Kester Brewin

An excellent discussion starter here from Michael Sandel (The BBC’s 2009 Reith Lecturer) on the limits of the market. In it he discusses what should and should not be sold, raising some very interesting questions about surrogate pregnancy, prostitution and hard labour. His point is made best, I feel, in relation to war: would it be right for a nation to pay a private war company to go and fight on its behalf? Most of us would, I think, agree that this was not in ‘the public good.’ And yet the number of private military operators in Iraq has been huge… Hmmm.