There is a subtitle to this book: “Assessing Claims about Markets and Justice.” Its aim is not to settle the question of how just markets are, but rather to identify the framework within which the morality of markets can be profitably discussed. In the opening chapter, he takes to task some celebrated economists who, he thinks, try to defend markets without moral judgment. We can certainly agree that if they really thought they were doing that, their task was hopeless. But more likely they felt their moral premises were uncontroversial.
The next two chapters respectively summarize the moral cases for and against markets. Discussion of the first is fairly straightforward, though strangely missing is the argument that the basic idea of the market is itself just, even the very hallmark of justice, viz. since it consists of freely made exchanges which respect the freedom of others. Discussion of the critiques of the market is rather undiscerning; e.g., that markets “threaten the environment.” Still, these are the sorts of things that are said. Finn doesn't try to pass judgment, though he appears to endorse most of these to some extent.
Chapter 5 then identifies what Finn proposes to be the four main problems of economic life: “allocation, distribution, scale, and quality of human relationships.” Finn does not, however, show much awareness of the specifically free-market handling of all these. (E.g., is there really a distinction to be made between “allocation” and “distribution,” given that people make things for reasons, including, often, who will use them and on what terms?)
Part 2 of the book devotes three chapters to “the market as an arena of freedom,” the “moral ecology of the market,” and “implications.” In the first of these, the point is made that discussing the market exclusively in terms as general as “capitalism vs. socialism” is largely pointless, since the real question is just where to put the “fences” that delimit the sphere of full market behaviour; socialism would be one view about where those fences should be. Now, the alternative to markets is always control by a central agency that is not itself acting as a market participant, which is the essence of socialism—perhaps the familiar bifurcation makes more sense than Finn allows. But, granted, the choice of “fence locations” is not an all-or-nothing issue. Finn does, however, fall into the familiar but undiscerning habit of holding that some “intervention” by government is necessary to the market itself.
Chapter 7 is the source of the book's title: “The Market's Moral Ecology.” This consists, first, in the aforementioned “fence-placing” and then in the “provision of essential goods and services, the morality of individuals and groups, and civil society” (126–7). Calling these things “ecology” suggests that they are distinct from the market itself; but a stout defender of the market would deny this. Markets provide goods and services, including “essential” ones; they are defined by moral prohibitions (against violation of rights to persons and property); and they certainly take place only in civil society, which is certainly a “network of voluntary associations” (138) and does pervade society. How can an organization be voluntary that doesn't instantiate the freedom of the marketplace, seeing that exchanges among participants are quintessentially voluntary?
This last brings up a question about the understanding of the term “economy.” The basic notion is that of individual freedom: individuals confining their activities to those that are consistent with the freedom of others. Is that exclusively “economic”? If not, then economics does indeed have an “ecology” lying outside itself; but it might make more sense to insist that what is usually called “economics” is simply the application of this same social principle to certain narrower activities in which, say, money figures prominently, the line between it and other things being essentially arbitrary.
Chapter 8 then summarizes what Finn supposes to be implications of the preceding analysis. For some reason, a rather perceptive discussion of political lobbying for economic purposes occupies a fair bit of this chapter, even though such lobbying is anti-market in essence. He then moves to a final summary: that “all participants in the debate about the justice of markets are already addressing the same four problems of economic life and taking positions on the same four elements of the moral ecology of markets.” Given this, we should also have a “common conversation” (154). Some of what Finn says might promote that object, but some will not. Serious defenders of markets can complain that much of the structure identified here is misleadingly characterized. (The discussion of freedom on pp. 117–19 is so confused as to deserve an article in itself.) The market idea can do a lot more than he suggests. However, he does the literature a service by producing this classification of aspects to discuss.
