Making Globalization Good: The Moral Challenges of Global Capitalism [Paperback]

He moves to the "moral" and "historical" part of his essay by tracing the split between the Western and the Eastern traditional beliefs to the rise of capitalism to the restrictions of the early medieval Catholic Church. The church he claims changed the rules around the traditional distribution of patrimony by creating new laws and moral injunctions with respect to the distribution of wealth to heirs, injunctions which created a widow class who, because they were enjoined to follow the new law against remarriage after the death of a husband were ripe fruit for importunate priests who drew their fortunes into the church treasury. A very lucrative practice, this resulted in fabulous wealth for the medieval church according to Lal.

Lal also explores the Western moral and economic philosophers starting with St. Augustine's vision of the shining city on a hill, then moves to the high Enllightement with Kant's universalistic moral creed which sought to demostrate that man was naturally moral and that that God (though still alive) was not necessary to moral behavior. Lal notes that once Darwin declared "God is blind," and later Nietzche proclaimed that "God is dead" the confusions wrought by ultilitarianism and consequentialism thoroughly dis-enchanted the world. Through one of Nietzche's aphorisms -- "moral sensibilites are nowadays at such cross purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it" -- the end of idealist philosophy is demonstrated.

Toward the end of the essay he suggests that any movement that would seek to undermine the trajectory of the capitalist economic ethos through a communalist or cooperative approach is "atavistic," and with that one word attempts to dismiss any evidence of or hope for less destructive arrangments among mankind. He uses the word at least three or four times, as if in its repitition it might become the more true. Another word he likes is Ecofundamentalists, a word he takes credit for inventing, and with which he attempts to discredit groups and people around the world who do not readily accede to what business theory eumphemistically calls "externalities," but which most people more simply call "pollution."

He finally ends the essay by suggesting international business consider a Humean common sense perspective. Hume, he says, saw that families have raised children to certain standards of behavior and "golden rule" beliefs for thousands of years without recourse to the potential divisiveness caused by different beliefs of followers of the various world religions diand. He maintains that it is these home truths of human behavior which should be invoked in global economic arrangements as they best represent the most common arrangements of humanity worldwide, a strategy which would avoid the misunderstandings generated between followers of various religions.

Similar to his earlier advancement of the universal creed of "truck and barter," is the practice of the universal home truths. Even if this assertion is to be granted, it prompts one to ask why capitalism should be allowed to piggy-back on these home truths, these relations which are generally altruistic or famlial in nature. Further, one could ask whether it is appropriate for capitialism to rely on these human arrangements given the self-seeking behavior promoted by capitalism. Will it not destroy the very arrangements it is piggy-backing on, or, more pointedly, isn't there ample proof that it has already? This essay is fairly representative of the essays in this volume; a dry, and supposedly "objective" manual designed for international business class and governmental and academic technocrats who have recently been forced by protests all over the world to examine the potential snarls they might run into as the world is remade in the image of the almighty dollar.