case, i.e. what is the right course of action. This is clearly not the case with matters of taste or preferences, understood as raw data about desires. When attitudes of repugnance indicate (sound or unsound) moral judgement they should be analysed as such.

When economists use the same assumptions but extend from positive to hypothetical normative or policy analysis, they unjustifiably simplify the normative landscape to a single dimension of commensurable value – ironically exemplifying the very idea that was repugnant in the first place. While some cases of repugnance may be plausibly analysed in terms of costs or externalities, the reduction of moral reasons to externalities is bound with both practical (the ubiquity of third-party effects) and conceptual problems (the distinctness of values and preferences).

For instance, one might support a universal entitlement to basic education irrespective of family income not out of repugnance for a market in education services but out of a commitment to equality of opportunity (as a requirement of justice or dignity). To be sure, in a next, instrumental step, one might discuss whether a tax-funded public school system, school vouchers, or some other policy is the most adequate instrument to achieve this goal. Equality of opportunity may also be considered a desirable principle of public policy in terms of its consequences. Yet equality of opportunity is not a mere ‘moral preference’ or the lack of it a ‘moral cost’.

The simplicity of reductionist accounts is attractive: all justified limits on market transactions can be expressed in terms of preferences and costs, i.e., without relaxing the usual assumptions of economics about individual rationality or resorting to non-consequentialist normative arguments of fairness, justice, or autonomy. Yet this simplicity comes at a cost of theoretical fruitfulness and practical relevance.

The reductionist promise to reduce all normative concerns to welfare is double-edged. If repugnance is a preference, then within the framework of economic analysis there is no rational basis for questioning or disregarding it. If repugnance is an externality and externality as a market failure is a pro tanto reason for regulation market transactions, then from a purely welfarist economic perspective, there is no principled limit to analytically welfarist but substantively moralistic interventions in the name of these attitudes, whether morally defensible or not.

Many cases of repugnance against commodification or alienability ‘are better explained by the idea that exchange of the relevant entitlement injures some fundamental interest of the restricted agent not captured by his utility function, or some social interest that cannot be translated into material or pecuniary terms’ (Hermalin et al., Reference Hermalin, Katz, Craswell, Polinsky and Shavell2007: 47–48).

In response to this argument against reducing repugnance to preferences and costs, an anonymous referee formulated the following argument:

The implication seems to be that there is no way out of analysing repugnance in instrumental terms. Imposing inalienability rules is either naïve or hypocritical (perhaps populist) – it will not eliminate the problematic transactions or practices.

The argument partly misfires and partly proves too much. My argument above is primarily conceptual and only secondarily one of institutional design. The objection is only concerned with the latter. In that regard, the question whether and how certain legal and cultural norms are enforced is indeed a legitimate subject of economic analysis and any realistic moral argument should also take enforcement costs into account. As mentioned above, incentive-compatibility is a relevant, indeed key, ingredient in public policymaking. Yet this is not a specific problem of laws expressing repugnance or making goods. Economists may and indeed do contest the wisdom of absolute bans on markets or transactions of certain kinds, e.g., prohibitions of certain types of anticompetitive behaviour. But when such a rule is in place, most economists do not (publicly) argue in such radically realist terms as to supporting disregarding them. In sum, while sound institutional design cannot disregard consequences, sound conceptual analysis cannot disregard categorical distinctions.

In a more conciliatory mode, one could rephrase the disagreement about the necessity of the second stage as one of disciplinary boundaries and competences. A rational analysis of repugnance requires input from both philosophy and economics.

Should there be a third stage of rationalisation?

After carving out what is the result of a market failure (first stage) and what independent moral reasons require, in terms of rights, justice, or dignity (second stage), there might remain an unanalysed and partly unanalysable residual ‘unease’ with certain transactions, linked to moral intuitions or gut feelings of repugnance.

Tirole argues that even here, some degree of rationalisation is possible, although perhaps of a different, explanatory, kind:

What we are concerned with here is whether the third kind of economic analysis indeed fully explains away repugnance, or should we rather engage in a third stage of rationalisation.

Philosophers Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski go full length with the first two stages of rationalisation discussed in the previous section. A key feature of their argument is an analysis and critique of some of those sentiments of repugnance that cannot be rationalised in terms of market failures or non-instrumental moral reasons, i.e., are irreducible to the former categories.

