Teaching, Preaching and Queaching about Commodities

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant famously distinguishes between those goods which should be available on the market and those which should not, with his disjunctive dictum that everything has either a market price or a dignity: "If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent" if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has a dignity."' The trouble with this approach is that without further detail it is insufficiently precise: neither my grandmother nor my loyal aged Blue Heeler cattle dog should be sold, but for different reasons. Value is more diverse than Kant's two-fold classification would suggest-it cannot do justice to the complexity of the human experience of valuing.² Nonetheless, Kant's edict provides a good starting point for our inquiry, for it gives voice to a puzzle which is the central concern of this paper, namely, how might we determine the proper range of the market.