Introduction

In his recent book What Money Can’t Buy, Michael Sandel offers a long series of things he believes should not be for sale—prison cell upgrades, access to the car pool lane during rush hour, foreign surrogate mothers to carry one’s baby, the right to immigrate to the United States, so-called concierge medicine, holding one’s place in line, and so on (2012: Introduction and passim). Another of the things he argues should not be for sale is attendance to papal masses. As he reports, when Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to the United States in 2008, tickets to the limited-seating event were distributed for free by local dioceses and parishes. Because the demand was so high, however, scalping went on, with tickets selling for hundreds of dollars apiece (ibid.: 37). To justify his objection and motivate centralized restrictions on markets in some goods and services, Sandel makes his own use of the concept of “respect”: “Treating religious rituals, or natural wonders, as marketable commodities is a failure of respect. Turning sacred goods into instruments of profit values them in the wrong way” (ibid.).

Socialist Respect

But Sandel has misplaced the proper object of respect. It is not the goods that deserve respect. It is the people. It is people who have dignity as moral agents, not the things that they create or exchange. Material and inert things have no intrinsic value at all; they have only the value that moral agents grant them. Proper respect should begin, then, with respecting the agents who are making choices. If you ban some of their associations, or if your forbid them from engaging in activities or transactions with which you disagree, then, whatever your goals or intentions, you disrespect them.