I was fortunate recently to be able to attend a lecture by Michael Sandel – a Harvard University Professor, recent Reith Lecturer, who has been dubbed the “Public Philosopher”, as he addresses key everyday issues and engages his audiences in ethical discourse in a very open and humorous manner.
His basic thesis is that there has been a shift from us operating a market economy to becoming a market society in which increasingly everything and anything is up for sale. This has not been the result of a deliberate choice and he is concerned by this move for two reasons.
The first is inequality; since the 1980's the distribution of wealth in our society has become massively skewed in favour of the rich and his concern is that the less there is in our society that is not subject to the market and hence the power of money the more unequal society becomes.
The second is the corrosive tendency of markets; putting a price on something may corrupt it – eg friendship, civic pride, blood donations. Professor Sandel's view is that market values are, in effect, crowding out non market considerations in nearly all areas of life. Civic and moral considerations which markets do not honour need to be protected and, as a “Public Philosopher”, Professor Sandel aims to get people to engage and grapple with the important issues that affect society. The point of this exercise is for us as a society to make conscious moral choices about the type of society in which we want to live, including deciding whether there are things it would be better if money could not buy or areas in which markets should not be allowed to reach.
It is interesting to apply some of this thinking to the Government proposals for criminal justice – a copy of our open letter to local MP's is on this website and contains more details of the proposals.
Government has said that “Present system is leading to work of too high a quality”
Looking at just 2 of proposals:
- l People accused of an offence will not be able to choose their own solicitor – solicitors will be allocated by the State by some method as yet to be announced, You can, however, choose your own solicitor if you can pay.
- The government has said that the present system is leading to work of too high a quality (yes very hard to believe but that is stated in the consultation) and there are incentives built into the new system to produce lower quality work,
To all intents and purposes the State in this instance is the only buyer in the market and therefore holds great sway. So in essence the Government is stating that it has assessed the market and feels it can set a (low) price at which a job can be done. We are, let us not forget, dealing here with potential loss of freedom for another member of our Society with all the long and short term consequences of that. It also seems to be stating that while as a civilised nation we have to have a criminal justice system which allows people to defend themselves against the State, this will be in name only for most of the citizens because the State will make sure you can only obtain low quality representation unless you pay for it yourself. Surely a clear example of the misuse of the market to reach a decision.
Moving away from Professor Sandel and his ideas it is fairly obvious that such a system will lead to more miscarriages of justice, more appeals, more distress, more payment of compensation, and will in fact cost more than the apparent short term savings gained. That always happens when one allows the market unbridled control over decision making with little or no thought or weight being given to other factors such as ethics and quality, Don't believe me? Check out the very different fortunes of Waitrose and Tesco in the aftermath of the recent horse meat scandal.