Globalization's Shifting Economic and Moral Terrain: Contesting Marketplace Mores

Abstract

Major shifts in economic life have always been accompanied by corresponding changes in the public's economic morality. Contemporary globalization is pulling the moral agent in opposite directions: greater moral obligations versus the competitive individualism required by an increasingly unforgiving marketplace. Moreover, the market, not governments or the grassroots, is emerging as the dominant determinant of popular economic morality and is profoundly reshaping people's self-understanding as persons and as a human community. The article argues that theological ethics plays an important role in contesting the market's moral baseline.