The Spectator, in association with How to: Academy hosted an unmissable opportunity to hear Michael Sandel, the world famous philosopher, discuss his best-selling book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets and within this context address the question ‘How do we want to live together?’

Should we financially reward children for good marks? Is it ethical to pay people to donate organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons or selling citizenship? What should be the role of money and markets in our societies?

In recent decades, market values have impinged on almost every aspect of life – medicine, education, government, law, even family life. We have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Michael Sandel asked, ‘Isn’t there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? And how do we protect the things that really matter?

Michael Sandel is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. His Harvard ‘Justice’ course has become legendary. He has been called ‘the most effective communicator of ideas’ in English, our most ‘relevant living philosopher’, a ‘genius’, a humanitarian, who can has taken philosophy into the global public domain and empowered audiences worldwide to participate in the highest quality of debate. Furthermore, What Money Can’t Buy is a Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller and BBC R4 audiences will know him as The Public Philosopher.