Reith Lectures: Markets and Morals
Jun. 10th, 2009 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylFinally listened to Michael Sandel's first Reith lecture Markets and Morals, which investigated whether applying market structures to particular decisions undermined any associated moral values — for example, is it wrong to allocate countries refugee quotas and to allow them to trade with each other, provided more refugees are rehomed under the market system that would have been the case with the current system?
While the lecture was interesting and thought provoking, time constraints were such that Sandel wasn't really able to do much more than sketch out his ideas. I'm not really sure that having a Q&A session after the lecture add much to the experience. Today's questions were particularly poor. One suggested that the questioner hadn't bothered to listen to the lecture — not his fault, since the question was presumable framed prior to the start of the broadcast — while another contribution from the floor seemed to me to be completely incoherent. Then, when someone finally asked an interesting question about whether Sandel believed that markets and morality are necessarily irreconcilable even given a perfect distribution of resources, he was only able to give them a very short reply that didn't really do justice to the question.
But despite all the gripes, I'm still looking forward to next week's lecture.
While the lecture was interesting and thought provoking, time constraints were such that Sandel wasn't really able to do much more than sketch out his ideas. I'm not really sure that having a Q&A session after the lecture add much to the experience. Today's questions were particularly poor. One suggested that the questioner hadn't bothered to listen to the lecture — not his fault, since the question was presumable framed prior to the start of the broadcast — while another contribution from the floor seemed to me to be completely incoherent. Then, when someone finally asked an interesting question about whether Sandel believed that markets and morality are necessarily irreconcilable even given a perfect distribution of resources, he was only able to give them a very short reply that didn't really do justice to the question.
But despite all the gripes, I'm still looking forward to next week's lecture.
