Eubulides wrote:
>
>
> Yet in Chapter 4 of Morals by Agreement<2>David Gauthier argues that a
> perfectly competitive market is "a morally free zone", an arena of social
> life in which moral evaluation has no role to play. Gauthier is not
> maintaining that real markets are such morally free zones, but his claim is
> still remarkable. If it were correct, morality would find applicability to
> markets only in virtue of the imperfection of those markets. I find this
> claim difficult to accept and hard to reconcile with comments Gauthier makes
> about real imperfect markets and with his general views on justice. [snip]
[Note: I have a colonoscopy at 9a.m. tomorrow, and all I'm going to be doing all night long (until I leave for the hospital at 8am) is drinking clear fluids and shitting (with occasional naps perhaps). I can't read because I can't see the texts, so in between shitting & slurping I've only this machine in front of me plus palying solitaire to keep me entertained, so I'll probably be overposting outrageously as well as in a most misceellaneous and rambling fashion as the night wears on.]
The premise operating in almost all disputes over markets, pro or con, is that free choice of commodities (consumables) is an absolute good, but except for the last couple centuries not only has such choice not been available (in most cultures not even to the elites) but no one ever dreamt that such a thing was a desirable condition. Braudel argues someplace, I believe, that capitalism originated in the strange new fad (among aristocrats) for fashion (change in clothing styles). For a numbeer of millenia almost everyone had been quite satisfied wearing essentially the same clothes that had been worn a millenni or two before. The desire for decoration, under those conditions, could be wholly satisfied with very minaor ornaments or 'accessories.' Why is variety in clothing such a big deal? It is a big deal only if it is a dull and long established habit. The variety of today is actually in terms of human experience no more various than the 'sameness' of a few centuries ago.
Is the demand for variety of consumables a moral absolute.
.....
The thing about capitalist markets, and whatever 'markets' in the past may have been, markets in the present and in the future are/wil be capitalist markets) is that growth is an imperative. It is nonsense to claim that "capitalsim" can do this or that: capitalism is not a person who makes choices or judgmenst. Capitalism is a set of abstract relationships which are to a large extent beyond the control of those who by their daily actions reconstitute the same relations. And no growth means either the death of capitalism (in barbarism and misery) or socialism. But there can be no socialism without a conscious s socialist movement. Capitalsism cannot evolve into soc8ialism.
Carrol
Incidentally, and this is both totally irrelevant and highly relevant, tomorrow morning at around 11 I will have one of the best meals of my life, though what I will be eating (some pedestrian sandwich & maybe an equally pedestrian muffin) will be something that ordinarily I would sniff at. I haven't eaten since 8am this morning (except for the sugar in otherwise black coffee) and won't until I come out of the anaesthesia tomorrow morning. The food I get then, under those conditions, will be every bit the equal of the meals I have had in a couple of marvelous Chicago restaurants. They will only be second to the baloney sandwich and beer (some vile Texas brew) I had in the PX at Brooks Air Force base the day after I transferred there from basic training at Lackland.
All things, even food, are historical. There are NO transhistoical values.