Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

3. Ethical critique of the market: respect for the market must nevertheless be critical.
Free-market theory rests in a reductionist notion of freedom. The neo-liberal Friedrich
von Hayek argued that whereas state action tends inevitably towards ‘serfdom’, the
market is ‘neutral’ and ‘self-regulating’. Politics destroys freedom, business ‘somehow’
promotes it. He argued, indeed, that social justice is nothing more than freedom, and that
the ‘free market’ is the core of human freedom. 16 In Centesimus Annus, however, Pope
John Paul II contrasts a ‘free-market economy’ with a ‘free economy’ (§ 15) precisely
because justice and freedom are mutually dependent. Where an economic system is
made absolute at the expense of other dimensions of human life, ‘economic freedom’
actually alienates and oppresses the human person (§ 39). 17
4. Shared but differentiated responsibility: if ‘the economy’ is not reified but is seen to reflect
human purposes, it becomes also the object of human responsibility. This claim has a
range of implications, of which I note only one: in the face of a global crisis, negotiations
must be truly global. As Pope Benedict wrote in March to the British Prime Minister,
Gordon Brown, noting that the London G20 Summit was understandably restricted
to states which represent 90% of the world’s population and 80% of world trade: ‘This
situation must prompt a profound reflection among the Summit participants, since
those whose voice has least force in the political scene are precisely the ones who suffer
most from the harmful effects of a crisis for which they do not bear responsibility.
Furthermore, in the long run, it is they who have the most potential to contribute to
the progress of everyone.’ 18
5. Solidarity, which may be defined as ‘the fundamental moral imperative that flows
from the communal character of human life’. No attempt to resolve the financial and
economic crisis that continues to exclude the perspective of those in poverty (whether
in Europe or elsewhere) is acceptable: nor is any rush for growth that fails to address
the ecological crisis which affects first those poor communities who have scarcely shared
in creating it.
6. Gratuity: to understand our life as gift (or ‘grace’), and to live in this spirit is the most
profound existential rejection of any world-view that reduces human persons to the
status of homo economicus. We live in a society with a market, but not a ‘market society’.
This concept of gratuity is not intrinsically religious (in that explanations can be given
in terms of anthropology and sociology). But Christian consciousness explicitly takes
gratuity as its ground and its fulfilment.
16 Hayek (1960).
17 John Paul II (1991).
18 Benedikt XVI (2009).
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