Markets and Dignity: The Essential Link (With an Application to Health Care)

Abstract

Conclusion: I have argued that the market embodies respect for the dignity of rational persons, insofar as those person are allowed to make choices in their own subjective interests, in the absence of coercion and dignity, constrained only by the choices of all other person doing the same. To the extent that this represents a principle of justice, it is (in Robert Nozick‟s terms) a historical rather than a patterned principle of justice: it is just because of the process, not the result. 35 True to this, it was not my intention to paint a rosy picture of the outcomes of the market process. All too often, hard choices have to be made, but those choices will have to be made in any system, whether organized around decentralized markets or centralized control; scarcity does not bow to government fiat. But in a market system, the individual makes those tough choices herself, within the circumstances in which she finds herself, based on her own subjective valuations of the innumerable dimensions and aspects of the available alternatives, and she is held responsible for the circumstances. The market‟s positive role is to coordinate all of the individual decisions, allowing each person to pursue and achieve her ends to the maximum degree consistent with all other doing the same, resulting in an allocation of resources free of any outside bias or favoritism. All of these features of the market pay due respect to the dignity and autonomy of rational persons—not as a happy accident or contingent consequence, but as implied by the essential nature of the market as the institutional realization of free choice.