Sunday, October 28, 2012

Money too has its limits!


Unlike many of us, Michael Sandel is worried about our having drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.  The drift is indeed discerning as people sucked into market economy are rarely conscious of the reasons for their behavior. Simply put, beyond a point market stops short of being freedom of choice and instead creates conditions which exert a kind of coercion on consumers! No wonder, therefore, people rely more on markets and less on morals in making a judgement. Else, why would we pay children to get good grades or pay people to donate organs or pay for lobbyists to favor decisions?

Our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has apparently led markets into the spheres of life where they don’t belong. From prison cell upgrade in the US to hiring services of surrogate mothers in India and from the right to shoot an endangered black rhino in South Africa to renting out space on your forehead in New Zealand, each for a price, illustrate the manner in which even criminal justice, family life, environmental protection and personal privacy have been corrupted.

Without taking a moral high ground, the author argues that markets tend to crowd out morals and that there is serious case for us to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships and everyday lives. In addition to raising moral and ethical issues, the question that marketisation of society widens the already existing divide between people of means and those without is equally crucial.

As market continues to explore new avenues for its expansion, the onus will be on us to analyze that putting a price tag on which things will undermine their function and relationship in society. Neither can friendship be bought nor are children sold, despite both being lucrative from a market perspective. Such transactions, even if feasible and acceptable, violate the moral ground of human relationships and neither is good for democracy.

What money can’t buy is all about moral and ethical question of what can be bought and sold in the market. However, it lets the reader ponder over the last question: Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?...Link

What Money Can’t Buy
by Michael Sandel
Allen Lane, UK
244 pages, UK£ 20.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Consistent inconsistencies

‘Why everyone else is a hypocrite’, with else prominently popping up, indicts the reader as the veritable point of reference. No offence therein because being ignorant, wrong, irrational and hypocritical can make one feel better off than being knowledgeable, correct, reasonable and consistent. No wonder, there are any number of people around us who died famous, wealthy, and wrong.

Teasing and amusing at the same time, ‘Why everyone else is a hypocrite’ is about mutually inconsistent contradictions in human brains. Using principles of evolutionary psychology, Robert Kurzban has cleverly confirmed the Greek definition of hypocrite as someone who ‘pretends to be better than he really is, virtuous without really being so.’ And there are reasons for people to have double take on matters because they desire to have the best of both worlds.

Mind is wired to generate behavioral inconsistencies. Explaining the functioning of modular mind through evolution, Kurzban reveals that the mind generates contradictory beliefs, vacillating behaviors and inflated egos at the same time. Our modular minds didn't evolve for consistency, but for patchwork multitasking such that at any given time we should think of ourselves not as ‘I’ but as ‘we’ – a set of interacting systems that are in constant conflict.

This might be one reason that politicians appear to be such hypocrites. In reality, however, politicians may not actually be much more hypocritical than the rest of us. It is just that the rest of us skate by without anyone noticing. Politicians, on the other hand, have to offer genuine sounding rationalization to wriggle out of it. For them, the ultimate rationalization is the phrase, ‘I just couldn't help myself.’

Loaded with humorous anecdotes, this book is an attempt to explain why we act the way we act, and, perhaps partly in our defense, to show that if we are wrong a lot, well, being right isn't everything. Explaining varied implications of our consistent minds, Robert Kurzban reveals why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else (including you yourself) is a hypocrite and will continue to be so whether or not anyone likes it....Link

Why everyone else is a hypocrite
by Robert Kurzban
Princeton University Press, New Jersey
274 pages, US $ 17.34