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"Moral economy"
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Encountering China : Michael Sandel and Chinese philosophy
In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he's a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds. China Daily reports that he has acquired a popularity \"usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.\" China Newsweek declared him the \"most influential foreign figure\" of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by the nation's swift embrace of a market economy--a guide whose communitarian ideas resonate with aspects of China's own rich and ancient philosophical traditions. Chinese citizens often describe a sense that, in sprinting ahead, they have bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. The market economy has lifted millions from poverty but done little to define ultimate goals for individuals or the nation. Is the market all there is? In this context, Sandel's charismatic, interactive lecturing style, which roots moral philosophy in real-world scenarios, has found an audience struggling with questions of their responsibility to one another. Encountering China brings together leading experts in Confucian and Daoist thought to explore the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West. The result is a profound examination of diverse ideas about the self, justice, community, gender, and public good. With a foreword by Evan Osnos that considers Sandel's fame and the state of moral dialogue in China, the book will itself be a major contribution to the debates that Sandel sparks in East and West alike.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Higher Ethical Objective (Maqasid al-Shari'ah) Augmented Framework for Islamic Banks: Assessing Ethical Performance and Exploring Its Determinants
This study utilises higher objectives postulated in Islamic moral economy or the maqasid al-Shari'ah theoretical framework's novel approach in evaluating the ethical, social, environmental and financial performance of Islamic banks. Maqasid al-Shar'ah is interpreted as achieving social good as a consequence in addition to well-being and, hence, it goes beyond traditional (voluntary) social responsibility. This study also explores the major determinants that affect maqasid performance as expressed through disclosure analysis. By expanding the traditional maqasid al-Shari'ah, we develop a comprehensive evaluation framework in the form of a maqasid index, which is subjected to a rigorous disclosure analysis. Furthermore, in identifying the main determinants of the maqasid disclosure performance, panel data analysis is used by including several key variables alongside political and socio-economic environment, ownership structures, and corporate and Shari'ah governance-related factors. The sample includes 33 full-fledged Islamic banks from 12 countries for the period of 2008-2016. The findings show that although during the nine-year period the disclosure of maqasid performance of the sampled Islamic banks has improved, this is still short of 'best practices'. Through panel data analysis, this study finds that the Muslim population indicator, CEO duality, Shari'ah governance, and leverage variables positively impact the disclosure of maqasid performance. However, the effect of GDP, financial development and human development index of the country, its political and civil rights, institutional ownership, and a higher share of independent directors have an overall negative impact on the maqasid performance. The findings reported in this study identify complex and multi-faceted relations between external market realities, corporate and SharVah governance mechanisms, and maqasid performance.
Journal Article
Land Justice as a Historical Diagnostic: Thinking with Detroit
Debates around urban land-who owns it, who can access it, who decides, and on what basis-are intensifying in the United States. Fifty years after the end of legally sanctioned segregation, rising rents in cities across the country are displacing poor people, particularly people of color. In this article, I consider debates around land in Detroit. Building on work in critical race studies, indigenous studies, and decolonial theory, as well insights from community activists, I introduce and develop what I call a \"historical diagnostic.\" This justice-oriented analytical approach illuminates the racialized dispossession that haunts land struggles and foregrounds the historical antecedents to and aspirations of contemporary land justice movements. Drawing on research conducted in Detroit between 2010 and 2012, I analyze instances when the moral economy of land becomes visible, including a truth and reconciliation process, the period when the state of Michigan placed the city under emergency management, and a tax foreclosure auction. An examination of these events reveals alternative ways of knowing and being in relation to land that we might build upon to confront displacement in cities today.
Journal Article
“A question of bank notes, cars, and houses!” Matchmaking and the Moral Economy of Love in Urban China
Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.
Journal Article
Building Merit: The Moral Economy of the Illegal Wildlife Trade in Rural, Post-Socialist Eastern Mongolia
This article describes the development of the moral economy of merit among the fishermen and rural poor of Dalai Village, Magtaal soum, Mongolia. In 1971, the historian E. P. Thompson used the term “moral economy” to describe a popular consensus on what was considered right and wrong in economic behavior, arguing that its provocation motivated the eighteenth-century English poor to engage in crowd-based political action. In contemporary, post-socialist eastern Mongolia, the rural poor have constructed a pervasive local discourse on what is considered legitimate (“merit-making” or buyantai) versus what is illegitimate in economic behavior that morally-condones their illegal wildlife procurement, selling, and smuggling activities. The political contexts of these case studies are compared in order to detail a similar political-economic progression: (1) the recent market liberalization of the commons, sparking moral outrage amongst those classes newly disadvantaged through this shift to the market; and (2) the formation of an anti-profiteering moral discourse among these classes, designed to limit the ability of others to economically capitalize off of these circumstances. Comparing the case studies, the moral economy is manifested as exchange practices involving commons-marked goods that distribute their benefits among the participants, envisioned as thereby promoting group wellbeing rather than the uneven accumulation by individuals.
