Market Complicity and Christian Ethics

Citation

Oslington, P. (2012), "Market Complicity and Christian Ethics", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 39 No. 6, pp. 449-450. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068291211224946

This important book by Albino Barrera, Professor of Economics and Theology at Providence College in Rhode Island, follows his 2004 book in the same series Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics.

The previous book addressed one of the perennial questions in economic ethics, the extent to which economic compulsion and coercion undermine economists' arguments that market exchanges must be beneficial for participants because they are voluntary. The present book takes up another of these perennial questions, that of the extent and nature of market participants responsibility for market outcomes. Barrera is well‐equipped to deploy the resources of scholastic philosophy in relation to these questions, and to engage contemporary economic theory. In the current book, he deploys contemporary tort law as another perspective on the question of responsibility for market outcomes.

In the first part of the book, Barrera sifts through the relationships between complicity, causation, and cooperation as well as considering a number of despite which arise with these concepts are applied in an economic context. For instance, markets outcomes are accumulations of actions of more agents over longer periods of time than outcomes in most other contexts. In a competitive economy, the effects of individual actions on market outcomes tend to be vanishingly small, whereas the law is not concerned with trifles. Also, complexity of modern economies makes it very difficult for agents, even where their influence is large, to anticipate and calculate the effects of their actions. It is even more difficult to do this when other agents' actions are influential and thus interdependencies arise between agents.

Barrera's method is to classify cases and formulate rules, culminating in the list of considerations when evaluating actions on page 92, and the fourfold classification of types of complicity on page 97, each of which is discussed in great detail in the second part of the book. There he divides the types of complicity into “hard complicity”, which includes benefiting from and enabling wrongs, and precipitating gratuitous harms, and “soft complicity” which includes not attending to pecuniary externalities, and reinforcing injure as socioeconomic structures. Soft complicity is less avoidable in the contemporary world and less blameworthy. The analysis is careful, the occasional lapse to dismissal of views on the basis of ill‐specified “common sense” (e.g. p. 46).

In the third part of the book Barrera moves on to consider the basis of responsibility for market outcomes, and significantly turns away from the attribution of blame that has occupied most of the book, to embrace an ethic of responsibility derived from Hans Jonas and William Schweiker. Regardless of blameworthiness for market outcomes, Barrera argues that we have responsibility to meet the needs of our fellow human beings. This responsibility comes from our common humanity, from our membership of the Christian family, the benefits we have received from participating in the market economy, and cultivating virtue.

This move by Barrera suggests that the individualist and consequentialist analysis of the first part of the book is somewhat beside the point. I would like to have seen a more explicit presentation of the Aristotelian‐Thomistic basis of his rejection of individualist and consequentialist accounts of morality that dominate contemporary economic discussion. I would also have liked to have seen a bit more discussion of why we might care about attributing blame for market outcomes. Is it so that we can properly calibrate our guilt for our economic actions? Is it so we might modify our behavior, either within the market order or embracing radical alternatives to participation? Is it so Christian pastors might be better equipped to offer pastoral care and penitential discipline to their flock? Or is public policy‐making in view?

This is a book on an important question by a well‐equipped scholar which is a valuable contribution to the literature on economics and theology.