This special collection of Global Perspectives appears during a time of polycrisis.1 Ever since the Great Recession of 2008, human existence has been threatened by a series of complex, interlocking events, ruptures, and crises that are precipitated by, and exacerbate, one another. The coronavirus pandemic—and the enduring danger posed by zoonotic disease—is just one plank of this polycrisis. Other elements include war in Europe, inflationary upsurge and volatility, debt crises, conflict in the Middle East, and the ever-present and increasingly volatile environmental disaster that has been unfolding for decades. Understanding the extent to which morality shapes people’s perceptions of and responses to crises, questions of economic justice, and environmental degradation, among many other issues, is a critical challenge for scholarship. The essays collected here are a contribution to meeting it.
There is a marked disconnect between the essentially amoral, utilitarian nature of economic science and much of the public...
University of California Press