Teaching, Preaching and Queaching about Commodities

Abstract

<p>In the <i>Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals</i>, Kant famously distinguishes between those goods which should be available on the market and those which should not, with his disjunctive dictum that everything has either a market price or a dignity: "If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an <i>equivalent</i>" if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has a dignity."' The trouble with this approach is that without further detail it is insufficiently precise: neither my grandmother nor my loyal aged Blue Heeler cattle dog should be sold, but for different reasons. Value is more diverse than Kant's two-fold classification would suggest-it cannot do justice to the complexity of the human experience of valuing.² Nonetheless, Kant's edict provides a good starting point for our inquiry, for it gives voice to a puzzle which is the central concern of this paper, namely, how might we determine the proper range of the market.</p>