Abstract
This chapter considers the central question of whether capitalism can be moral. The confluence of economic and social crises exacerbated by the global financial crisis and the corona virus pandemic has led to crippled healthcare and education systems, soaring unemployment, and an outpouring of anger and anxiety within countries. These global concerns have placed capitalism and its efficacy firmly in the spotlight for its inability to realize the creation and distribution of wealth for inclusive growth that is ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable. Unmistakably, capitalism has been good at meeting many of our wants but at the cost of contradictions at odds with the achievement of genuine democracy and development. The analysis contends that institutions matter and, rather than rely on invisible market mechanisms or reluctant regulatory reforms in time of crisis to infuse a semblance of order into capitalism, that there be a conscious effort at injecting morality into its ecosystem of values. This requires examining and identifying a new or a reformed institutional architecture as a constitutive feature of the modus operandi of the system. This approach is imperative for [re]conceptualizing the utility of capitalism in mitigating the dire circumstances of the global economy as it attempts to move forward from this current epochal predicament. While this is a long process that requires determination, the chapter concludes by encouraging us to think of public values as powerful forces that must be induced into society both by rule of law and by the attitudes of society towards civilizing capitalism.
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Broome, P.A. (2022). Capitalism and Morality. In: Baikady, R., Sajid, S., Nadesan, V., Przeperski, J., Islam, M.R., Gao, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_19-1
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