Guilt and Debt. How Moral is the Economy?

Abstract

This article provides a critical reconstruction of the problems of debt and neoliberalism in the modern and contemporary philosophical thought. Starting from the well-known lexical analogy between “fault” and “debt” as expressed by the German word Schuld, the article focuses in particular on the topics of subjectivity, of property and self-ownership of the body and on the moral consequences of forgiveness and solidarity. None of us depends entirely on him/herself: we always owe our very existence to the subjects who created us, that is to say we always are indebted to something or someone. Economic decisions are also (and most of all) moral decisions. From the ancient roman law categories to the neoliberal thinking, the article casts a new philosophical light on the subtle overlapping of “time”, “money” and “ethics” in the contemporary society.