Our topic this week is what we’re calling repugnant markets. We have in mind potential markets in goods and services the buying and selling of which people tend to find repugnant for one reason or another. We say “potential” markets because society tends not to allow markets in such goods to operate in the open… though there are often black markets in such goods. Are we right to prohibit markets in goods the buying and selling of which some people find repugnant? That’s the kind of question we will be addressing this week, with our guest, Nobel Prize winning economist, Alvin Roth—who may be the first Nobel Laureate to ever appear on中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播.

显然，有很多东西不应该以任何价格出售，其中最主要的是人。现在，人类市场——也就是奴隶市场——是最容易证明禁止的市场。毕竟，没有人有拥有另一个人的(道德)权利。你不能合法地卖掉你本来就不拥有的东西。但我们确实拥有很多东西，因此买卖这些东西在某种程度上是令人憎恶的。但我们仍然禁止这样的市场，尽管我们“拥有”相关的商品。例如，我们拥有自己的身体。然而，在许多地方，以性为目的的身体买卖是被禁止的。

Why should the buying and selling of sex be prohibited? If two—or possibly more—consenting adults want to trade money for sex with each other, whose business is it but theirs? Admittedly, some people find the idea of buying and selling of sex degrading and so just not the sort of thing a self-respecting human being ought to do with his or her body. But frankly that response seems to me to smack of an outmoded puritanism. Besides, given how sexually permissive society has become, given the prevalence of hook-up culture among the young, and given the widespread and easy accessibility of pornography, I don’t see how allowing the buying and selling of sex would significantly alter the current sexual landscape—especially if sex markets were well-regulated so as to ensure the health and safety of all involved. Some people might respond that this approach misses the real point. Prostitution is probably hardly ever the first resort for anyone. In fact, it’s mostly a desperate last resort. So perhaps banning prostitution is a way of protecting desperation—women with few other options.

Perhaps there is more to be said for this line. It is certainly less puritanical, but it also seems much more paternalistic. What exactly are we protecting women from by banning open markets in prostitution and forcing these still desperate women underground? Themselves? No, we’re protecting them from exploitation, the anti-prostitution person will say. And we’re protecting them from exploitation out of deep respect for their dignity as persons. That’s not at all paternalistic.

I’m not so sure. It’s not clear to me that it shows more respect for human dignity to drive desperate people into an unregulated underground economy in which anything goes. If we really wanted to respect the dignity of the potential prostitute, wouldn’t we bring sex work out of the shadows and design a market with some measure of safeguards meant to preserve human dignity?

There’s an even deeper point about human beings and our ability (or inability) to reliably detect affronts to human dignity. I don’t think that we’re nearly as good at doing so as we like to pretend. On the one hand, our "dignity violation detectors," if we can call them that, are subject to an awful lot of false negatives. That’s partly because as a species we’re awfully good at denial. Only our capacity for denial could explain how, for example, slave markets could persist for so long. When it’s convenient, we have a well-developed capacity to look right past violations of human dignity, even when they are staring us right in the face.

On the flip side, we also prone to false positive. People used to find the idea of selling life insurance repugnant. They thought that it was repugnant to place a price on a human life. We now find the idea that life insurance violates human dignity just silly. People once found the very idea of interracial marriage or gay sex repugnant too. Did those things really violate human dignity? And I could go on. The catalog of what we would now regard as false positives is enormous. And all of these false positives delivered by our built-in, viscerally powerful violation-of-dignity-detectors, have motivated us to constrain markets, stigmatize certain behaviors, and so much more, throughout the history of our species.

值得庆幸的是，我们已经过去了很多，即使不是全部，至少是大部分。有鉴于此，我们可能会倾向于将我们先前的本能厌恶斥为非理性的，坚持认为我们相对于非理性的祖先已经取得了道德上的进步。但这种思维方式假定，我们比过去更善于发现侵犯人类尊严的行为，或许是因为我们在某种程度上比过去更不容易出现假阴性和假阳性。也许是这样。也许不是。我不会轻易得出这样的结论。想想加州，它禁止出售马肉供人类食用。为什么被禁止?因为吃马比吃牛更恶心吗?毕竟，有自尊的人怎么会堕落到吃马肉而不吃牛肉呢! Really?

