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Value and Values: Economics and Justice in an Age of Global Interdependence Value and Values: Economics and Justice in an Age of Global Interdependence
Format
cloth
Pages
568
ISBN
978-0-8248-3967-3

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century--climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two--are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life.

Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law.

Published in association with the East-West Philosophers Conference

© University of Hawaii Press

 

Hard copies may be purchased from the University of Hawaii Press.
 

CONTENTS
 
Part I  Interdependence and Relationality
1. The Mosaic and the Jigsaw Puzzle: How It All Fits Together
2. Value, Exchange, and Beyond: Betweenness as Starting Point
3. Triple Negation: Watsuji Tetsurō on the Sustainability of Ecosystems, Economies, and International Peace
4. Fouling Our Nest: Is (Environmental) Ethics Impotent against (Bad) Economics?
5. The Visible and the Invisible: Rethinking Values and Justice from a Buddhist-Postmodern Perspective
6. "You Ought to Be Ashamed of Yourself!"
7. Filial Piety and the Traditional Chinese Rural Community: An Alternative Ethical Paradigm for Modern Aging Societies
8. Doing Justice to Justice: Seeking a More Capacious Conception of Justice from Confucian Role Ethics
 
Part II  Dynamism and Contextuality
9. Moral Equivalents
10. A Critique of Economic Reason: Between Tradition and Postcoloniality
11. Economies of Scarcity and Acquisition, Economies of Gift and Thanksgiving: Lessons from Cultural Anthropology
12. John Dewey, Institutional Economics, and Confucian Democracies
13. The Responsible Society as Social Harmony: Walter G. Muelder's Communitarian Social Ethics as a Bridge Tradition for Confucian Economics
14. Swaraj and Swadeshi: Gandhi and Tagore on Ethics, Development, and Freedom
15. Economics and Religion or Economics versus Religion: The Concept of an Islamic Economics
16. Two Challenges to Market Daoism
17. Buddhist, Western, and Hybrid Perspectives on Liberty Rights and Economic Rights
18. The Conversation of Justice: Rawls, Sandel, Cavell, and Education for Political Literacy
19. Social Justice and the Occident
20. Three-Level Eco-Humanism in Japanese Confucianism: Combining Environmental with Humanist Social Ethics
21. Economic Growth, Human Well-Being, and the Environment
 
Part III  Equity and Diversity
22. The Moral Necessity of Socialism
23. Invaluable Justice: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism Thinking on Values and Justice
24. What Is It Like to Be a Moral Being?
25. What is the Value of Poverty? A Comparative Analysis of Aristotle's Politics and Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki
26. Economic Goods, Common Goods, and the Good Life
27. On the Justice of Caring Labor: An Alternative Theory of Liberal Egalitarianism to Dworkin's Luck Egalitarianism
28. Aging, Equality, and Confucian Selves
29. Institutional Power Matters: The Role of Institutional Power in International Development
30. The Value of Diversity: Buddhist Reflections on More Equitably Orienting Global Interdependence
 

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century--climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two--are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life.

Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law.

Published in association with the East-West Philosophers Conference

© University of Hawaii Press

 

Hard copies may be purchased from the University of Hawaii Press.
 

CONTENTS
 
Part I  Interdependence and Relationality
1. The Mosaic and the Jigsaw Puzzle: How It All Fits Together
2. Value, Exchange, and Beyond: Betweenness as Starting Point
3. Triple Negation: Watsuji Tetsurō on the Sustainability of Ecosystems, Economies, and International Peace
4. Fouling Our Nest: Is (Environmental) Ethics Impotent against (Bad) Economics?
5. The Visible and the Invisible: Rethinking Values and Justice from a Buddhist-Postmodern Perspective
6. "You Ought to Be Ashamed of Yourself!"
7. Filial Piety and the Traditional Chinese Rural Community: An Alternative Ethical Paradigm for Modern Aging Societies
8. Doing Justice to Justice: Seeking a More Capacious Conception of Justice from Confucian Role Ethics
 
Part II  Dynamism and Contextuality
9. Moral Equivalents
10. A Critique of Economic Reason: Between Tradition and Postcoloniality
11. Economies of Scarcity and Acquisition, Economies of Gift and Thanksgiving: Lessons from Cultural Anthropology
12. John Dewey, Institutional Economics, and Confucian Democracies
13. The Responsible Society as Social Harmony: Walter G. Muelder's Communitarian Social Ethics as a Bridge Tradition for Confucian Economics
14. Swaraj and Swadeshi: Gandhi and Tagore on Ethics, Development, and Freedom
15. Economics and Religion or Economics versus Religion: The Concept of an Islamic Economics
16. Two Challenges to Market Daoism
17. Buddhist, Western, and Hybrid Perspectives on Liberty Rights and Economic Rights
18. The Conversation of Justice: Rawls, Sandel, Cavell, and Education for Political Literacy
19. Social Justice and the Occident
20. Three-Level Eco-Humanism in Japanese Confucianism: Combining Environmental with Humanist Social Ethics
21. Economic Growth, Human Well-Being, and the Environment
 
Part III  Equity and Diversity
22. The Moral Necessity of Socialism
23. Invaluable Justice: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism Thinking on Values and Justice
24. What Is It Like to Be a Moral Being?
25. What is the Value of Poverty? A Comparative Analysis of Aristotle's Politics and Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki
26. Economic Goods, Common Goods, and the Good Life
27. On the Justice of Caring Labor: An Alternative Theory of Liberal Egalitarianism to Dworkin's Luck Egalitarianism
28. Aging, Equality, and Confucian Selves
29. Institutional Power Matters: The Role of Institutional Power in International Development
30. The Value of Diversity: Buddhist Reflections on More Equitably Orienting Global Interdependence