Interests

My work addresses the moral boundaries of markets – specifically markets in public goods including health care and education, physical goods including body parts and intimate services, and civic goods including votes and speech.

My research falls under the broad category of moral and political philosophy, and under the more specific mantles of distributive justice, health policy, and normative economics. In my work I examine and elucidate the concepts of commodification and exploitation to determine whether they can help us justify coercive restrictions on the sale of bodily goods, public goods, and civic goods.

I have been concerned throughout my work to show, first, that the concepts of commodification and exploitation, although often conflated in both scholarship and public discourse, in fact point in different directions with respect to the moral and legal permissibility of body markets; second, that different contested markets in bodily, civic, and public goods require different principles to ground their prohibition; and third, that liberal egalitarian theories of justice can offer deeper and more effective rationales for the prohibition of markets in these goods than those offered by theories that are thought to be more traditionally antithetical to market exchange.

My research contributions address to three broad themes:

Surrogacy and Body Markets:

I began my scholarly career by examining arguments for and against public health care, and this in turn led me to questions about the types of services that should be covered under a public health insurance scheme. In one of my first papers, (published in Bioethics in 2015 but written earlier), I explored the question of whether reproductive needs qualified as health care needs, which kindled my interest in access to reproductive services more broadly and ultimately led me to the debate about paid surrogacy. Many years of my early career were devoted to questioning the permissibility of commercial surrogacy, particularly in a global context in which the commodification of reproduction was coupled with the exploitation of vulnerable women. My most widely cited papers remain to this day the two I published in 2013 on this topic in Hypatia and the Journal of Global Ethics respectively.

My work expanded to seeking (and often not finding) justifiable grounds for restrictions on sex markets, organ markets, gamete markets, and blood markets. Many of the (philosophical, political, and policy) opponents of these paid practices appeal to concepts of commodification and exploitation as grounds for their criminalization, but as I have argued throughout my work, such appeals evince repeated failures to properly understand the ways in which (and reasons for which) these concepts point us in different directions regarding the defensible restriction of body markets. See my CV for my multiple publications on body markets during the years 2013-2019.

justice and Commodification:

My most significant philosophical contributions are presented in a recent series of papers, titled Liberalism, Commodification, and Justice (2020), Contemporary Anti-Commodification Theory: Corruption, Inequality, and Justice (2023), and Decommodification as Exploitation (2024).

This series of papers responds to a significant moral and political challenge: in a market economy committed to individual autonomy, how can we justify restricting the market choices of consenting adults? Shouldn’t free people be able to buy and sell whatever they wish?  Contemporary political philosophers who have addressed this question (Anderson, 1990, 1993; Brennan and Jaworski, 2016; Phillips, 2013; Radin, 1996; Sandel, 2012; Satz, 2010; Walzer, 1984) have either offered what I call corruption-based or equality-based arguments against contested markets; both of which are problematic, albeit for different reasons. Proponents of corruption-based arguments are unable to provide grounds for restricting noxious markets consistent with the commitments of a liberal democratic state, specifically value pluralism, while proponents of equality-based arguments can only justify limiting markets based on how a good is sold rather than based on what type of good is sold, thereby seemingly dispensing with the very question they set out to answer, namely what shouldn’t be for sale.

The account I defend in their stead throughout this series of papers is a justice-based anti-commodification argument, which is deeply informed by commitments to pluralism and neutrality and simultaneously capable of grounding market restriction based on the type of good being sold rather than simply based on the unequal circumstances under which many goods are exchanged for money in our non-ideal world. My account appeals to the conception of political liberalism (Rawls, 1996) to show that restrictions on various markets are necessitated by the principles of justice that would be endorsed by free and equal persons with diverse moral and metaphysical commitments. The arguments I offer against specific markets draws, following Walzer’s (1984) methodology, on the principles of distributive justice most appropriate to the exchange of the type of good in question.

Commodification and Exploitation:

In my recent paper, “Decommodification as Exploitation” (2024) I raise a challenge to my own justice-based anti-commodification theory, and its policy implications. In many body markets, decommodification rhetoric is often used to justify withholding payment from suppliers, who are primarily women. I worry that it thereby contributes to the exploitation of gendered labour.

