Markets are essential spaces for generating peaceful relationalities.

In addition to its role as a productive system, the market also serves as a space where we learn to be courteous to our suppliers and customers as we participate in market conversations that transcend the bidding over scarce resources and the bargaining between buyers and sellers. We learn to care about the needs of others and place trust in our fellows. In their book, Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?, Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi (2019) find that markets often put us in positions where we can observe and judge the trustworthiness of others, given that successful market exchanges depend on the trust forged between buyers and sellers.

A barber’s clients must trust her to cut and style their hair. And the barber must respectfully consider what her client’s care about if she hopes to be an effective practitioner who successfully improves the well-being of her clients which, in turn, cultivates their increased trust in her and ultimately contributes to her bottom-line. A hungry customer visiting a restaurant will have learned during his previous visits to restaurants to respect her waiter. Although she cares about quickly receiving a high- quality meal, she knows that respecting her waiter will make the experience more enjoyable and might improve the service she receives. The mutual respect that the waiter reciprocates to her customer, in turn, both is likely to increase the waiter’s compensation and demonstrates his habitual peacefulness.

Often, the peaceful behavior that typically occurs between buyers and sellers is the result of a habit of peacefulness that has become ingrained in people’s actions and expectations as they continually experience and participate in the market in their roles as producers and consumers. Although at least some of the barber’s or waiter’s motivation, for instance, might be based on the expectation of receiving a nice tip, a good review, or the satisfaction of other narrowly economic criteria, it does not imply that other elements of sociality and friendliness do not factor into their peaceful behavior and the peaceful behavior of her customer. The barber-client and waiter-customer relation, or any social arrangement in markets, might be fleeting, and only last a few minutes, but they are nonetheless arrangements through which both parties are expected to practice habits of peacefulness.

Market participants who have been enculturated in market contexts learned, perhaps from a young age, how to be courteous to others, what meanings to ascribe to certain encounters (e.g., whether they be rude or pleasant), and how to be habitually peaceful. We learn to interpret our environment as we develop a shared understanding, with our own unique twist, as to how we should publicly behave so that others will deem us admirable and, as Adam Smith (1759) in the Theory of Moral Sentiments put it, “worthy of admiration.”