Ethics under neoliberalism:

Moral principles, ethical evaluation, are cast as a luxury we can’t afford, or the province of cranks and loony utopian thinking.

Why do I feel the need to apologise for imagining a better way of being? Why does systemic change feel impossible? The power of markets (i.e. the power of money) has become so naturalised that it’s barely possible to imagine overcoming it. Even the natural catastrophes predicted by climate science are somehow felt as less potent than the political and economic structures that have been built in my lifetime. ‘Individual freedom’, that cloaking device of neoliberalism, becomes a prison, whose bars are constructed by mega-corporations and increasing inequality. Freedom to put your money wherever you like, including in the hands of tame politicians, is no freedom for the unmoneyed majority, whose democratic voices are suppressed and whose social and natural environments are plundered, converted into additional income streams for the already rich.

Individualism is taken to imply that morality is a matter of personal choice, so there’s no space or need for ethical debate. Questions of what value is or what principles we as a society should live by are dismissed or swept under a rug of ‘cost-benefit analysis’. Only financial value is countable – what is unmonetised is invisible.

But counter-voices are being raised, arguing for different metrics of social value – replacing GDP with well-being and sustainability, infinite growth with circular economies (doughnut economics), challenging the assumption that self-interest and competition are the basic human condition, recognising the existence of altruism and community.

Faced with the present planetary emergencies, maybe those voices will come to prevail. Isolated individuals pursuing money in ‘free’, i.e. unregulated, competitive markets have not so far proved to be the best way to protect our ecosystem. And when catastrophes happen, it is mutuality and the gift economies of charity, sharing and collaboration, that leap to the fore.

Identifying value with monetary cost and letting economics do our moral thinking for us – these are the luxuries we can no longer afford.

Watercolour experiments:

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