ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I evaluate the arguments offered by philosophical anti-commodification (PAC) theorists, and specifically the corruption and equality arguments they offer against the sale of contested commodities. I highlight the normative and empirical challenges each of these arguments face and go on to propose a view that promises to avoid these problems by grounding the limits of markets in a politically liberal theory of justice. In the first part of the chapter, I evaluate corruption-based PAC argument and argue that they depend on claims either empirically unsound or morally suspect as grounds for criminal legislation in a pluralist society. In the second part of the chapter, I examine equality-based PAC arguments and argue that they cannot tell us which goods should not be sold (as opposed to merely telling us how goods in general should not be sold) without appealing to corruption claims of their own. In the final part of the chapter, I offer a brief defence of an account I refer to as a justice-based PAC argument, according to which the goods that are wrong to commodify are those whose sale would be precluded by the principles of justice that would be endorsed by free and equal citizens committed to diverse and incompatible conceptions of the good. This view offers an argument against the sale of contested commodities consistent with the aims of philosophical anti-commodification theory, but equally with the commitments of a liberal democratic state.
