Abstract

This essay offers a constructive proposal for an ethics of production using key elements from the thinking of Giambattista Vico. It seeks to move toward a social ethic that is both congruent with theological concerns and pertinent to the economic issues in a complex, rapidly changing society. The approach sets out the ethics of production in three operations: the analogy between production and the formation of the person; the cultural prerequisites for the realization of this analogy; and the exercise of imagination through social dynamics in understanding how persons make cultures. Paul Ricoeur’s work is used to offer a contemporary interpretation of Vico’s sensus communis concept in the service of an ethic which maintains both individual practice and social imagination.