Conscience and the Common Good by Robert K. Vischer

Author:Robert K. Vischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

The Moral Marketplace and Collective Power

Just as individual autonomy should not be the sole object of our conversations regarding the good, the state should not be the exclusive audience for, or arbiter of, those conversations. We must recognize that “[w]hen mediating and moderating associations collapse, human passion asserts itself through power, not reasoned argument and consensual interaction.”67 In this regard, there is a necessary corollary to our recognition of the moral marketplace's power to transcend the domain of the atomistic individual: The moral marketplace does not subjugate the individual to the collective will. If anything, it creates space for individual human flourishing by reining in attempts to harness collective power to a particular conception of individual well-being.

Replacing collective political determinations with market determinations is not an obvious path to ideal policy outcomes. James Boyd White, for example, cautions us “not to abandon our collective powers of judgment, as the marketplace metaphor invites us to do,” because “[d]espite what we say about the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ we also know, if we allow ourselves to reflect on it, that we simply cannot trust any such process to winnow out the bad and promote the good.”68

Nor can we rely on the marketplace to winnow out the false and promote the true, at least when it comes to religious and moral convictions. Justice Holmes, who pioneered the marketplace approach to free speech in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, presumed that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”69 The relative marketplace successes of pharmacies that do or do not offer the morning-after pill, or that do or do not force their employees to dispense the morning-after pill, will do little to bring consensus as to the “truth” of the moral claims made regarding the pill or the sanctity of pharmacists' consciences. As Stanley Ingber observes, “if the possibility of rational discourse and discovery is negated by [individuals'] entrenched and irreconcilable perceptions of truth, the dominant ‘truth’ discovered by the marketplace can result only from the triumph of power, rather than the triumph of reason.”70 The ends of this market power are not always noble. After all, market forces catapulted “shock jock” Howard Stern to the heights of cultural influence; do we really want those same forces unleashed with respect to health care? Which values, in the end, will rule the marketplace, and which values will be marginalized once stripped of support from collective ordering?

One reassurance stems from the fact that the current project is not directed toward the establishment of communes devoted to the all-encompassing embodiment of a contested norm. Pharmacies are not equipped or positioned to transform wholly the worldviews of their customers. As such, the constraints on a pharmacy's mediating function are also constraints on the corrosive effects of a pharmacy's embrace of any particular norm. But a more fundamental reassessment of the marketplace threat requires us to recognize that the current trend toward collectively enshrining

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