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Resolved: It Is Immoral to Pursue Extravagant Wealth
Leah Libresco is one of the most interesting writers in the blogosphere. After graduating from Yale with a degree in mathematics, she matriculated into the real world. She started a blog on the Patheos atheist channel that shot to the top of the charts. Libresco was quickly hired by the Huffington Post. She rose to prominence because of her unique way of arguing for the atheist position.
After several years of challenging believers with tough questions, Libresco shocked the blogosphere with her conversion to Catholicism. She now runs the blog Unequally Yoked and writes at FiveThirtyEight. She runs the podcast Fights in Good Faith for Real Life Radio.
I came across a review of her new book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer, at the American Conservative, and was captivated by the reviewer’s explanation of her quirky and sometimes flat-out weird theological point of view. My curiosity thus piqued, I visited Libresco’s blog, then made my way over to her podcasts, where I found the May 2 edition: What Duties Come with Wealth. It was great fun!
Libresco begins with the famous teaching of St. Basil the Great, who wrote:
When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.
Using this as a starting point, Libresco moves to a discussion of wealth as power and as opportunity. There’s no question that the rich, particularly the fabulously rich, have enormous power to influence the world by caring for the suffering, or by acquiring enormous control over the lives of their fellow human beings. A man with the wealth to feed the hungry can also enslave the masses by allowing them only a few morsels in exchange for their obedience. This is common in the third world, where corrupt and ruthless men plunder the resources of private charitable organizations and allow only a few scraps to reach the desperate mob. What greater control can any man have than a monopoly on simple survival?
On the opposite side of the coin, the rich possess the power to improve the current state of affairs by giving lavishly to the impoverished or engaging in philanthropic endeavors designed to feed the hungry or cloth the naked. Historically, the rich have been patrons of the arts, preservers of natural beauty, and promoters of literature, art, science, philosophy, and a host of other noble ventures. Of course, the misers have always been with us. Midas has long been condemned for his selfishness. But that takes nothing away from the generous rich.
As I listened, I was reminded that questions about the uses and abuses of wealth have a long pedigree. For Plato and Aristotle, wealth was only a means to the ultimate human end as a rational animal. According to these Greek philosophers, men properly pursue wealth only to the extent that they achieve sufficient comfort to allow for contemplation of the ultimate human good: maximization of the intellectual and moral virtues. Aristotle argued that wealth has only so much value as it promotes health — both material and moral. I suspect that, in the modern idiom, Aristotle would promote an upper middle-class lifestyle: It’s appropriate to have a Mercedes, but maybe not a Ferrari. I vaguely recall that in the Eudemian Ethics, he called the relentless pursuit of money swinish.
Early Christian thinkers often came down on the side of St. Basil. Taking their cue from Jesus, they argued that archetype of the good Christian wealthy man was his willingness to sell his goods, give them to the poor, and follow Him. This didn’t necessarily mean that a Christian was prohibited from becoming rich. After all, Joseph of Arimathea was rich, and he is praised in the Gospel’s for his unselfish act of donating his elaborate tomb to Jesus. The question for a rich Christian is whether he is sufficiently detached from the world that the surrender or loss of his wealth would still leave him blessed.
St. Augustine famously said, “Happy the man who has everything he desires, provided he desires nothing amiss.” One way to interpret Augustine is to apply moral rules to his declaration. For example, we might criticize a man who spends his money on concubines because promiscuity is a consequence of lust, and lust is one of the deadly sins. But we might also consider Augustine’s admonition as a condemnation of excess concern for money as money. To use a modern example, Augustine might have seen the collection of high priced cars as something amiss: a form of idolatry.
In medieval times, great attention was placed on the dangers of excess, especially to the political and legal system. Averroes saw the rise of greed as a danger to the community because — and we see this in our day — wealth can corrupt even the best of men, and they will often use their power to subvert the law, and even impoverish the people, in a search for greater and greater wealth and power.
