DISQUS

LavrentiBeria · 2 months ago

What's of concern here is the agonizing over a question the basis for an answer to which should have been aquired by adolescence, I would think. What is encouraging is that this question still makes its claims on conscience in adulthood during an era in which the very existence of human conscience is under assault from the priests of the regnant religion of scientific reason, the psychological establishment.

First, some essentials. Any question of morality first bears on who it is that is to be considered the subject thereof, the "agent" so called. Only human persons are appropriately considered moral agents. Further, moral agency is organic. Sociological constructs, political structures, economic realities and the like simply don't qualify for moral agency, they operate more as definable contexts than anything else. And they are not living things.

Given the immediately preceeding, one answers the question of whether capitalism is intrinsically immoral with the inquiry, is capitalism in and of itself personal? Any child would have to answer "no", and with obvious implications for the marxist who erroneously considers structures as moral agents and libertarians who see the state in exactly the same way.

Now, can individual capitalists or public servants be considered immoral and thus taint the contexts in which they operate? Indeed they can. They can even despoil the free operation of these contexts but, even then, they cannot come to define them. Structures, because they are impersonal, are immune to such definition. One can permissibly say that certain capitalists are morally miscreant, even that at times capitalism has become innurred to moral influences, but one can never say in truth that capitalism is intrinsically evil.

So you can bring an end to the agonizing, Ed. What you and many others with similar questions debate ad naseum, Sister Mary Margaret could have resolved in a minute's time given a certain minimum of humility. But Sister Mary Margaret doesn't get questions like this anymore. Only the "experts" do, "experts" who know absolutely nothing of the West's 5000 year old history of moral theology and of its accompanying theological anthopology and whose confusion forces them to stumble about here and there in search of certainty.

Edward Harrison · 2 months ago

Lavrenti,

I am not agonizing one iota. I am subtly -- perhaps too subtly -- saying that we live in a society in which greed is glorified (something antithetical to thousands of years of Indo-European moral attitudes). You are one of the few who acknowledges this and acknowledges this as a major reason we are in the fix we are today. The fact that there have been no other comments on this is telling.

LavrentiBeria · 2 months ago

It seems to me that the whole energy behind objections to the unholy alliance of "bankster", on the one hand, and "political contribution whore" on the other is moral. It certainly can't be
questions of legality that principally inform the complaints - God knows, law in this country is almost the antithesis of morality - although legal questions may be involved coincidentally. Rather the responses go to an innate perception of right and wrong that is written on one's heart, something that faith identifies as "conscience". It is here that one grasps the propriety of the use of the term "bankster" or "filth" when referring to politicians that sell their votes for political contributions. And that because these scum, acting as they almost habitually do precisely as banksters and filth, make of themselves and ARE banksters and filth. One might properly even think of the matter ontologically, I suppose; one is what one does. Frankly, I think you'd benefit feeling free enough to call a spade a spade in this connection, Ed. If it smell like a bankster and it looks like a bankster, be sure, its a bankster.

jnewman · 2 months ago

We've lost the distinction between self interest and greed. Self interest is what I always pursue and to do so am concerned about the consequences of my actions for others. Unintended consequences affect my long term self interest. Greed is never good, it is the expression of my infantile want unalloyed by what knowledge or wisdom I may have gleaned by consideration of my fellow may.

Free market orthodoxy assumes that the vast underpinnings of trust that make markets, in fact make money itself possible are somehow a part of nature rather than a creation of humanity that like all of humanities other creations requires maintenance. If trust were a force of nature maybe greed could be good, but trust lives in competition with cynicism and suspicion and where these latter two achieve preponderance trust dissolves and markets become ineffective and government corrupt. Perhaps this where we are and I'm just too much the idealist to accept it.