Economics and the Ethics of Care

This chapter examines how we think about “economic actors” and the kind of behavior suitable for the “economic sphere.” First, the chapter shows that the neoclassical orthodoxy has produced several tendentious analyses regarding issues such as the relationship between humans and the rest of nature and the persistence of poverty. Second, it shows how the social and economic gender expectations that prevent many men from ‘physical contact and encounter’ with their children also add to a deficit of care in both the home and the workplace, which can ultimately be detrimental to the economy.

[A] lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality…[A] true ecological approach must hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, 2015