Aquinas followed Aristotle to some extent by explain that wealth is merely a means to man’s highest good which is blessedness or holiness. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, wealth was largely a utilitarian tool for achieving perfection, and the pursuit of money for the sake of ever-greater material satisfaction was a dead end for human beings created in the image and likeness of God. Indeed, immoderate pursuit of money may kill the soul:
Whereas in the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods, the contrary is the case: for when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others: which is the sense of Our Lord’s words (John 4:13): “Whosoever drinketh of this water,” by which temporal goods are signified, “shall thirst again.” The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.
Like Augustine and Basil, Aquinas viewed the ownership of property as provisional. Once a man has earned enough to satisfy his needs and acquire appropriate comforts, the rest of his fortune is owned by the poor. The man of means is, therefore, merely a trustee for his suffering brethren. Calvin is reported to have said, “Wealth is like manure; it works best when it is spread, but stinks when it is in one big pile.”
With the dawn of the Enlightenment, the classical view of wealth as solely a means to a higher end was reevaluated, especially by John Locke. The acquisition of property was no longer a mere means to an end, but a component of happiness itself. I don’t want to overstate Locke’s case, especially since it’s been years since I’ve read any of his books, but the famous phrase that man’s rights were “life, liberty and the pursuit of property,” seems a far cry from the views of Aristotle or Aquinas.
Kant, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill all have interesting things to say about wealth, but, because Aristotle, the Christian thinkers, and Locke pretty much set up the problematic, I’ll gloss over them except to quote Kant’s famous line: “We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.” I don’t know what Aristotle would say to that, but the Christian thinkers would surely agree.
By comparing the bare bones of all the arguments about wealth found in the forgoing philosopher’s, I arrive at the question: which view is correct?
Is, as in Aristotle, the pursuit of wealth only a means to the final end of man, and hence the relentless pursuit of money and the things it buys, contrary to man’s ultimate good and therefore immoral?
Does accumulated wealth belong ultimately to others, and therefore as in Aquinas, held only in trust, which means that a preoccupation with wealth as a good in itself, immoral?
Is, as in Locke, the acquisition of wealth a good in itself?
I state these questions based on my own somewhat idiosyncratic reading of these thinkers, so the reader should feel free to argue against my interpretation — especially since I’ve not gone back to read them in detail because this post isn’t designed to be scholarly (and because I’m lazy).
I tend toward Aquinas’ view that property is a gift from God, and that life is stewardship, which requires not only the conservation of the things of the world, but also demands that whatever we have is to be used in the service of others. I would add, however, that such service comes in all shapes and sizes. While we might criticize Bill Gates for hanging on to so much wealth, we should also see that he has arguably lifted millions out of poverty, something he could not have done had he spread his earnings solely by giving them away. After all, from a purely material point of view, Gates has contributed far more to the common good than Mother Theresa.
Lastly, I must confess to an inherent hypocrisy in my position. I live a comfortable life. I have relatively few wants, so what money I have at my disposal is somewhat more than I need. I don’t give away most of my excess, and if a million dollars suddenly fell into my lap, I’d probably find more personal uses than I might give away.
I offer this post as a way to while away the weekend. If you have nothing better to do, I invite you to weigh in. If you do have better plans, you are doubly blessed.
So how about it? Is it immoral to pursue extravagant wealth?
Published in Culture, General, Religion & Philosophy
Vicryl Contessa
So money represents the freedom to choose Tiffany’s over Shane Co. and Mercedes over VW? That ability to choose is your most valued thing in life?
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It doesn’t represent that freedom, it IS that freedom.
It is possible to make any value system sound tawdry through parsing and framing. So… When y’all Christians say “your eternal reward”, that’s something you want, right? Petty and self-serving, the pursuit of this infinite benefit is somehow morally superior to honest work and fair dealing?
