Equal respect, capabilities and the moral limits of market exchange: denigration in the EU internal market

The EU's central task is to improve the lives of European citizens. The EU acts out that task by enhancing its internal market, on the assumption that market exchanges are a primary way individuals pursue their own conceptions of the good life. While the EU aims to enable market exchange through its legal structures, it does not demarcate the moral limits of its internal market. As such, the EU approach to the internal market has decoupled market logic from morality. However, justice requires that European citizens are treated with equal respect and that the exchanges they wish to pursue are subject to a generalisable normative standard. This paper explores the question of how and where the moral limits of the internal market are drawn as a question of justice, and argues that the current European approach to this question fails to safeguard European citizens from denigration.