Market Complicity and Christian Ethics

by Barrera, Albino

• ISBN13: 9781107003156
• ISBN10: 1107003156
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-14
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

The marketplace is a remarkable social institution that has greatly extended our reach so shoppers in the West can now buy fresh-cut flowers, vegetables, and tropical fruits grown halfway across the globe even in the depths of winter. However, these expanded choices have also come with considerable moral responsibilities as our economic decisions can have far-reaching effects by either ennobling or debasing human lives. Albino Barrera examines our own moral responsibilities for the distant harms of our market transactions from a Christian viewpoint, identifying how the market's division of labour makes us unwitting collaborators in others' wrongdoing and in collective ills. His important account covers a range of different subjects, including law, economics, philosophy, and theology, in order to identify the injurious ripple effects of our market activities.

Table of Contents

General editor's preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Theory: Material Cooperation in Economic Life	p. 9
The nature of material cooperation and moral complicity	p. 11
Complicity in What? The problem of accumulative harms	p. 30
Too small and morally insignificant? The problem of overdetermination	p. 48
Who is morally responsible in the chain of causation? The problem of interdependence	p. 70
Application: A Typology of Market-Mediated Complicity	p. 97
Hard complicity I	p. 101
Hard complicity II	p. 146
Soft complicity I	p. 177
Soft complicity II	p. 206
Synthesis and Conclusions	p. 231
Toward a theology of economic responsibility	p. 233
Synthesis: Christian ethics and blameworthy material cooperation	p. 266
References	p. 286
Index	p. 300
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