The modern moral climate is then a construct of three assumptions: that the human moral agent is an autonomous reasoning sovereign, that human economic exchange is a realm of contractual mediation between autonomous agents, and that the social contract is relationally independent of the cause—effect mechanism of the cosmos.

All three elements of this conceptual architectonic manifest seriously inadequate descriptions of the cosmos, of the good life, and of human and species being.

These arise from Newton's failure to describe correctly the relational character of space and time in its original dependence on the being of God as Creator, and the relational inter-connections, subsequently observed by Einstein, between the different dimensions of space and time; from Mill's failure to ascribe intrinsic value to creaturely being, and hence the failure of the utilitarian calculus to value individuals and households as well as society; and from the classical economists' failure to conceive of society as more than a contractual aggregate of sovereign individuals.

These mis-descriptions produce and shape a moral climate in liberal societies which is increasingly demoralised and disenchanted, and which stands in urgent need of reformation if the planet is not to be committed to irreversible ecological breakdown

These connections between pre-Einsteinian physics and classical economics are not just ones of similitude.

Philip Merowski shows how nineteenth-century economists modelled their mechanistic accounts of human exchange relations and the valuing procedures of the 'laws' of supply and demand on nineteenth-century mechanistic physics.

And under the influence of neoliberalism, this mechanistic modelling of human behaviour by economists has actually deepened.

Neoliberals in the last forty years have sought to redescribe human behaviour in purely mathematical terms after Newtonian-style laws of object relations, time and motion, and also by analogy with binary computer codes and mathematical models of genetics.

These mathematical models have acquired near-mystical power in British and American government circles, as well as among bankers and corporate managers.

Consequently the United States and British governments have both sought to confer on markets powers over more and more areas of human life while shrinking political mediation in economic and social policy.

Even government agencies have adopted mathematical mantras as markets are introduced into education, healthcare and, most recently, into climate-change mitigation with the inauguration of carbon trading as the principal social mechanism for responding to global warming.

The effect of all this has been to produce what Walter Wriston calls the 'twilight of sovereignty', in which the powers of local human communities and even national governments to order their affairs according to shared deliberation on moral ends is given up to autonomous market instruments based on the movement of bits of mathematical information between computers.

But of course these instruments are not truly autonomous, but humanly made.

They further exalt exchange values over intrinsic worth. And they exalt the corporate holders and accountants of money wealth as sovereigns, or even gods, in the neoliberal global economy.

Darton, Longman & Todd | 2007 | Pages 70-71

Michael S. Northcott is Professor of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh and a Priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church