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Thank you. through givewell.org slash rationally speaking. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and today's episode is with Professor Michael Sandell.

He is a political philosopher at Harvard.

And like my last episode, this one has roughly two halves.

The first half is about one of Michael's books from 2012 titled, What Money Can't Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets.

And the second half is about his most recent book from this year titled The Tyranny of Merit, What's Become of the Common Good?

So starting with What Money Can't Buy, one of the main arguments that he makes in that book is that there are some things that maybe we shouldn't

allow people to buy and sell. For example, should we allow people to sell their blood or their

kidneys? Should we allow companies to pay for advertising space in public schools, or pay

individuals to tattoo advertisements on their body? And his main argument is that allowing these

kinds of things to be bought and sold can have a harmful corrupting effect on norms in society.

That, for example, paying people to donate blood might undermine our

collective sense of blood donation as this noble altruistic act, and that can actually reduce

people's willingness to give blood. And then also more broadly, that allowing markets in

goods like the ones I mentioned can degrade these general norms

in society like our sense of civic duty or the sacredness of education.

And also that such markets can even degrade human dignity.

And as you'll hear in the upcoming conversation, I'm particularly interested in this idea of

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