Economic analyses of repugnant market transactions: a modest typology

Economic accounts of repugnance concern two broad questions: the rationalisation of sentiments of repugnance (do emotional and visceral reactions of repugnance track valid reasons for not engaging in or condemning certain (trans)actions?) and institutional design (how to institute, regulate or restrict markets in response to reasonable objections). If repugnance expresses valid practical reasons for regulating or limiting markets, our institutions should acknowledge and express these. If attitudes of repugnance are not rationalizable in the sense of instrumental or moral values, we should disregard or eventually
counteract or reduce them. Focusing on a special case of repugnance, when commodification, i.e., the sale of goods or services for money meets societal disapproval, this paper identifies three characteristic ways to combine conceptual, empirical, and normative arguments and map repugnance into a disciplinary “epistemic frame” of economics: repugnance as taste; repugnance as proxy for market failures or moral reasons; repugnance as hypocrisy or
contingent cultural fact. Correspondingly, economists advise to (1) work around; (2) make sense of; and (3) explain away people’s sentiments of repugnance.