Daniel K. FINN, Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy: How Buying Here Causes Injustice There. Georgetown University Press: Washington, D.C., 2019. Pp ix,171. $104.95 (hard cover), $34.95 (paper; ebook). ISBN: 9781626166950 (1626166951. Reviewed by Joseph A. BRACKEN, S.J., Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH 45207.

Daniel Finn, an economist and theologian teaching at St John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota, has written an important book on the intersection of economic theory and ethical responsibility. Details of his analysis are too numerous to cover in this brief review.  But I will summarize the contents and add a few words of critique afterwards.  The book is divided into three parts.  Part I, entitled “Our Situation,” is composed of three chapters.  The first chapter reflects on the individualistic bias of contemporary Western culture, the second on the history of the science of economics with its own individualistic bias, the third on the efforts of three contemporary economists to take account of the pervasive influence of social and economic structures on consumers, factory workers, buyers and sellers in the clothing industry.  Then in Part II, entitled “Critical Realism,” Finn reviews the philosophical presuppositions of modern natural science in Chapter Four, then points to the unseen reality and all-pervasive influence of underlying social and economic structures in Chapter Five. In Chapter Six he analyzes how some power-structures restrict the decisions of individuals, others enable and facilitate freedom of choice, and still others over time subtly alter the moral conscience of people in power. Chapter Seven applies these different kinds of power-relations to the way that markets work in the world economy. In Part III, Chapter Eight, Finn makes clear that, while social and economic structures are not themselves sinful, they enable human beings to make sinful self-centered choices vis-à-vis others and thereby damage the common good. Chapter Nine points out the value of the theory of Critical Realism to avoid either collectivism or rugged individualism in policies designed to deal with manifest instances of social injustice. Rugged individualism focuses simply on improving the behavior of individuals within current systems; collectivism urges revolt against the system and a dramatic change in the prevailing social order.  Critical realism instead insists on the assumption of a stratified world order together with careful analysis of the key relationship between agency and structure; neither makes sense apart from the other.  Finally, in Chapter 10 Finn out of his own experience in the field suggests concrete ways in which an individual can bring about needed change: e.g., by choosing “fair trade” products even at some cost to oneself, by using the ballot box to elect socially conscientious individuals who will enforce existing government regulations or change them for the better so as to guarantee better working conditions and a living wage for workers in this country and abroad.

By way of personal comment, I first warmly commend Finn for drawing attention to the relatively unnoticed effects of current economic and social systems on the lives of individual human beings. For Western civilization has traditionally put heavy stress on the rights of individuals vis-à-vis others and under-emphasized the moral obligation of individuals to safeguard the rights of others and to cultivate the common good as a higher-order value than simply the protection of one’s own goals and values. But I have reservations with Finn’s appeal to critical realism as the philosophical underpinning for his analysis of life in contemporary society.  In my view, Critical Realism, however well-intentioned, is still too anthropocentric, too little aware of physical reality as an organically constituted whole in which everything is intrinsically interconnected with everything else. Individual parts or members of the whole play different roles in the origin and growth of the whole but all contribute to its ontological status as a higher-order reality or genuine common good.  In Western medieval society, everything was organically linked to everything else but at the same time deterministically in virtue of the master plan of Divine Providence for the world of creation.  With the rise of early modern science and its reliance on the quantitative measurement of empirical data, this theological determinism was replaced by a mechanistic world view in which the world is strictly governed by universal laws of nature. Only in the twentieth century through gradual realization of the innate unpredictability of open-ended natural systems in their ever-changing relations to one another has it become clear that nature is alive, equivalently a mega-organism with innumerable subsystems in ongoing dynamic interrelation. Consumer ethics in a global economy, accordingly, should be envisioned more within the context of evolution, the way in which higher-order systems are emergent out of the ongoing interplay of lower-order systems. As Holmes Rolston makes clear in A New Environmental Ethic: The Next Millenium for Life on Earth, we human beings need lower-forms of life (plants, animals, even bacteria) much more than they need us to survive and prosper in a physical environment with limited resources.  Cooperation for survival among rival life-forms, more than intense competition between them, is ultimately the name of the game.