While Mike doesn’t mean to attack market economics, there is only one answer which does not require the rejection of the market as moral as a foundation for other arguments.
I work on the other end of life. I’ll have rows of little faces looking up at me soon ready to soak up knowledge. For me, there’s nothing quite like listening to a child I’ve helped not only to read but to love to read, knowing what that success can mean to their life.
It can be brutally draining, mentally and emotionally — and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
BDB- Are spiritual persuits and shrewd, hard work in business mutually exclusive? I don’t think they are. I guess it comes down to what the long term goal is. If one isn’t convinced that there is anything beyond this world, one’s priorities will look very different from one who is focused on one’s life beyond this world. Still, I don’t think they can’t coexist.
Don’t insist upon emphasizing Tiffany’s or Mercedes. I shop at Old Navy as often as I do at Saks but I like having the choice.
You got it right with your second sentence.
Ok, noted. I was just using Tiffany and Mercedes as examples.
BTW, love me some Old Navy. Best flip flops ever.
We can certainly agree on this!
I don’t agree. The free market depends on virtue, and that includes a moral obligation to care for the poor, make the community more beautiful, and offer opportunities for moral and spiritual growth. I’m not stating my case all that clearly, but one of the foundational documents of the republic is John Winthrop’s speech “The City on the Hill.” Many think Reagan came up with that, but it actually dates back 400 years. I think it’s worth a read.
It strikes me as a false dichotomy to separate the good things in life that money can buy and the things it cannot. Both categories add to a good life.
Money can buy the ability to participate more fully in those non-pecuniary activities:
I’m sure you could add many lines to the list.
That’s basically Aristotle’s position. Having sufficient wealth affords a man time for leisure. But for Aristotle that does not mean recreation–which is also a means–but the freedom to pursue the higher things in order to live a truly happy (I prefer blessed) life. Man reaches his highest purpose in the contemplation of the world and reality. For example, Aristotle was the first botanist, something he could not have done without a comfortable level of wealth. He would, I think have, rejected the notion that the endless pursuit of riches is proper to man. The maximization of things unique to man also spell out his purpose. To do anything in excess stunts his ability to be truly human according to his nature.
The blessed man in Plato is the one who escapes the passing idols of the world and finds true light. That is the meaning of the Allegory of the Cave. But for Plato the man who emerged from the cave had a duty to return to the world of intellectual darkness so he could free those still in the trap.
For Aquinas, the endless pursuit of wealth interferes with man as created in the image and likeness of God. His belief that excess wealth is held in trust for others–including those to come–is not just about helping the poor. The pursuit of selfless love is his highest good because God is love in its perfect being.
Holding “choice” as the highest virtue in life seems fraught, to me. I agree with the ancients that to be held in submission is a bad thing, and that freedom requires the ability to make choices freely. The reason for this, though, was that if choices were not made freely, then making the choice was no virtue, and the society that forced the choice was not virtuous, and its members were not free, but ant-like automatons.
Choice is important, but to elevate choice above its purpose, to imbue things with meaning not because they are good but because I choose them is literally nihilistic. Not to mention a category error that confuses ends for means.
We are not, contra the economists and utilitarians, utility-munchers. If all we are is a collection of “good experiences” and “bad experiences” then we’re not much more than animals. (This is hardly an original criticism, utilitarianism has long been derided as the dog’s morality.)
The purpose of a good education, the purpose of a free society, is to allow us live a good life. That necessitates allowing people to live bad lives -something we excel at with our refusal to actually define the good life anymore.
Thus, to the original question -yes, the man who earns “extravagant wealth” and uses it merely to satisfy his own animal urges while doing nothing to live a good life is a waste of man, unvirtuous, and immoral. The wealth is not the problem, though.
I would amend Aristotle’s position on leisure to note that we are not all called to be philosophers, so philosophy isn’t really a “higher” pursuit. Most intellectuals share his bias for esteeming their own abilities.
