Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

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14 Piet J. Naudé used different designations. But they hopefully provide some order and allow a quick overview of the book’s content. Part One, “Rethinking Ethics,” includes the chapters on afeminist ethics of care (Gouws), the ethics of institutions (Glaeser), and an example of abiographical account ofmoral formation (Allpress). These chapters are grouped together and deliberately put at the beginningbecause they provide theoretical proposals of how to frame character formation and moral communication from different perspectives. Part Two, “Integrating Social Systems,” includes chapters on how social systems indeed operate separately but could still be held as complementary, despite difficulties in this regard. The contributions by Aroney, Belardinelli, and Oslington refer in different ways to economics, education, law, and religion. Part Three, “Evaluating Liberal Capitalism,” includes the view that there is no specific ethos and moral formation associated with liberal capitalism (Bittner), followed bytwo case studies on the global financial crisis (McIlroy) and the design of Twitter (Cole), both highly critical of how moral deformation occurs in the market. Part Four, “Navigating State Power,” includes achapter on the conditions and grounds for resistance to state power (Witte) and one on how state power could be negotiated via constitutional deliberation (Chapman). To give apreview and overview of the contributions, Ipresent each chapter here in afew paragraphs in the order of appearance. Readers are advised to read the full chapters, because much of the detail and nuances are lost in these summaries. Part One: Rethinking Ethics “Neoliberal Political Economy and Value Transmission: What We Can Learn from Feminist Care Ethics,” by Amanda Gouws, describes late modern Western societies as multicultural and subject to the dominance of aneoliberal political economy. The social fabric of pluralistic societies is assured by values such as social inclusion, more inclusive resource distribution, and acceptance of differing value options. These values are transmitted by avariety of socialization agents. However, since neoliberal policies came to dominate our political economy, these values are compromised: “Neoliberal competitiveness and afocus on independence, combined with the commoditization of care, undermine care ethics that embodies interdependence as an important value in multicultural societies.” The privileging of the individual, the economization ofsubjectivity, and an encompassing self-referential consumer culture create anarcissistic value system, namely, “that of manipulating relationships and the lack of deep inter-
Introduction 15 personal connections.” Reinforced by social media, there isaslow corrosion of interrelational values like attentiveness and care. The outcome of this shift invalues is the reinforcement ofasymmetrical power relations between those who cannot successfully participate in the market and those who are economically empowered. The fringes of societyare mostly occupied by women and people of color, constituting neoliberalism as both a raced and gendered process. In apatriarchal society, care and the value of care are usually associated with (often unpaid) women’s work, creating not only a binary gender distinction, but also adivide between aproductive economy and areproductive economy, the latter associated with feminization of poverty. Gouws then introduces the concept of “precarity”: “Precarity is caused and fueled by neoliberalism and the way it assigns value to human interactions, with large numbers of people now living outside asafety net that would ensure their survival. It is now widely acknowledged that we have acare crisis,” partially attributed tothe privatization of care and the scaling back of the welfare state. To address this crisis, she turns in the second part of her chapter to highlight the importance of care ethics in late modern societies. Care ethics is incompatible with neoliberalvalues of individualization and acompetition imperative, as care ethics promotes principles of interdependence, relationality, and acknowledging the “affective turn” where emotions supporting solidarity are nurtured. Care ethics builds on anotion ofanontologically constituted relational moral subject dependent on acollective community and afocus on distributive justice that seeks to overcome precarity. The argument for a feminist ethics of care is based on the gendered nature of the “robust masculine market” in general, but more specifically in relation to the taskofcaring. “Afeminist care ethicsocializes values such as attentiveness (to the care recipient), responsiveness, responsibility, and relationality,” and it applies such values on apersonal, interpersonal, and planetary scale. What is needed are different types ofsocialization agents “that [focus] on relationality, community, and care.” Gouws concludes her discussion with the question why care isnot in the forefront of late modern societies if thereisindeed acare crisis?The answer lies in the fact that care istaken for granted; “care is something without which humans cannotexist,” and we live by the assumptionthat we all know how to care, including honoring the emotional and affective dimensions of care. Yet care is devalued because it is embedded in the value dominance of the neoliberal market, where care is relegated, undervalued, and feminized. There are thus no proper socialization options for care that relate from the individual to the state and to the global community. “We ignore acare ethics at our own peril,” is her concluding remark. “Ethics’ Political Imperative: Moving Toward Better Institutions” is the title of Andreas Glaeser’schapter. The discussion aboutcharacter formation and moral communication in late modern societies is directed away from the merely
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Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

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