ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explain the moral case for the limitation of market expansion. It provides a discussion on limits against a broader look at the idea of limits in economic theory and markets themselves. The chapter examines various conceptual frameworks that might delimit and justify the boundaries of market transactions. There is a wider social and political argument that decentralized markets foster innovation and dynamism, are the best mechanism of satisfying people's preferences, and that they help promote individualism, freedom and pluralism. The criticism of market transactions are grounded on the idea of exploitation, 'coercion' and the reduction of the autonomy of market participants. The argument for ethical limits to markets, rests on the conviction that there are certain moral, religious, aesthetic, cultural, civil and political 'goods' that should not be thought of in market terms. Far from offering resistance to the inexorable growth of commodification culture, cognitive capacities and 'the social' are all being mobilized to support it.
