This book represents the latest installment in a movement—led by Daniel Finn and joined by David Cloutier, Matthew Shadle, and Daniel Daly—to introduce the critical realist sociology of Margaret Archer to Christian moral reflection. This framework can organize an increasingly fragmented field while resolving ethical quandaries left by the field as impasses. Here, Finn takes up the thorny question of consumers’ implications and, by extension, moral responsibilities regarding unjust labor practices hidden behind sinuous supply chains. For him, “We can fully understand our moral responsibility as consumers in the market only if we understand our causal participation as consumers in the harms that markets cause in the lives of those distant others who produce the things we buy” (154). Adequate moral analyses of this question require robust understanding of agency and economics. Finn gifts readers with both.

The first two parts of the book outline the problem and propose a solution. In part 1, Finn considers how individualistic and empiricist conceptions of causality, in both ethics and economics, blind us to the ways markets themselves shape moral agency. Labor malpractices cannot simply be blamed on selfish factory owners; the pull of market conditions makes it virtually impossible to increase wages or secure safe conditions (43). Without an adequate understanding of the causality embedded in social structures, however, this case is difficult to make. In part 2, Finn turns to the critical realist sociology of Archer to fill this lacuna. From this perspective, avowedly nondeterministic “structures generate restrictions, opportunities, and incentives in the face of which persons in those structures make different decisions than they otherwise would make” (68). Thus, more so than individuals within them, markets shape the choices and moral characters of producers and consumers, whether through prices, regulations, or unions. This thick account of causal agency enables a moral assessment of markets.

Part 3 executes this assessment. From a critical realist perspective, markets are structures of sin insofar as they incline moral agents toward evil choices; buying here causes injustice there. Our reliance on these structures shows that “we lead indicted lives,” a realization that should prompt conversion and the promotion of alternative structures of grace that shape human choices toward the good (140). Taking up this charge, Finn suggests, can take the form of supporting fair-trade organizations, consumer-led groups that seek to improve corporate practices, and international NGOs that empower persons who are poor. These actions can set the conditions of saving possibilities for a market oriented toward the good.

Finn shows the effectiveness of critical realist sociology for Christian ethics, as the complexity of critical realism matches the complexity of our moral responsibility in an interconnected world. Because of its density, this book could be used in graduate courses on economic ethics or, because of its attention to methodology, courses on Christian social ethics. He rightly judges the “noncollectivist, nonindividualist, nondeterministic, and nonempiricist” character of critical realism as making it most fit for fruitful dialogue between theology and the social sciences (62). Other partners can likewise strengthen this dialogue. One wonders, for instance, how these efforts might be complemented by the critical realism of Bernard Lonergan. Starting in the 1930s, Lonergan aspired to produce a critical realist analysis of social reality that could buttress Catholic social teaching. Since carried forth by Robert Doran, Neil Ormerod, and others, this project has yielded a similar account of structural sin and the formative character of structures to Finn's project; so too has it produced a critical realist understanding of the preferential option for the poor (anticipated by Finn [73]), the redemptive agency of the church, and an emergent account of social grace rooted in the Trinitarian missions. While Finn dismisses Lonergan's work for involving “a complex system of concepts and neologisms that are a challenge to grasp even for a committed student” (58), the theological depth of Lonergan's critical realism makes it well worth the effort in future iterations of Finn's project and those like his. Indeed, Finn notes that critical realist social analysis “applies equally well to … the environment, racism, sexism, homelessness, health care, and economic inequality” (96). One hopes that Finn's work continues to inspire these desperately needed applications.