The concepts of exploitation and commodification are appealed to so commonly in unison by those who indict body sales, that they are often presented as mutually constitutive. The commodification of the human body is problematic, so it is argued, because it is exploitative; and those involved in such sales are exploited because their bodies are being commodified. The upshot of these arguments is that the commodification of the body – and specifically the offer of compensation or the payment of a wage to an individual who sells a body part or intimate service -  is inevitably exploitative. But arguments of this sort are extremely problematic, because the denial of compensation to donors of body parts and providers of intimate services by those who benefit, indeed profit from their contributions, short of preventing exploitation, quite clearly fosters it. What I argue is that wrongful exploitation occurs when donors are denied compensation on the grounds that the body shouldn’t be commodified by those who stand to profit from this denial.

In future work I want to explore the implications of this concern more fully for my justice-based anti-commodification view.

Future Research

Liberalism and the Limits of Markets

I am currently writing of a single authored monograph, which I will call Liberalism and the Limits of Markets. This book will draw on the justice-based anti-commodification theory I developed in the three papers noted under “Liberal Justice and Commodification” above to yield ethical and policy conclusions about contested markets in such things as kidneys, gametes, surrogacy, and sex, as well as votes, citizenship, education, healthcare, and environmental goods. The book will further develop and defend the justice-based anti-commodification theory I advanced in my three recent papers, as well as respond to challenges that face the view’s theoretical foundations and policy implications.The book will serve as a response to the two most significant monographic contributions to the philosophical debate about noxious markets (Sandel’s 2012 What Money Can’t Buy and Satz’ 2010 Why Some Things Should not be for Sale), in which the authors offered conflicting arguments about the boundaries of markets that still await both response and resolution. My book will serve as the culmination of my considered thinking on a topic that has occupied my research for over a decade and make a significant contribution to ongoing philosophical debates about what money can’t, or rather, shouldn’t buy. 

Basic Income and Health Justice

My other future research project relates to my long-standing interest in basic income as a requirement of distributive justice. Myriad arguments for basic income are by now well-rehearsed in the literature. What I want to do is contribute to philosophical and policy debates about basic income by mounting a health justice defense thereof. At the start of the pandemic, over 100 countries instituted some form of emergency cash benefit for their citizens, to protect them against the devastation of sudden job loss, rent hikes, and business failure, and to enable them to stay home from work while sick. Although most of these programs have been discontinued, the fact that they were put in place as an emergency social protection measure shows the intuitiveness of providing income support as a response to health needs. No basic income pilot experiment has ever sought or collected medical data. But there is tangential evidence from past experiments of reduced hospital visits, lower rates of domestic violence, and decreases in childhood obesity.

This limited but suggestive data from past pilot programs, coupled with the results of the emergency pandemic benefits, is grounds for exploring basic income as a requirement of health justice, and indeed for arguing explicitly, as I intend to do, that basic income is a crucial feature of a just health care system. I will argue that the social determinants of health are as critical as basic care to fulfilling the requirements of a conception of health justice grounded in the principle of equality of opportunity, and that income is prime among the social determinants. The income would need to be set at a sustainable level that is nonetheless high enough to enable recipients to make choices conducive to good health and must be provided on a continual (non-emergency) basis as an addendum to and not a replacement for the in-kind provision of basic health services.

Basic Income and Commodification Theory

My interest in basic income and contested commodification are linked. I explored this link briefly in two papers (Basic Income, Decommodification and the Welfare State 2010, and Basic Income and Intimate Labor 2019). In future research I would like to explore this connection more fully. In my 2019 paper, I argued that criminalizing markets in intimate labour only serves to turn white markets black and does not thereby achieve the aims of decommodifying sex and gestation as many defenders of criminal sanctions imagine they would. A reliable cash transfer, however, has been shown to provide women with an alternative to entering these trades in the first place. This is an avenue of research I would like to explore further because it suggests that a basic income could potentially be part of the solution to the myriad problems attendant to markets in both physical and public goods. I imagine this topic substantiating a closing chapter of Liberalism and the Limits of Markets and of furnishing the content of a series of subsequent papers.