Book Launch Reflection: Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption
The launch of Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption, edited by Peter Rona, Laszlo Zsolnai, and Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price, brings fresh Dominican thinking into the pressing issues of consumerism and environmental collapse. This book is a product of the Las Casas Institute’s symposium on “The Ethics of Consumption” at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. It engages deeply with the moral dimensions of consumption, critiquing the failures of modern economic theory and calling for ethical renewal.
The book explores two critical questions: the inherent human capacity for excess and wrongdoing, and the inability of mainstream economics to factor morality into its frameworks. The central critique is aimed at the language of maximization—an ethos that defines success as unending growth and consumption. Instead, the authors ask a fundamental question: what is enough?
Consumption and justice in today’s world, justice is intrinsically tied to the limits of our planet. The authors argue that economics is not a science in the analytic sense, but a descriptive tool that has strayed far from its moral purpose. As we face ecological collapse, the question of “enough” demands responsibility, judgment, and moral courage. This requires resisting the “iron cage of consumption” that defines modernity and rethinking our relationship with resources.
Temperance and the commons, the Dominican perspective shines here: take what you need, no more. Temperance, once a core virtue, is now subsumed by a culture of excess. The monetization of the commons—the transformation of shared resources into exchangeable commodities—has stripped nature of its intrinsic value. The result? A world where growth relentlessly encroaches upon the commons, leaving us with privatized, degraded ecosystems.
This critique of monetization calls for a radical reevaluation of the way we assign value. Economic systems built on perpetual growth cannot sustain a world of finite resources. Justice and sustainability require that we mediate compassion with responsibility, tempering individual desires for the sake of collective well-being.
Time, prudence, and addiction to the present, the book also delves into the mutilation of prudence by unbalanced rationality. Traditionally encompassing past, present, and future, prudence has been reduced to a myopic focus on immediate gratification. This short-term thinking fuels addiction to consumption, where future benefits are discounted, and irrational preferences dominate decision-making.
The addiction metaphor is powerful here. Like addicts, societies rationalize their destructive behaviours under the guise of “rational” self-interest, even when the long-term costs are catastrophic. The authors challenge this paradigm of irrationality, advocating for a return to prudence that considers the well-being of future generations.
Here the Christian thinking kicks in with moral renewal over structural reform, a criticism that while structural reforms are touted as solutions, the book argues they cannot succeed without a moral foundation. Real change requires a reawakening of ethical principles—justice, temperance, and responsibility. For this path without these, even the most revolutionary economic policies will fail to address the root causes of ecological and social crises.
Shovelling the mess, the themes of Homo Curator align with the challenges we face in building a sustainable and just future. The critique of consumption, monetization, and short-term thinking reflects the broader struggle to escape the “#deathcult” of #neoliberalism.
As I often say, our world is smeared in social and ecological “shit,” but shit makes good compost. By wielding these tools of justice, temperance, and prudence, we could maybe shovel this mess into something fertile. This Dominican vision dose offers not just critique but hope: a call to embrace moral responsibility as we plant the seeds of a new economy rooted in shared humanity and care for the planet.
It’s a reminder that we need more than technical fixes—we need ethical renewal. The work ahead is messy, but necessary. Grab a shovel.
Book launch for Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption edited by Peter Rona, Laszlo Zsolnai, and Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price.
This book explores the under-researched sources of the consumerist culture and the environmental damage it has brought about. The book is an outcome of the symposium on “The Ethics of Consumption” organised and hosted by the Las Casas Institute at the Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford as part of its Economics as a Moral Science Programme. It takes on two contemporary problems: the human weakness and capacity for wrong-doing, and the failure of modern economic theory to account for the moral character of human behaviour and its implicit encouragement of gluttonous life-styles. In a time when grand political schemes are proposed to revive sustainability of global economy, the authors of the papers collected in this book highlight the need for moral renewal without which the most revolutionary structural reforms are bound to fail at producing the desired outcome. Topics of the book include the meaning and sources of avarice, the attempt to define what is enough, exploration of philosophical and theological perspectives which can serve as building blocks for the ethics of consumption. This makes the book of great interest to a broad readership of economists, social scientists and philosophers.
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That economics is not a science, rather it is descriptive rather than analytic. They are quite progressive, Franciscans in Oxford.
Criticism of the language of maximization, enough is the question.
Temperature, taking what you need, not more. Now the is the question of justice, due to the limits we now understand.
We have to take the responsibility for making judgments. To mediate the compation, in our money society, it’s hard work to counter this.
The iron cage of consumption, we need radical change in our economics to escape this.
Produce, the 3 ages of men, past, present future, its feald is time. Modern rationality, gives us mutilated “produnce” only the present.
Addiction, as rationale, they discount future benefits. A paradine of irrationality. Some preferences are irrational?
Monetisation is a core problem, commons are closed, growth is more and more inclosing the”commons” the environment becomes property. All nature is turned into exchange values.