As mentioned in section ‘Three types of economic analysis of repugnance’, they also devote much of their analytical energy to arguing against the ‘asymmetry thesis’, namely that there are goods that one may legitimately give away for free but should not sell. They also identify and refute what they call the ‘semiotic objection’ to markets, as the main underlying argument for the asymmetry thesis they attempt to refute. They formulate the objection in abstract terms:

Their response to the objection is disarmingly simple. The semiotics of markets is temporarily and culturally variable: markets themselves carry social meanings that are local and contingent ‘and not written into the moral fabric of the universe. […] What market exchanges mean depends upon a culture's interpretative practices. […] [T]hese interpretative practices are themselves subject to moral evaluation and […] there can be better or worse interpretive practices’ (Brennan and Jaworski, Reference Brennan and Jaworski2015: 1057).

Indeed, the social meaning of institutional practices is both contingent and dynamic and to some extent subject to deliberate change. Think about how the ‘meaning’ of marriage has changed in the last decades. Social norms and interpretative schemata attached to practices change; in some cases, deliberate change through policies and regulatory interventions is possible.

This is, in fact, common ground among scholars discussing the moral limits of markets. At this stage, it is important to note that the asymmetry thesis is not defended by any of the philosophers Brennan and Jaworski associate it with, such as Sandel, Anderson, Satz, Walzer, and Archard. Furthermore, the essentialist semiotics implied in the ‘semiotic objection’ is rejected by most philosophers who have written on the topic, including those that Brennan and Jaworski claim rely on it. In a recent book, Taylor (Reference Taylor2022) meticulously reconstructed the relevant arguments by these philosophers and showed how Brennan and Jaworski's focus on refuting the implausible asymmetry thesis and semiotic objection has ‘derailed’ the debate on the moral limits of markets. The debate, Taylor argues, is not indeed binary (either certain goods should not be sold, or they may be) and it does not depend on the meaning that those goods ‘essentially’ bear. Taylor's critique of Brennan and Jaworski's is serious if not devastating in exegetical terms but ultimately his argument is constructive. In order to ‘rerail’ the debate, Taylor provides a rich taxonomy of relevant arguments about moral limits of markets, distinguishing inherent and contingent limits, various expressive limits as well as ontological ones. This is all highly relevant for the substantive debate about repugnance and commodification but would go beyond to scope of this paper.

Here I just briefly discuss the last category that Taylor calls ontological limits to markets. This refers to goods or services (such as love or academic recognition) whose very nature precludes them from being bought or sold. If one attempts to buy love or friendship by money what one gets is at best the semblance of it. Academic institutions may not be universally necessary features of flourishing societies; yet allocating academic rewards based on criteria other than merit (let alone willingness to pay) is not merely objectionable in view of (contingent) social norms of academia; rather, if one gets an academic recognition for money, it is at best a simulacrum. One may be able to buy a Nobel prize medal but one can only be awarded the Nobel prize based on merit.

This particular example is, of course, complicated: some honorary titles may be awarded in recognition of a financial contribution; the Nobel committee may stray far from being a trusted and trustworthy judge of (scientific or literary) merit. Furthermore, markets may have an indirect effect on the allocation of some ontologically non-commodifiable goods. Archard (Reference Archard2022: 934) discusses ‘criminal justice and the good of a favourable verdict’ as an example: ‘This good is surely one whose nature is such that it can only be distributed according to norms of procedural fairness. Bribing judges to secure certain verdicts is wrong as allowing such a market would crowd out fair judgments of guilt and innocence. Yet there is a market for professional legal services and the rich can, by paying for the services of better lawyers, have a higher chance than the poor (who cannot afford their services) of being acquitted. There is here no simple market in favourable verdicts, but it remains true that insofar as lawyers trade their services, fair outcomes to trials may tend to be crowded out.’

All this suggests that the social norms and interpretative schemes governing the cultural or moral significance of goods, acts, and practices can be analysed, as Tirole suggests, in reasonable fashion, i.e., guided by the constitutive norms of academia, to enhance understanding. This could indeed be considered a third stage of rationalising repugnance.