Andrea Walsh

While it is common in discussions of Islamic finance to translate 'riba' as interest, we wish to argue that it is better understood through the notion of usury since it was understood this way not just in the Christian Middle Ages but even at the time of Adam Smith in his 'The Wealth of Nations'. We also argue that the person responsible for changing attitudes towards usury was Jeremy Bentham, whose Defence of Usury would have a huge impact in shaping a tendency not just to trivialize the notion of usury, but to promote a tendency in the West to divorce financial behaviour from ethical concerns. While their debate about usury has already attracted comment, it deserves to be placed within a larger context. Bentham's ideas would eventually lead to the abolition of the usury laws in Britain in 1854, making London the global financial centre that it still is today. One could argue that when Britain's law-makers first acknowledged the legitimacy of Islamic financial contracts in 2002, they were unwittingly recognizing the validity of a system of financial ethics that had in fact underpinned the European economy for more than six hundred years until its abolition. This chapter explores a parallel movement to Islamic finance in the European tradition. It is the fruit of collaboration between a historian of medieval Christian thought, and a philosopher concerned with contemporary financial ethics.

The casual visitor to Oslo, with little or no knowledge of Norway's recent history, could be forgiven for being unaware that per capita this is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. With its predominantly nineteenth-century streetscapes and the absence of large or monumental buildings, there is in fact little evidence, except for the recently built opera house on the harbour, that Oslo is the capital of a nation with the world's largest future fund. The latter, with assets worth 185 per cent of the country's GDP, was built on rates of taxes on petroleum resources, that in some instances, were as high as eighty-five per cent.

Jason Stanley argues in his new book that propaganda is more prevalent within liberal democracies - and is of far greater concern - than is typically assumed. Indeed, Stanley suggests that the very idea that propaganda only proliferates within authoritarian regimes, which have ministries set aside for its production, is a central tenet of the propaganda of the West. Stanley's aim in this book is to outline the distinctive features of propaganda within a liberal democracy. On his account, the 'flawed ideology' of vested and powerful interest groups undermines the genuinely valuable ideals at the heart of the democratic project; this is what he refers to as 'demagogic propaganda'. Although I am highly sceptical of the argumentative strategies Stanley employs, the book raises significant issues about the extent to which public debates in countries like the United States and Australia involve distorted conceptions of what democratic principles properly entail. Criticisms of the undemocratic and illiberal nature of political processes within liberal democracies are of course common on the left. Two key features set Stanley's work apart from much of that literature. First, he regards democratic principles as genuinely valuable and does not dismiss them as 'mere reactionary claptrap', as many in the New Left did forty years ago. Second, and more significantly, his intellectual background is highly unusual. Stanley is an analytic philosopher whose training was primarily in epistemology and formal semantics rather than in social theory or political philosophy. This is uncommon, since most analytic philosophers who are focused on epistemology and similar issues avoid political questions, a reticence of which Stanley does not approve. Indeed, the book is driven, as he says, by a profound sense of regret that analytic philosophy has surrendered many of its central questions to sociology and social theory.

Climate change is one of the most crucial problems facing the global community at the present time. Climate change will affect not only the well-being of future generations but the prospects of those who are currently alive. At the time of writing this introduction, news outlets across the world were reporting that global temperatures for February of this year showed an unprecedented upward spike.' According to NASA data, it was 1.35°C warmer than the average February during the baseline period of 1950-1981. Even more disturbingly, this is the biggest temperature anomaly since records began in 1880. At the same time, Arctic sea-ice cover recorded its lowest ever February value. Many commentators in those reports spoke understandably of a climate emergency at our very doorstep. These alarming statistics illustrate the rapid changes occurring across the globe and demonstrate the urgency of the climate challenges that confront us. In responding to climate change and in formulating climate policy, economic analysis and economic solutions will undoubtedly be two of the key tools employed by policymakers. They will be central to the solutions that governments and other relevant institutional agencies develop to the challenge of climate change. Indeed climate economics has been at the heart of much of the recent policy debate.

Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed a revolution in the organisation and social understanding of elite sport. Elite sport has been commercialised. Top-level athletes have become professionals who often receive remarkable levels of income and sporting events, such as the World Cup, are multi-billion dollar exercises that attract enormous levels of sponsorship. Many sports, such as cricket, have been substantially revamped in order to make them more appealing to mass audiences and, accordingly, more beneficial to sponsors and many clubs, such as Manchester United, have become corporations in their own right

We inhabit a world in which the market is a dominant institutional form of social organization. This influence is not without its critics, and there is considerable debate amongst political philosophers and policy-makers about whether the range of the market should expand or contract and, further, about the extent to which the market should be subject to constraints and government regulation. The expansion of the market into realms hitherto unknown is the theme of a number of recent books, including Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy and Debra Satz's Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, which build on earlier work by, amongst others, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Jane Radin, and Michael Walzer

Consider the following dilemma. If it is possible to identify the cause of a person's action and beliefs - causes that are outside the agent's own conscious reasoning - in what sense can we say that the person chooses what she does or she thinks? If the person did not consciously choose, then it is reasonable to ask whether she should be held morally responsible for any of the subsequent consequences of her actions. This is the general territory of the puzzle that Neil Levy's thoughtful and elegantly written new book addresses. He explores what scientific advances in the study of consciousness might tell us about our capacity for choice and, hence, our responsibility for those choices.

