This book examines our own moral responsibilities for the distant harms of our market transactions, and the global consequences and costs.
Preface; Part I. Theory: Material Cooperation in Economic Life: 1. The nature of material cooperation and moral complicity; 2. Complicity in what? The problem of accumulative harms; 3. Too small and morally insignificant? The problem of overdetermination; 4. Who is morally responsible in the chain of causation? The problem of interdependence; Part II. Application: A Typology of Market-Mediated Complicity: A. Hard Complicity: 5. Benefiting from and enabling wrongdoing; 6. Precipitating gratuitous harms; B. Soft Complicity: 7. Leaving severe pecuniary externalities unattended; 8. Reinforcing injurious socioeconomic structures; Part III. Synthesis and Conclusions: 9. Toward a theology of economic responsibility; 10. Synthesis: Christian ethics and blameworthy material cooperation; References; Index.
Albino Barrera is Professor of Economics and Theology at Providence College in Rhode Island. His previous publications include Globalisation and Economic Ethics (2007), Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), God and the Evil of Scarcity (2005) and Modern Catholic Social Documents and Political Economy (2001).