Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Neoliberalism has been characterised as an ideology that compels individuals to act as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ by turning their cognitive and affective experiences into market assets. While thus ‘emotional labour’ and ‘personal branding’ have been staples of working life for some time, in recent years, morality and ethics have increasingly been subjected to the same mechanisms of commoditisation. Large corporations have long realized the market value of being perceived as ‘ethical’, and to sell customers a clear conscience as an add-on to any commodity or service imaginable. But equally, individuals are increasingly called to demonstrate a good moral character as a condition of market participation – be it in the shape of formal ‘social credit’ systems as operating in China, or in terms of informal peer-credit systems mediated by social media. This move from ethics as a social good to ethics as a market asset is accompanied by a scholarly turn to Virtue Ethics, an ethical theory that essentially treats morality as ‘quantums of virtue’ which can be accumulated and strategically invested. In Bourdieu’s terms, one could therefore say that in addition to social and cultural capital, neoliberal market competition is producing a new category of cultural accumulation: ethical capital. This paper provides an overview of what ethical capital is, and why its rapid emergence should be regarded with critical skepticism.