Value and Values: Economics and Justice in an Age of Global Interdependence
Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock
Abstract
The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. This book 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 Grea ... More
The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. This book 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. The chapters 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.
Keywords:
justice,
economics,
ethics,
moral life,
human prosperity,
value,
cultural differences
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780824839673 |
Published to Hawaii Scholarship Online: November 2016 |
DOI:10.21313/hawaii/9780824839673.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Roger T. Ames, editor
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Peter D. Hershock, editor
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