Moral Economy and the Ethics of Survival in Emeka Ukwuaba’s Benign Pain and Hypnotising Minefield

The concept of moral economy, originally developed by E.P. Thompson to describe the ethical norms that govern economic behaviour in subsistence communities, has been productively extended in literary studies to examine the ethical frameworks that characters construct in conditions of extreme material deprivation. This study applies this framework to Emeka Ukwuaba's Benign Pain (2021) and Hypnotising Minefield (2025), examining how both novels construct and interrogate the moral codes by which characters navigate poverty, institutional failure, and social crisis. The study is anchored on moral economy theory as adapted in recent African literary scholarship, alongside virtue ethics as a complementary philosophical framework for evaluating character choices under duress. A qualitative textual analysis methodology is employed, supported by recent ethical and literary scholarship published within the last five years. Findings reveal that Ukwuaba's fiction consistently distinguishes between survival strategies that preserve human dignity and those that corrode it, positioning moral integrity not as a luxury of the comfortable but as a form of resistance available even to the most dispossessed. The novels further demonstrate that shortcuts pursued for material gain consistently extract a moral and existential cost that outweighs their immediate benefit. The study concludes that Ukwuaba's moral economy functions as a form of ethical pedagogy embedded in narrative, and recommends further studies of moral philosophy in contemporary Nigerian fiction as a complement to purely sociological or political readings.

Keywords: Moral economy, Ethics of survival, Emeka Ukwuaba, Virtue ethics, Nigerian fiction