Abstract
This chapter analyzes economic activities from a consumer standpoint. Human needs award value to the goods that can satisfy them. Markets make it possible to price goods, facilitating exchange. Money serves as a means for exchange, a unit of measurement, a value reserve; it also has a value in itself. The market system’s appropriate workings require a set of virtues that are introduced. Additionally, the chapter describes reciprocity as another exchange form.
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- 1.
It should be clear from the start that speaking of use and exchange value when discussing Aristotle’s thinking is an anachronism. These two expressions are tidily linked to modern economics, alien to Aristotle’s oikonomikê.
- 2.
On these topics, cf. e.g., Carl Menger ([1871], 1950) and Sergio Ricossa’s dictionary of economics (1982) and their definitions of the terms “needs”, “price”, “utility” and “value”, or any book of microeconomics. My apologies to economists for this paragraph intended for philosophers.
- 3.
John Finnis claims, “[t]hings will be better for everyone if there is a division of labour between families, specialization, technology, joint of co-operative enterprises in production and marketing, a market and a medium of exchange, in short, an economy that is more than domestic”, (1980), Chap. 7, “Community, Communities and Common Good”, p. 145.
- 4.
As Gudeman poses, “markets never exist ‘outside’ a cultural and social context” (2001, p. 94).
- 5.
Israel Kirzner wrote in a personal letter, “You suggest that ‘moral coordination’ is an implicit condition for economic coordination. Now I have, in other papers, expressed my agreement with the central idea with which you conclude your letter: ‘Economy does not run without a common ethos.’ Like you, I do not believe that a market economy (and the economic coordination it is able to achieve) is feasible, as a practical matter, without a shared moral framework. So that I agree that a condition for the practical achievement of economic coordination is (what you call, if I understand correctly) ‘moral coordination’.” (July 23, 1998 letter, the cursives are original.) Bruce Caldwell (1993) states, “It seems clear that the existence of a ‘certain moral climate’ is indeed a necessary condition for an economy to be able to function adequately”. In turn, Irene van Staveren (1999, p. 73) asserts, “Smith, Mill and Taylor, Marx, Reid and Perkins Gilman knew very well that free exchange does not function without justice, nor without care.” Cf. also Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden (2000). Without some virtues like justice, honesty and truthfulness, market coordination fails.
- 6.
For broad discussion, cf. Vittorio Mathieu’s sharp analysis in Mathieu (1990).
- 7.
The two chrematistics use the same means in a different way.
- 8.
I do not agree with S. Meikle’s interpretation (1997, p. 39) following Marxian views. Marx quotes this passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “neither would there have been association if there were not exchange, nor exchange if there were not equality, nor equality if there were not commensurability”. Marx quotes this passage as follows: “‘Exchange,’ he says, ‘cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability’. Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. ‘It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable’—i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only ‘a makeshift for practical purposes’.” (The Capital I, I, 3, 3, retrieved 9 July 2012, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1.) That is, Marx believed that Aristotle had weakly conceded what he should not have conceded. The mistake arises from an imperfect translation. Marx included in brackets the Greek version of the part of the passage well translated, but he did not include the last part, which is incorrectly translated. Aristotle did not write “a makeshift for practical purposes”, rather “but with reference to demand they may become so sufficiently” (V, 5, 1133b 31). Thus, both Marx and Meikle rely on Aristotle to maintain an intrinsic problem of the exchange system that necessarily leads to a practice of the censured chrematistics. According to Aristotle, the reason for this chrematistics to arise is not exchange value but unlimited desire. If things exchanged are qualitatively different and incommensurable, what is, according to Aristotle, the unit of analysis or commonalty that enables things to be compared? It is the need (chreia) of the goods exchanged for the demander. While, in many passages of Metaphysics and Physics, Aristotle claims that measurement requires homogeneity, in Categories, he considers the possibility of measure and commensurate qualities by degrees (see, e.g., VIII, 10b 26). The resulting commensuration of the things so measured, he warns, has limits and is conventional (see, e.g., VI, 5b 11 and 8, 10b 13). Thus, it can be applied—with limits—to things exchanged through necessity. Instead, it cannot be applied to different ends because ends differ in more than quality. The difference between ends is analogical—of “priority and posteriority”—and cannot be measured, for there is not a common measure (see, e.g., NE I, 6, 1096b 18–25).
- 9.
On Aristotelian economic virtues, see Yuengert (2012), pp. 75–77 and 90–91.
- 10.
I rely on practical rationality to discuss reciprocity in my paper Crespo (2008).
- 11.
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Crespo, R.F. (2013). Economic Activities. In: Philosophy of the Economy. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02648-0_8
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