1 - Introduction: inequality matters

Summary

“Why is Inequality Back on the Agenda?” Economists Ravi Kanbur and Nora Lustig pose this question as the title of a recent essay. Their own careful answer contributes to the growing chorus of international and domestic voices attending to inequality, its causes and its effects. While economic and political analyses have been at the center of this renewed public discussion, less prominent has been an explicit focus on the moral dimensions. How and why does inequality matter morally?

The stated purpose of the series, New Studies in Christian Ethics, is to engage a secular moral debate and to demonstrate the distinctive contribution of Christian ethics to that debate. To that end, this book considers the various dimensions of the public discourse on inequality. It offers a constructive approach that engages resources in Christian social ethics along with perspectives in political philosophy and development economics. The book seeks not only to contribute to the wider moral debate about inequality, but also to shed light on how moral values operate (and should operate) in all aspects of the discussions. It aims to understand and then move beyond the numbers, providing a moral framework for understanding and responding to them.

At the beginning, it is important to clarify the distinction between poverty and inequality: while poverty is a condition of people at the bottom end of a socioeconomic distribution, inequality is a phenomenon of a distribution as a whole.