In 2015, Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, acquired the rights to Daraprim, a decades-old drug crucial for treating a serious parasitic infection that is especially dangerous for people with HIV/AIDS.
After acquiring the drug, he raised the price overnight from about $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet—an increase of more than 5,000%.
This caused widespread outrage from the public, medical professionals, and politicians around the world, who saw it as a blatant case of price gouging.
This collective sense of injustice reveals a deep-seated intuition: somehow, there is a "just price" for a product.
The idea of a “just price” has occupied philosophers, theologians, and economists for more than two millennia.
It touches the very heart of economic and moral reasoning: how should value be determined, and what makes an exchange fair?
From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and into the modern era, the just price has evolved from a moral principle into an economic abstraction. Today, we'll focus on what Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had to say.
Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s idea that justice in exchange means equivalence, but he added a moral and theological dimension.
The just price was not simply what the buyer and seller agreed upon. It was the price that reflected the true worth of the good,
ensuring that neither party was unjustly enriched. In practice, this was often seen as the common estimate of value within a community.
For Aquinas, the just price represented moral equality, not mathematical precision. He recognized that value could vary due to circumstances like scarcity or need, but he insisted that these variations must remain within the bounds of fairness.
Charging an excessively high price by exploiting another’s necessity was considered the sin of avarice.
For Aristotle and Aquinas, this debate was held in the arena of ethics. In the coming lectures, we'll see how it shifted into ideas about free markets and supply and demand.
Today, the phrase “just price” has re-emerged in debates about ethical consumption, fair trade, and corporate responsibility. While economists rarely use the term, its moral legacy persists.
Fair trade movements argue that producers, especially in developing countries, should receive a “just” compensation reflecting their labor and sustainability efforts.
Philosophers like Michael Sandel, in his book What Money Can’t Buy, have criticized the expansion of market values into all aspects of life, reviving the ancient concern for moral limits in exchange.
Thank you for your attention... the floor is yours.....
Main Sources:
MacMillan The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition
of Economic Thought (2012)
TABLE OF CONTENT -----------------------------------------------------------------
1 - 100 Philosophers 9 May 2009 Start of
2 - 25+ Women Philosophers 10 May 2009 this blog
3 - 25 Adventures in Thinking 10 May 2009
4 - Modern Theories of Ethics 29 Oct 2009
5 - The Ideal State 24 Febr 2010 / 234
6 - The Mystery of the Brain 3 Sept 2010 / 266
7 - The Utopia of the Free Market 16 Febr 2012 / 383
8. - The Aftermath of Neo-liberalism 5 Sept 2012 / 413
9. - The Art Not to Be an Egoist 6 Nov 2012 / 426
10 - Non-Western Philosophy 29 May 2013 / 477
11 - Why Science is Right 2 Sept 2014 / 534
12 - A Philosopher looks at Atheism 1 Jan 2015 / 557
13 - EVIL, a philosophical investigation 17 Apr 2015 / 580
14 - Existentialism and Free Will 2 Sept 2015 / 586
15 - Spinoza 2 Sept 2016 / 615
16 - The Meaning of Life 13 Febr 2017 / 637
17 - In Search of my Self 6 Sept 2017 / 670
18 - The 20th Century Revisited 3 Apr 2018 / 706
19 - The Pessimist 11 Jan 2020 / 819
20 - The Optimist 9 Febr 2020 / 824
21 - Awakening from a Neoliberal Dream 8 Oct 2020 / 872
22 - A World Full of Patterns 1 Apr 2021 / 912
23 - The Concept of Freedom 8 Jan 2022 / 965
24 - Materialism 7 Sept 2022 / 1011
25 - Historical Materialism 5 Oct 2023 / 1088
26 - The Bonobo and the Atheist 9 Jan 2024 / 1102
27 - Artificial Intelligence 9 Feb 2024 / 1108
28 - Why Am I Here 6 Sept 2024 / 1139
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