Human beings are as various as living cells within a body. To apply Aristotle’s own concept of virtue, excellence is to perform one’s own function well.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is among the doctors of the Church who formed Christianity’s understanding of the angels. He taught that Saint Michael is an archangel, which is among the lowest choirs of angels, yet St Michael commands God’s army. He was created “lower” than Lucifer, yet is placed higher than all the angels who returned God’s love.
This is a common Christian theme. The least becomes greatest not by nature or accomplishment… but by humility, charity, and steadfast devotion within one’s own particular calling to manifest God’s love.
This I take to actually be Aristotle’s position. He describes the life of the mind as being not really human, so it isn’t possible to directly compare the two. A good philosopher is a terrible human -lacking as they do in all virtues because they lack in all actions. It is, however, important to have contemplative people around.
I actually, in this case, subscribe to Kant, myself, who argued that all should engage in contemplation from time to time, simply as a method of developing judgment.
The free market can’t exist without virtue and you don’t seem to understand that. I can only succeed in the business world if I create a win-win situation for all parties involved.
Personal example: I provide young kids with some of their first experiences in the working world. Many of them have never been taught by negligent parents about punctuality, professional appearance and demeanor. My stores are now heartily endorsed by PTAs and parents in all our local communities so I get the pick of the litter. A win-win.
One of the best moments of my business career evah happened two weeks ago when a former employee dropped by to thank me for my recommendations when he applied to UCLA as well as to a fraternity (of which I was once a little sister). He was accepted by both, doing well and presented as an extremely happy, confident young man. His parents are beside themselves and have two more young sons in the pipeline who according to their mother will be working for one of our OC stores whether they like it or not!
I promise not to hog this thread anymore than I have but you happened to touch on a topic very near and dear to my heart.
This is what I’m truly trying to communicate:
Virtues such as honesty don’t come naturally to people and need to be nurtured by one or even several influences. Religion is one. Family/peer group pressure is another. Business success is yet another and I happen to be particularly effusive about this one because it correlates so beautifully with yet another powerful force of human nature – self-interest.
Thanks very much for a great conversation.
Not my point. Sounded like you were trashing ET’s values. More precisely, sounded like you were placing artillery on the high ground.
Just spiking guns.
I’m not a theologian and certainly not philosophically trained, and I haven’t read the comments here, so excuse me if I repeat. As far as I can tell the operating verse from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 6:24) is
I guess the distinction comes in as to what constitutes pursuit of extravagant wealth. Most businesses have small profit margins but magnified over huge quantities. Such businesses provide thousands of jobs and money spreads across the economy helping everyone. If you are good to your workers, provide them more than the minimum acceptable, then I think you’re not pursuing wealth for its own sake. If youre a scrooge prior to his conversion, then I do think it’s immoral. So are you serving God or are you serving mammon? Only God can read the heart.
The key to this is the weasel word “extravagant”.
Finishing his waffle:
The application can be tricky sometimes, but the answer is simple. If wealth becomes an idol it is sinful. I think the way it is described in the title qualifies.
“It is immoral to seek to provide a comfortable life for your family” is not true.
EThompson:
First, I certainly do understand the importance of virtues like honesty in the market. I would disagree that honesty is always required to succeed. I represented many a businessman who was dishonest.
Here’s the point. Honesty is a good in itself, regardless of whether it brings success. A virtuous man develops habits of honesty, and acts in accordance with honesty even when dishonesty might allow him to gain something he wants. Honesty is a virtue because, again, to lie is contrary to man’s nature as a rational animal. The object of the mind is truth. Therefore, if a man is dishonest he betrays his nature as a truth seeking being. Honesty is not merely functional. It is essential to happiness in and of itself..
Another way to look at this is by examining the will. For Aquinas and Atistotle the object of the will is the good. It is always proper to man to do what is good and to avoid what is evil. In essence, when a man does evil he betrays his very self. In Christian teaching sin is a form of spiritual (and often bodily) suicide.
