Our situation -- Understanding our individualistic cultural bias -- Why economics sees markets individualistically -- Are consumers responsible for injustices a world away? -- Critical realism -- Critical realism and natural science -- Social structures -- Power -- The market as a social structure -- Implications -- Sinful social structures -- Economic ethics in a stratified world -- What can be done about market injustice? -- Conclusion.
Summary:
Workers in distant nations who produce the products we buy frequently suffer from accidents, managerial malfeasance, and injustice. Are consumers who bought the products made by these workers in any way morally responsible for those injustices? And what about the far more frequent, less severe injustices, such as the withholding of wages, the denial of bathroom breaks, forced overtime, and harassment of various sorts? Could buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the horrendous death in a factory fire of the women who sewed it half a planet away?
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