Greed

Matt Yglesias makes a good point about how we've gotten to where we are:

These are people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. These aren’t immigrants who walked through the desert from Mexico in order to earn more money by washing dishes in a San Diego hotel. They’re not 24 year-olds looking for a hefty salary in order to pay off student loans. They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more. It’s possible, of course, that Vikram Pandit really does find being a bank executive to be intrinsically interesting. But a good person, who’s primary passion was the life of a bank executive, would be donating the bulk of his massive compensation package to charity. But that’s not what Pandit’s doing. Rather he, like virtually all executives at major firms, is living a life that’s primarily oriented around an ethic of greed.

Now there’s a decent argument out there, familiar from Adam Smith and the whole tradition of economics, that a world full of greedy people isn’t necessarily quite the disaster that pre-modern ethical thinkers would have thought. This is all well and good. True even. But it’s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we’ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who’s ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it’s very unlikely that the “best” young people were going into finance. And to say that they’re not necessarily good people need not entail that they’re criminals. Simply the fact that the best people are people who aren’t primarily driven by greed.

I would only quibble with the description of Adam Smith as supportive of an economy run by "greed." This is a point that is often made in discusssions about how capitalism "works," but it is based on a misreading of Smith. He believes that, in economic affairs, we are governed by "interest," but interest is not the same as "greed." Interest is a legitimate expression of our own sense of self-love, where as greed, as a vice, is inordinate self-love that leaves out concerns for fellow-feeling and justice. Smith's moral philosophy is a form of virtue theory, and as with all virtue theories, rests on a presumption that the virtues can be knocked out of whack and result in potentially destructive vice.

But this also helps point to what I view as the underlying moral problem facing the economy, namely the lack of a set of moral presuppositions to our economic activties. It's not that I would say people need to stop acting out of "interest," but that "interest" is not the only concern that enters into either the economy or society.

But, people being people, interest will far too often translate into greed, which is why it is necessary to have a just society in order to prevent greed from damaging the social fabric in those instances when people's sense of fellow-feeling isn't sufficient to prevent them from acting viciously.