Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy: How Buying Here Causes Injustice There, Paperback

Workers in distant nations who produce the products we buy frequently suffer from accidents, managerial malfeasance, and injustice. Are consumers who bought the products made by these workers in any way morally responsible for those injustices? And what about the far more frequent, less severe injustices, such as the withholding of wages, the denial of bathroom breaks, forced overtime, and harassment of various sorts? Could buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the horrendous death in a factory fire of the women who sewed it half a planet away?

Daniel K. Finn is an economist and theologian, teaching at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. He is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE), and the Association for Social Economics. He has published extensively on the relation of ethics and economics. He is director of the True Wealth of Nations research project at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies in Los Angeles.