Distant Markets, Distant Harms: Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics

by Daniel Finn

Overview

Does a consumer who bought a shirt made in another nation bear any moral responsibility when the women who sewed that shirt die in a factory fire or in the collapse of the building? Many have asserted, without explanation, that because markets cause harms to distant others, consumers bear moral responsibility for those harms. But traditional moral analysis of individual decisions is unable to sustain this argument.

Distant Harms, Distant Markets presents a careful analysis of moral complicity in markets, employing resources from sociology, Christian history, feminism, legal theory, and Catholic moral theology today.

Because of its individualistic methods, mainstream economics as a discipline is not equipped to understand the causality entailed in the long chains of social relationships that make up the market. Critical realist sociology, however, has addressed the character and functioning of social structures, an analysis that can helpfully be applied to the market. The True Wealth of Nations research project of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sociologists, economists, moral theologians, and others to describe these causal relationships and articulate how Catholic social thought can use these insights to more fully address issues of economic ethics in the twenty-first century. The result was this interdisciplinary volume of essays, which explores the causal and moral responsibilities that consumers bear for the harms that markets cause to distant others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199371006
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/16/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Daniel K. Finn teaches Economics and Theology at St. John's University in Collegeville Minnesota. He has published widely on economics and ethics, including The Moral Ecology of Markets: Assessing Claims about Markets, and Just Trading: On the Ethics and Economics of International Trade. He is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics, the Catholic Theological Society of America, and the Association for Social Economics.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
List of Contributors

Introduction

Sociological Resources
1. Who is Responsible? Critical Realism, Market Harms, and Collective Responsibility
Douglas Porpora
2. Structural Conditioning and Personal Reflexivity: Sources of Market Complicity, Critique, and Change
Margaret Archer
3. Morality of Action, Reflexivity, and the Relational Subject
Pierpaolo Donati
4. Global Warming: A Case Study in Structure, Agency, and Accountability
John Coleman, S.J.

Historical Resources
5. Early Christian Philanthropy as a "Marketplace" and the Moral Responsibility of Market Participants
Brian Matz
6. How a Thomistic Moral Framework Can Take Social Causality Seriously
Mary Hirschfeld

Analytical Resources
7. Facing Forward: Feminist Analysis of Care and Agency on a Global Scale
Christina Traina
8. The African Concept of Community and Individual in the Context of the Market
Paul Appiah Himin Asante
9. Individuating Collective Responsibility
Albino Barrera, O.P.

Implications
10. Social Causality and Market Complicity: Specifying the Causal Roles of Persons and Structures
Daniel K. Finn

Editorial Reviews

"This set of essays, individually and as a group, offer a very strong, diversified yet coherent treatment of a crucial question for economic ethics - moral causality in complex market relationships. I would find this volume very helpful for my own research and writing in economic ethics, and could foresee assigning it to advanced undergraduates or graduates in courses on economic ethics, or Catholic/Christian social thought." —Christine Firer Hinze, Fordham University

From the Publisher