Noxious markets, inequality and social meanings In this thoughtful and timely book, Debra Satz provides a convincing justificatory framework for our ongoing discomfort at the intrusion of markets into many areas of our lives that hitherto had been free from commercial influence. Her central problem is the commodification of everyday life. We inhabit social worlds which are highly commodified and in which the market is often prescribed as a universal panacea for any social problem we confront. Yet despite such overt marketisation in the culture at large, nonetheless there remains the widespread belief that there are some things that should not be for sale: the very thought of selling certain goods remains repugnant. Satz's task in this book is to explain why such misgivings are correct. How might we best account for the intuition that some things should not be for sale? At the heart of her tale is a concern with the inequality that markets often bring in their wake

Since the publication of Jonathan Dancy's 'Moral Reasons' in 1991, many English speaking ethicists have been especially interested in the role of abstract theory in moral life and the extent to which principles analogous to those employed in the hard sciences like physics are central to the development of ethical knowledge. Unlike earlier generations of philosophers who had, on the whole, accepted that principles had an integral role in the life of a morally serious person, contemporary ethicists are largely divided about the merits of such principles and whether ethical knowledge is gained through principles. This debate about the form of ethical knowledge raises questions about the epistemic status of intuitions. Can intuitions about right and wrong provide an alternative source of genuine ethical knowledge? Is reflection upon a belief enough to show that it is true? This edited collection, consisting of 11 essays by distinguished philosophers, pursues and advances that debate. The early chapters of the book are concerned primarily with intuitions and intuitionism. John Cottingham, in an essay that casts doubt on the possibility of secular intuitions, argues that if intuitions are uprooted from their traditional theological foundations then they lose their plausibility. The claim is that theism and moral intuitionism are natural partners and morality is doomed if we reject theistic picture that 'provides a home for these intuitions'. James Lenman provides an indirect response to Cottingham, questioning whether evolutionary explanations of intuitions genuinely debunk them. Explaining the causal origins of intuitions within a naturalistic framework is not damning of them or of morality itself.

Albert O. Hirschman was a development economist and political theorist whose work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life figures in the political worlds we inhabit and the ways in which we give meaning to our lives in market-based societies. Perhaps best known for the distinction between 'exit' and 'voice', Hirschman was a prolific theorist who wrote about the role individual moral virtue and individual self-interest should play in economic activity, how economic growth in the developing world might best be achieved, and the reactionary rhetoric of neo-conservative politicians in the late 1980s, to list but some of the areas he covered. Hirschman's writing was elegant; further, he understood the importance of the well-chosen word. He was, as this new biography by Jeremy Adelman shows, an economist for whom the essays of Montaigne were as important as the writings of Ricardo and Smith

Mark Blyth's 'Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea' is at heart a morality tale, or, more accurately, an account of two competing and diametrically opposed morality tales jostling to explain both the recent Global Financial Crisis that engulfed much of Europe in 2008 and the austerity policies that were implemented by most governments in that region in its aftermath. According to proponents of austerity, economic growth can only be achieved through reductions in state spending. Blyth argues with great passion and intelligence that the austerity policies, which have involved severe cuts to government services and higher tax rates for average wage-earners, have not only caused great misery but are, in the end, economically counter-productive

Does the pursuit of ideals of global justice mean we must relinquish exclusive territorial rights and, in particular, exclusive resource rights? Cosmopolitans have assumed that it does. In this rich and thoughtful book, Cara Nine runs against the tide of much thinking on global justice and pursues the provocative suggestion that if we take territorial rights to be fundamental elements in a theory of global justice, then there will be circumstances where resource inequality can be justified. Nine does not so much deny the claims of global justice, as assert the centrality of territory in any theory of a globally just world

It is now more than six years since the Global Financial Crisis threatened to topple the banking systems of the Western world. Although a complete breakdown in the financial system was ultimately avoided, one consequence of the events of 2008 has been the biggest slump in economic activity since the Great Depression. Australia was, in the main, spared the economic damage that ravaged large parts of Europe, and there has been little discussion in these parts of the causes and social effects of what the authors refer to as the 'Great Recession'. Somewhat surprisingly, on the evidence presented in this book it would seem that the Anglosphere at large is guilty of what the authors call the 'veil of complacency'. The book asserts that in those countries there is little concern for either the financial consequences or the victims of the crisis. Why should this be the case? Perhaps the Great Recession was not as bad as the headlines have suggested