Contested Commodities

While I disagree with some of the details Radin's fundamental insight is sound. Whereas human value systems are characterized by value-pluralism (see for example Concepts and Categories, Isaiah Berlin, Princeton Univ. Press) business and capitalism require value monism (i.e., utility is a scalar) and are in contradiction with one another. Technically, the error in capitalism is that utility should be a vector rather than a scalar like money. (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern, Princeton Univ. Press, 1944, pgs 19-20)

Radin deals thoughtfully with some virgin territory in legal and social theory -- the question of what theoretical grounds might underlie the common intuition that some valued (indeed cherished) things should be treated by the law as (in whole or in part) "not for sale." Such items as children, body parts, sexual relations, votes, opinions, and the like are among the candidates for this status, and many things that are traded on markets have commerce in them restricted for reasons that relate neither to market efficiency nor fair distribution, but rather to the transformation in meaning (and ultimately value) that can occur when it something is treated as a commodity. Radin's discussion of these novel issues does not resolve them in any simple way, but better than anything else on the subject reveals how sticky they can be. T. Gre