This Article considers one aspect of the ongoing debate about the moral limits of markets – namely, the purported harmful effects of market transactions on particular relations, goods, services, or society at large, due to an inappropriate valuation. In other words, the argument is that some markets are ‘repugnant’ because they degrade and corrupt a variety of nonmarket values and relations, not just to the willing parties to the exchange, but to larger segments of society. This objection contains both a (frequently unacknowledged) empirical component and a moral component. This Article critiques these empirical claims on two grounds. First, market skeptics fail to provide evidence of the negative effects they hypothesize, despite widespread variation over time and across legal regimes. Second, these objections fail to account for the well-documented human tendency to fashion repugnant exchanges in a manner that reinforces – rather than undermines – deeply held values and relationships.

In her ‘Markets, repugnance, and externalities’ (2022), Kimberly Krawiec notes that the so-called corruption theorists fail to provide evidence that the adoption of repugnant behaviours or commodification destroy social values. She adds that, the values repugnant behaviours are supposed to destroy may even be reinforced after a market has been created. The explanation she explores is that the creation of a market never goes without debates that allow the society to ponder the values it stands for. We suggest an alternative view on the lack of evidence Krawiec identifies. Our starting point is Krawiec's interpretation of repugnance in terms of externalities. We claim that an analysis of repugnance based on externalities requires a characterization of what an externality is, which is rarely done. We show that economists use two opposed definitions of externalities, an objective and a subjective one, and then show what it implies for an analysis of repugnance and justify why the corruption thesis is not always verified empirically.