Bottom line, it's not clear that we should always or even ever trust our visceral reactions to perceived affronts to human dignity. I know we tend to think our own moral sensibilities are infinitely more fine-tuned than those of our benighted ancestors, who couldn’t recognize patriarchy, racism, classism, you name it, when such evils were staring them right in the face. But that doesn't mean we should undersestimate our own capacity for moral blindness either.

与此同时，我也不认为我们应该完全忽视我们对明显的、可感知的尊严侮辱发自内心的负面反应。我不怀疑他们有时会告诉我们一些有道德意义的事情，一些我们最好站出来关注的事情。困难在于，考虑到我们公认的假阴性和假阳性倾向，要搞清楚什么是假阴性，什么时候是假阳性。

用一种一致的方式来处理这些问题的一个问题是，对你来说有道德意义的事情对我来说可能没有那么有道德意义。从某种意义上说，什么应该被认为具有道德意义，什么不应该，这似乎是相当主观的，尽管我并不是想否认，在道德基础上，关于什么应该被买卖，什么不应该被买卖，存在客观事实的可能性。尽管如此，考虑到很难确定这个领域的客观真相在哪里——假设有这样的事情——这就有点难以理解为什么其他人发自内心地认为有辱人格的事情应该决定我可以或不可以购买或出售什么，特别是如果我和我的交易伙伴没有发现它在贬低我们自己。

有人会对我说一件事——我怀疑黛布拉也会这么说——那就是在经济交易中，这从来不只是合作伙伴的问题。当有人从别人那里购买一辆耗油的汽车或香烟时，他们把成本加在了我们其他人身上。这里我说的是经济学家所说的外部性——强加给没有参与某些经济交易的第三方的有害影响。这里的想法是，也许当市场确实产生外部性时，我们有权利监管市场，甚至完全禁止它们。

但人们必须谨慎对待这种想法。一个聪明的愤世嫉俗者可以曲解这一论点，使其似乎暗示，你对我的经济选择的厌恶是一种不可接受的外部性。然后，聪明的愤世嫉俗者会问，我出售自己身体部位的自由是否应该受到限制，就因为它让你感到恶心。因此，我们需要让那些愤世嫉俗的人明白，说到底，我们之所以关心神经质，只是因为我们把它作为一种可靠的、发自内心的指标，来衡量是否存在侵犯尊严和正义的行为!也就是说，这并不是说我们认为卖肾或卖淫是不公平的，因为它让我们感到恶心。是反过来的。这些事情引起我们厌恶和反感的原因是它们违反了正义。真正令人担忧的不是我们的本能反应，而是人类的尊严和正义。

That’s not to say that it’s obvious where justice lies. Think of thousands of people who languish on waiting lists, hoping to be deemed worthy of receiving a kidney, with the shortage of kidneys being at least in part due to the fact that people with delicate moral sensibilities find kidney markets repugnant. Can we really call that that justice? On the other hand, it's not clear that it would be more just if we were incentivized to sell our kidneys and only rich people could afford to buy them. On the one hand, I suppose you could say that maybe some poor people wouldn’t be so poor if they were free to sell a kidney to the highest bidder. On the other hand, it seems right to say that kidneys should go to the people who need them the most, not to people able to pay the most!

I don’t really have any neat answers here. Part of me agrees that markets aren’t a perfect mechanism for distributing goods that we are reluctant, on moral grounds, to see bought and sold. At the very least such markets need to be well-designed and well-regulated. And perhaps they can be if we don’t let our moral qualms keep us from even trying to make them work. As long as markets don’t diminish human dignity, they can do good things. If we could find a way to strike the right balance between human dignity and market efficiency, maybe we could agree. So how do we do that? Got any ideas? If so, add your voice to this conversation.