Perhaps you caught David Burchell's piece in the Australian last week criticising both our and the United Kingdom prime ministers of 'windy, lofty-sounding humbug' in the addresses they gave in St Paul's Cathedral before the G20.
It was interesting because Burchell found the two prime ministers' appeal to benevolence as unconvincing, aping what he calls the ethical niche market of the clergy who are specialists in 'moral reproach'.
This article is a helpful warning to church leaders like myself to reflect on the way we discuss complex and significant ethical issues in things like the recent global financial crisis. It is too easy just to be seen as denouncing from a high moral ground.
Burchell calls us 'moral astronauts'.
Self interest and the way our economy works
However, what is really interested is Burchell's reminder about what actually makes economies like ours work.
You may remember Adam Smith's famous remark that it is not the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker from which we should expect our dinner but 'from their regard to their own interest'.
This is true, and in a well-working society self-regard is not inconsistent with serving others.
In fact, self-regard should drive people to properly serve the greater good. Burchell says this is a serious moral point because benevolence is not the kind of emotion which most people can come to. He also says that benevolence almost inevitably implies someone up and someone down. (It's a bit like the word 'charity' as it has come to be used.) There is a place for benevolence but in fact it is social relations of trust and mutual independence in community which are just as important.
I think it raises important questions for the way we understand the way our world works.
As a result I believe that to simply complain that the global financial crisis was caused by 'greed' is saying almost nothing.
I have found it much more helpful to look at the writings of Thomas L Friedman, an American commentator (his Hot, Flat, and Crowded has almost made me a greenie).
In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree he makes an important point about the way that free enterprise works.
In the chapter entitled 'Dos Capital 6.0' he draws attention that for proper free markets to work, there needs to be as it were a proper operating system in the society, not just a ‘free for all’. Without the proper operating system (hence the allusion to Dos 6.0), a free market becomes a kleptocracy. That is, a place of thieving, robbery and corruption.
The proper software or operating system is, of course, the appropriate institutions and framework.
We probably take it for granted in our society how much we depend upon the power of strong, good and effective institutions. Even to get any kind of credit is a classic example of a massive background of trust and confidence.
He wrote the book a long time before the global financial crisis. But Friedman reminds us that it is not simply human greed which is endemic but the failure of appropriate institutions to cope with new forms of finance and to properly curb human stupidity.
This is a more sophisticated view than simply bemoaning covetousness.
