Chapter 6: Materialist Case Studies in Applied Ethics

In studying sociocultural phenomena, the methodology of cultural materialism demonstrates synergies between structure and infrastructure, while giving primacy to infrastructural forces. This chapter presents six case studies using this methodological approach to show how the new normative program developed in Chap. 5 can be implemented. This chapter traces social pathologies in several important areas of life in the United States, namely, the political arena (political campaigns and the Electoral College), the judicial field (particularly the hegemonic role of the Supreme Court), the field of healthcare, and the areas of pensions and finance. In accordance with the above methodological approach, we trace the impact of infrastructural forces and their structural and superstructural consequences in these fields. As with the studies using the methodology of cultural materialism presented in Chap. 4 , the case studies examine the synergies between infrastructure and structure, but this time with a view to identifying epistemically credible avenues of reform that are concrete, even if they are difficult to achieve in the near term.