would judge the “morality” of bees, or engineers the “ethics” of an aqueduct. Of course, people today do discuss the ethics of finance. We debate whether bankers deserve lucrative bonuses; we worry about the moral hazard of bank bailouts; we condemn bankers who sell financial instruments that they know will fail. But since so much of the language of economics is amoral, and built on the assumption that everyone acts in their narrow self-interest, demanding just outcomes from finance feels like expecting fair results from war. We’ve lost the instinct that finance and debt are moral affairs all the way down, which is something that the Scholastics understood. So what would the Scholastics make of modern finance? Would they admire how efficiently a family’s savings can find productive uses? Or would they decry how developing countries pay more to borrow than rich ones? Would they marvel at our banks’ international reach? Or would they condemn how poor people pay for banking services such as checking accounts that rich people get for free? It shouldn’t be so strange for a big bank to hire a theologian such as Miller; what should be strange is that we find it strange. It’s our modern talk of unfettered free markets and shareholder value that’s the anomaly. When Miller talks to bankers and executives, they often tell him that they feel as if what they learn in church or synagogue has no place at work. Even he was embarrassed about using the word “calling” when he told his former co- workers that he was leaving for the seminary.
But neither secular nor religious authorities offer much guidance to bankers trying to link what they do to some kind of ethical tradition. In seminaries and divinity schools there’s a total lack of attention to the economy and the marketplace, Miller says. “Clergy may be quick to throw stones at the latest corporate excess on the front pages,’ he told me, “but there is not much constructive work.” The public criticizes bankers for their ethical failings, but the bankers themselves have also been failed by our ethical authorities. Anyone interested in reclaiming ethics’ place in the world of finance, however, can build on a several-thousand-year-old foundation. “Aristotle, Kant, Bentham – are they dead people who have nothing of interest to offer?” Miller muses. “Or were they on to something? Our economy would be unrecognizable to them. But the questions are still relevant.”
This essay was originally published in Aeon.
Hank Blaustein | © 2016 Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Used by permission. www.GrantsPub.com
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