Moral values may well be human constructs. But they are more than just constructs. They are categories constructed to differentiate between the usefulness of different kinds of social behaviour. Value, in other words, is tied to action. But the essential core of the concept of “value” is exactly that: worth. Something is valuable if it’s worth doing. But if it’s not worth it, it’s not valuable. So value is all about worth. An ethical value is thus a category that implies certain types of action are intrinsically worth doing. Moral values therefore designate special kinds of social behaviour as having this sort of intrinsic worth.
All social systems are tied to values, because they encourage certain types of behaviour while discouraging and prohibiting others. So why certain types of behaviour are encouraged and others discouraged depends on the nature of that specific social system; it depends on the way that social system conceives human beings and nature; it depends, in summary, on a particular conception of life and nature – whether or not that conception is unconscious and implicit. There is therefore an objective dimension to values – which is whether they work or not, whether they lead to forms of behaviour that generate well-being, or do the opposite. Values are more likely be useful, if they reflect reality – human nature, the nature of the world, and the way their mutual interrelationship.
One of Professor McMurtry’s most well-known and disturbing areas of focus is his analysis of global markets as an ethical system. He points out that the global economic regime is based on “an unexamined and absolutist value system.”
Capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, Anglo-American wars and the intensifying suppression of civil liberties are all symptoms of a “new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns.” Conventional neo-liberal economic theory is supposed to be value-free, objective, scientific. But it isn’t, at all:
“To the contrary, the positions of a ‘value-free’ or positivist economics still presuppose as given and self-evident the value system of private property rights, the pursuit of self-interest and profit, and the monetized production and exchange of needed goods as the foundational, regulating norms of their analyses…. The principle of self-serving for money accumulation in all conditions, with no constraining obligation to one’s own society or to use-value production, has become the overriding, abstract imperative of market doctrine. The promotion of the public interest, on the other hand, has become a token mantra with no demonstrated connection to money self-maximization.”
Like David Korten, John McMurtry sees in this free market ideology subtle but deeply engrained fundamentalist strains that elevate materialist market principles of self-interest and profit maximization to unquestionable levels of God-like status: “We find that government and their leadership now assume that the value system of the global market is to be the proper order to social organization and that societies must be made to adapt to this order as the needs and demands of the market requires. The market is not now seen as a structure to serve society, rather society is seen as an aggregate of resources to serve the global market.” He continues, “No traditional religion had declared more absolutely the universality and necessity of its laws and commandments than the proponents of the global market doctrine.”
So the question is, how do we overcome this hidden theology of market fundamentalism that is so deeply embedded in our dysfunctional social systems? Beyond our activism on the pressing issues of our times, this needs to be at the forefront of our thinking, as a matter of urgency.
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