The Western world is highly secular in all its assumptions. One has to acknowledge that shift. In many ways ordinary people and not just the leaders had for a long time bought into a number of deeply questionable assumptions. We lost sight of the structural questions - the systemic questions of how does this affect all parts of society rather than that how does this affect those part of society that have most access to the public forum? We missed that as faith communities. Christians bought increasingly into the materialist consumerist mindset which assumed that more and more had to be better. I cannot speak for other religions.
We as Christians were quite prepared to lap up the cheap credit to bask in the benefits (what we though were ever benefits) of ever rising house prices. We voted in a way which reinforced the economic model that came to be so dominant. It is no good us complaining about government dereliction of duty in regulation when throughout the Western world for the last 30 years we have voted in governments that were quite clear that they were going to deregulate and they were going to free up the market.
I think this is part of the problem of ultraspecialization. If you are going to tackle finance as a subject, you must have some basic economics as a subject. Most students who want to do theology don't have that. Finance is genuinely one of those dual discipline subjects. If you cannot make your way through some of the economic arguments that are presented as if they are value free, as if they are purely factual which they are not, it will be difficult for you to combine the thinking behind the two. They make all sorts of assumptions which are never overtly referred to and therefore never challenged. How can you possibly comment on put or call options if you do not know what they are?
One of the things that both theological and secular ethicists have to do is they have to make the effort of learning some of this complexity and then presenting it in ways that are accessible. For too long discussion and debate particularly about finance matters has been reserved to a small expert group. Take bankers bonuses. This is greedy, people say. If you say something is greedy that implies that you have an idea what enough looks like. We don't have any sort of common understanding of what enough looks like, because we have been told increasingly over the last 30 years by the market that more is always better, and the only real indicator of value is a monetary indicator.
We know what enough looks like when we have a clear idea of what the good life looks like. Aristotle had a very good idea of what the good life looked like. An idea that was widely shared amongst his social peers. I don't think the slaves in Athens would have agreed with it but we don't have anything like that now. At the moment it is set totally arbitrarily.
Yes exactly. Everything is arbitrary. Now we don't have forms of life that is desirable in themselves. There is no consensus. Now we just have desirable lifelstyles and that by definition is utterly arbitrary and completely individual.
Yes, the word maximization is the key, especially at any cost. Seeking to make a profit is not only desirable, it is necessary. If you don't make a profit you will go under. But why, as the market assumes, must a bank increase its market share and its profit every year? Why can't you have enough market share and enough profit? In a bank in a particular country I was talking about, their analysts were expecting market share and profit to increase by 18 percent. Yet the same analysts were expecting the same country's GDP to increase by 4 percent in that year. Where is this extra going to come from?
One of the consequences of the free market ideology over the last 30 years is the overwhelming emphasis on individualism. If you look at the response to this tax in the UK on bonuses and the 50 percent income tax on high earners, we are told that 50,000 bankers will clear off. Rather than pay toward more hospitals, schools and roads, they are prepared to uproot themselves and their families and go off to another country where perhaps they see the only advantages as purely a financial one.
Where is the responsibility to the country where they have been living in which they may or may not be a citizen of but where they have certainly have been benefiting from all the infrastructure paid by other peoples' taxes? Are they so self-centered that they lose any sense of responsibility?
At the moment the financial crisis generally speaking has been presented as a technical failure. I think it is a moral failure. But that moral failure is a failure even in terms of philosophical morality, not just in terms of theological morality. That is why it is too easy to say it is a failure of secularism.
First of all, there has to be an acknowledgement of what has really happened. So, an end to denial. Secondly, we have to question very seriously a whole range of economic assumptions of more being better; our whole attitude to profit maximization; the questions why enough is never enough; questions of what actually is the purpose of finance. Let us recover that. Finance should be at the service of the economy. But the economy is at the service of finance currently. One sees share ownership as an investment in the future. It is about the management of already accumulated wealth. How then can we refocus what we think finance is for? This is a very hard question to answer. In theory, I know some bankers would say that we are here to serve industry, they are here to provide credit. Look at the percentage of time and capital devoted to those sort of activities and compare that with the time and capital devoted to proprietary trading, derivatives, and those speculative activities.
It really is. Post-Big Bang in this country.
Initially bonuses were given to teams. It at least gave some emphasis to the idea that you don't do this on your own. No-one pulls off a deal as a soloist. If you are part of a team you can at least start thinking occasionally of the good of the whole company and partly by extension the wider good. Once it gets down to individual bonuses you are then injecting massive elements of competition, fear and anxiety - all of those things which militate against clear-headed ethical thinking, and promotes the cutting of corners.
Interfaith can be fruitful once it has been done long enough. Hopefully by the same people so that levels of trust can build up. So that we can get pass the notion that my tradition is more important than yours. I once told someone in Islamic banking that it all boils down to semantics. It takes time to build up to real discussion.
