Abstract

Although philosophers tend to differ in terms of the criteria that they offer for determining when market transactions should be morally prohibited, they tend to converge with respect to a certain methodological bias: they fail to reflexively consider how the existing politico-economic context bears on the way in which they formulate these criteria. After discussing the nature of actually existing, rather than idealized, markets, I consider four such offerings, which are either liberal egalitarian or communitarian, and I articulate how this failure is manifested in their respective positions. I conclude by pointing toward an alternative approach to the question of marketization, one that is both methodologically and substantively more faithful to the scope of the underlying problems that this question raises.