Women as commercial baby factories, nature as an economic resource, life as one big shopping mall: This is what we get when we use the market as a common measure of value. Elizabeth Anderson offers an alternative - a new theory of value and rationality that rejects cost-benefit analysis in our social lives, and in our ethical theories. The market has invaded the realm of ethics, giving us a quantitative account of values that fails to do justice to the richness and variety of our ethical experience. But valuing, this book suggests, is not simply something we do more or less. It is something we do in different ways. By asking how we value something, instead of how much, Anderson's theory guides us to a deeper understanding of how and why the goods we value differ in kind - how and why, for instance, objects of love, respect, and admiration differ from objects of mere use. By understanding these differences, we should be able to determine which goods can properly be treated as commodities, and which cannot. This account of the plurality of values thus offers a new approach, beyond welfare economics and traditional theories of justice, to assessing the ethical limitations of the market. In this light, Anderson discusses several contemporary controversies involving the proper scope of the market, including commercial surrogate motherhood, privatization of public services, and the application of cost-benefit analysis to issues of workplace safety and environmental protection.

1. A Pluralist Theory of Value. 1.1. A Rational Attitude Theory of Value. 1.2. Ideals and Self-Assessment. 1.3. How Goods Differ in Kind (I): Different Modes of Valuation. 1.4. How Goods Differ in Kind (II): Social Relations of Realization --2. An Expressive Theory of Rational Action. 2.1. Value and Rational Action. 2.2. The Framing of Decisions. 2.3. The Extrinsic Value of States of Affairs. 2.4. Consequentialism. 2.5. Practical Reason and the Unity of the Self -- 3. Pluralism and Incommensurable Goods. 3.1. The Advantages of Consequentialism. 3.2. A Pragmatic Theory of Comparative Value Judgments. 3.3. Incommensurable Goods. 3.4. Rational Choice among Incommensurable Goods -- 4. Self-Understanding, the Hierarchy of Values, and Moral Constraints. 4.1. The Test of Self-Understanding. 4.2. The Hierarchy of Values. 4.3. Agent-Centered Restrictions. 4.4. Hybrid Consequentialism. 4.5. A Self-Effacing Theory of Practical Reason? -- 5. Criticism, Justification, and Common Sense. 5.1. A Pragmatic Account of Objectivity. 5.2. The Thick Conceptual Structure of the Space of Reasons. 5.3. How Common Sense Can Be Self-Critical. 5.4. Why We Should Ignore Skeptical Challenges to Common Sense -- 6. Monistic Theories of Value. 6.1. Monism. 6.2. Moore's Aesthetic Monism. 6.3. Hedonism. 6.4. Rational Desire Theory -- 7. The Ethical Limitations of the Market. 7.1. Pluralism, Freedom, and Liberal Politics. 7.2. The Ideals and Social Relations of the Modern Market. 7.3. Civil Society and the Market. 7.4. Personal Relations and the Market. 7.5. Political Goods and the Market. 7.6. The Limitations of Market Ideologies -- 8. Is Women's Labor a Commodity? 8.1. The Case of Commercial Surrogate Motherhood. 8.2. Children as Commodities. 8.3. Women's Labor as a Commodity. 8.4. Contract Pregnancy and the Status of Women. 8.5. Contract Pregnancy, Freedom, and the Law -- 9. Cost-Benefit Analysis, Safety, and Environment Quality. 9.1. Cost-Benefit Analysis as a Form of Commodification. 9.2. Autonomy, Labor Markets, and the Value of Life. 9.3. Citizens, Consumers, and the Value of the Environment. 9.4. Toward Democratic Alternatives to Cost-Benefit Analysis.