Being a graduate student with a family has brought many challenges, such as when my daughter decided to be born two weeks early and therefore two days before a scheduled oral exam. (My committee kindly agreed to postpone.) But the economic challenges have perhaps been most acute.

At one point, in addition to graduate coursework, I was teaching, tutoring, working as a museum tour guide, and cooking for a family in exchange for rent. Before our daughter was born, my wife was working full-time as a pastry cook, something she’s now doing again while pregnant with our second child. Afterward, she took over cooking and cleaning for the family we lived with. Through all of this, we managed to pay off the debt we incurred moving across the country to Boston, where our rent more than doubled even as our family income went down. Somehow we’ve managed to avoid taking on any more debt. My wife often says, only half-jokingly, that we just keep learning how to get by with less and less.

This tidy little portrait of economic virtue gets at an important issue in these difficult times, namely our tendency as Americans to speak of economic matters in moral terms. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Paul Krugman argues that American economic policy has been “mugged by the moralizers.” (His colleague David Brooks, meanwhile, characterizes liberal economic philosophy as amoral.) The morality in question asks people to live within their means and to avoid unnecessary debt. It’s a message that leaders of my religious tradition have been teaching for years.

The problem with this morality, on a household level, is that a falloff in consumer demand undergirds the current economic crisis. There can be no recovery unless consumers begin to spend enough money to generate 2-3% annual growth. But what if consumers don’t have enough money to spend in this way?

Krugman’s not talking about this morality on a household level, though: he’s referring to the gathering political momentum for applying this morality to fiscal policy on a national and even international scale. As a Keynesian economist, Krugman has been arguing that the debt required to finance enough government spending to fill the gap in demand left by the private sector amounts to a lesser evil than the alternative, which is deep and persistent economic malaise (with all the attendant suffering). Yet the moralizers, faced with what Krugman sees as the speciousness of their argument, “fly into a rage” and start throwing around the word “socialist.”

The word “socialist” conveys a deep moral opprobrium. As a putative alternative to “individual responsibility,” it seems to stand for the opposite of everything that morality is. More broadly, attempts to explain social causes of the economic crisis, and therefore to pursue possible remedies on a societal scale, often get refracted into language of “blame” that unfairly (so the thinking goes) lets individuals off the hook.

All of this suggests that our ways of thinking about economic behavior as a moral matter need to undergo a paradigm shift.

Some basic economic facts—including social causes—need to be taken into account. For roughly 150 years, American wages and productivity rose in tandem. This, argues Richard D. Wolff and others, gave rise to the “American Dream” of an ever-increasing standard of living. Then, for myriad reasons, wages began to stagnate in the 1970s, even as productivity continued to rise. American workers no longer had the money to spend in a way that could sustain 3% annual growth—nor in a way that could bear out a century and a half of engrained cultural expectation—so we made up the difference with debt. This reliance on debt received considerable encouragement from banks awash in corporate profits derived from the increasing productivity. The ultimate unsustainability of this model underlies the current crisis.

My aim here is not to shift the burden of economic immorality to corporations or banks. They and the American people (and many other people around the globe) walked hand-in-hand into this crisis. Whatever the pleasures of retribution, blame is beside the point.

What we need instead is to renegotiate the moral underpinnings of republican government for the 21^st century. Since classical times, republican theory has linked public and private morality with a two-pronged ethical imperative: the government ought to orient itself in a way that enables its citizens to exercise their freedom fully, and the citizens in turn ought to exercise that freedom in ways that do not lead to societal chaos. Both of these obligations are extraordinarily difficult to meet in practice and rely heavily on self-enforcement, so it is hardly surprising that many people and governments take a pass when given the chance. Liberty is hard, but that is part of what makes it virtuous.

We hear hints of this classical republicanism in our current discourse. Libertarians (including many Tea Partiers) fret about the encroachment of government on individual liberty. Meanwhile, progressives take something of a Hobbesian view, arguing that coercive force (in the form of government regulation and so on) is a necessary counter for the moral failings of individual and corporate actors.

In this way, both sides focus on what is wrong rather than on what ought to be right, leaving a void where we urgently need to work out exactly what might constitute an appropriate individual and collective moral response to our circumstances. Ironically, all of this talk about the role of government works to divert us from any serious discussion of how individuals, corporations, and other actors might behave in a way that is both moral and economically sustainable, when getting the role of government right depends on just such a discussion.

Even if we believe that moral principles are and ought to be timeless, their application is necessarily timebound. Every time and people faces anew the challenge of how to live morally, and we can’t afford any longer to go about like the people in Breughel’s painting, carrying on with business as usual and imagining that one person suffering the consequences of flying too close to the sun is none of our concern.