Markets satisfy our appetites, but they also reshape them.

Freedom of choice does not answer whether our desires are worth cultivating.

Cultural norms can shift gradually until what once seemed troubling feels normal.

Sandel's warning: Mastery over nature may change how we see our children and each other.

If we view the market strictly through the lens of individual freedom, it is difficult to make a case against fast food or modern sexual culture. Neither was imposed on an unwilling public. Both succeeded because they responded to genuine human desires, and competition made satisfying those desires easier, cheaper, and more profitable than ever before.

Yet no one set out to create an obesity and metabolic disease crisis. Nor did anyone intend to create a culture marked by rising loneliness, declining intimacy, and dissatisfaction with relationships. In both cases, millions of voluntary choices accumulated into outcomes that few people, across political or religious divides, would regard as a success.

Markets are remarkably good at giving people what they want. They are less equipped to ask whether every desire they satisfy contributes to human flourishing. As market principles permeate more areas of life, moral legitimacy increasingly rests on a single question: Did you consent? Yet that question neglects a deeper one: Was the desire to which you consented worth cultivating?

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim used the concept of anomie to describe a condition in which traditional moral frameworks weakened, leaving appetites without clear direction or restraint. He worried that rapid industrialization, combined with the decline of religious and local community attachments, had weakened society’s ability to........

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