Journal Article
Rethinking capitalist transformation of fisheries in South Africa and India
The industrialization of fisheries and the growth of a capitalist sector within fisheries have received considerable scholarly attention. For the most part, scholars have emphasized how capitalism has led to privatization of the commons, forced small-scale resource users into wage labor, and marginalized the sector. This analysis does not, however, explain the continued presence of such a vibrant and important small-scale sector in fisheries throughout the world. Drawing on the notion of Foucauldian governmentality, other scholars have argued that the small-scale sector or what they term the “need economy” is a product of primitive accumulation. The state must, in conditions of democracy, address the welfare needs of all those who have been dispossessed in order to govern. We engage with this theorization in the context of fisheries and argue that seeing small-scale fisheries only as a product of primitive accumulation and Foucauldian governmentality ignores the moral economies of these fisheries. By analyzing capitalist transformation of fisheries in two “democratic” countries, South Africa and India, we highlight how small-scale fishers resist increasing marginalization and how governments have afforded a measure of protection to this sector, and confirm the importance of their moral economies to sustainable and equitable fisheries in the future.
Journal Article
Water governance and sustainability: an Islamic moral economy perspective on circular resource use
Water circularity is increasingly recognised as a critical determinant of long-term economic resilience and sustainability. This paper empirically investigates the decoupling of economic growth from water consumption across 179 countries over the period 1962 to 2019, using Tapio’s decoupling index (2005) and the environmental Kuznets curve framework. It examines performance differences between Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries, and further evaluates the role of constitutional systems, Shari’ah, civil, and common law, through the combined lenses of the circular economy and Islamic Moral Economy. An innovative model, “CircuIslamicus”, is proposed, incorporating the Islamicity Index as a proxy for IME adherence to assess whether higher Islamicity scores correlate with stronger water circularity performance. Key findings reveal that non-Muslim countries with higher Islamicity index scores outperform Muslim-majority countries and those governed by Shari’ah law in achieving water circularity, suggesting a significant gap between ethical-economic aspirations and environmental outcomes in Muslim-majority contexts. While evidence of global progress in relative decoupling is observed, the results call for urgent policy and institutional realignment to embed substance-oriented Islamic Moral Economy principles into practice.
Journal Article
Constituting an Islamic social welfare function: an exploration through Islamic moral economy
Purpose
This study aims to theoretically explore and examine the possibility of developing an Islamic social welfare function (ISWF) within the Islamic moral economy (IME) frame by going beyond the traditional fiqhī approach. It focuses on issues of preference ordering and utility through the normative dimension of Islamic ontology, as expressed and articulated within the IME.
Design/methodology/approach
Being a theoretical paper, a conceptual and critical discursive approach is used in this paper.
Findings
To establish an ISWF, a narrow juristic approach remains inadequate; there is a need to integrate the substantive morality to complement the juristic approach to achieve the ihsani process as the ultimate individual objective, which makes an ISWF possible. As the scattered debate on the topic concentrates mainly on the juristic approach, the main contribution of this study is to present a model in which juristic and moralist positions endogenized and augmented to constitute ISWF.
Originality/value
As there is a limited amount of research available on the subject matter, this paper will be an important theoretical contribution. In addition, this study develops an IME approach rather than fiqh-based approach used in the available research, which makes it novel.
Journal Article
INDEBTED
The 2008 mortgage crash and the online publics that have emerged in its aftermath have reshaped American interpretations of indebtedness. Combining research among homeowners facing foreclosure in California’s Sacramento Valley with an analysis of the national online forums they frequent, I show how participants rethink the moral scaffolding of debt relations within what I describe as online publics of indebtedness. Anonymous online publics foster experiences of disembodied autonomy that encourage debt refusal and discipline the middle-class ethics of debt abandonment, as participants distinguish between mortgagors who deserve not to pay their debts and those they deem irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. In contrast, participation in semipublic social networks and online forms of publicity emphasizes new affective orientations toward debt obligations. My analysis contributes to an anthropological scholarship on moral economies by exploring the role of distinct forms of new media in shaping everyday experiences of indebtedness in late-capitalist financial markets.
Journal Article
Beyond Modernity
The idea of a moral economy has gained salience in the 21st century. It has been used by economists, political scientists, and to a lesser extent, scholars of religion, for alternative values of money, exchange, debt, poverty, and prosperity. As an actual moral economy seems elusive in the presence of a dominant capitalist market, this essay reflects on the work of Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century historian and philosopher. Ibn Khaldun’s reflections on the different ways in which individuals seek a livelihood (maʿāsh) reveal systematic and also ethical considerations. The essay examines some key terms which he uses to understand human sustenance and ethical reflections on various crafts. His ‘moral economy’ combines economic considerations with divine beneficence, rational thought, and ethical purpose.
Journal Article