All the virtues have proper practical uses. But that’s just the starting point in the quest for human excellence. The final end is to maximize moral and intellectual excellence to the highest degree possible, despite the cost to ourselves.
Whatever we think of the morality of modeling human decision-making in terms of utility – that is, treating human behavior as if “utils” really could be measured against one another and swapped out for each other, the amazing thing is how often and how well such models work. We don’t have to believe that utils “really exist” – or that they’re defined merely in terms of fleeting experience, rather than longer-term satisfaction – in order to recognize the power of the modeling technique.
Indeed, it often appears that the richest source of “utils” in human life are long-term projects involving considerable amounts of effort and even sacrifice, whether it’s saving lives, as VC does, or nurturing business relationships, as ET does. The paradox being that, for those who best love what they do, the sacrifice may not even feel like sacrifice anymore (my husband falls into this category – despite all his hard work, he perceives falling into this category as a huge piece of unearned good fortune… and he might not be wrong).
Mike Rapkoch:
Let’s step back from issues of virtue and charity, and just talk about the logical consequences of an economy where private individuals do not accumulate wealth – even if they surrender it voluntarily.
The fundamental problem is that without the accumulation of private capital, it becomes impossible for anything big to get done. Starting a large corporation requires a large amount of capital in concentrated form. You need big investors.
Capitalism gets its name from the idea that capital remains with the creators and therefore many, many people have a voice in where investment should go. This is a good thing.
One of the features of this system is that people who are proven to be able to provide for the needs of others accumulate capital which allows them to expand their reach. This is what we want to have happen. If Elon Musk gave away his fortune from PayPal, SpaceX would never have come to exist. If Fred Smith gave away his first fortune, there never would have been a Federal Express.
Think about how venture capital works. Venture capitalists are talent hunters. They scour myriad proposals for new companies, evaluating the ideas, the people involved, and deciding whether capital should be invested in them. The ones who aren’t good at those choices fail and leave the market. The good ones profit from their investment, and then have more capital which they can use to invest in even bigger ventures.
For this to happen, these people have to be rich. They are the ones with the knowledge and skills to wield the power of their wealth most effectively.
Another reason you need the rich is to create a class of early adopters that have the money to spend on products, medical procedures, and other goods and services that are not mature enough to be affordable to the mass market. The early adopters help fund development, help find the flaws in products, and take the big risks.
Every safety device we have in cars started out in luxury automobiles. The first Macintosh computer cost $3499 in Canada in the 1980’s. Believe me, people in my income class weren’t buying them. But if that higher income class didn’t exist, there never would have been a Mac in the first place because the first generation w-as impossible to make while being affordable for the bulk of the country.
A lot of innovations in efficiency and materials have come from billionaires racing yachts and airplanes. The private space company SpaceX only came into existence because a very rich man wanted to indulge his dream of sending rockets into space and ultimately going to Mars. Elon Musk thought SpaceX was unlikely to be commercially viable at first, but he built it anyway. The innovations it is pioneering are dramatically reducing our access cost to space and forcing all the old crony aerospace companies to tighten up and start innovating again. And we all benefit from that.
So you say that you aren’t advocating socialism, but that’s exactly what you are doing. Socialism simply means that the wealth of society is distributed according to some scale of justice rather than by value. You can do that voluntarily, but the end result is the same – all big projects would have to be controlled and directed by government, because the people would not retain the concentrations of capital to do it themselves.
We also need money to flow to capitalists in proportion to how much we value their products. This transmits information to all the participants in the economy about the relative value of things so they can make intelligent choices. In a world where money flows according to ‘fairness’ instead of value, the information content of monetary flows goes way down. Now I have no idea why money has gone where it has. It’s like taking a communications waveform and removing the peaks and valley to create something smoother – the process of doing it destroys the information the original signal contained.
Thinking about the negative attitude the ancient philosophers had toward the acquisition of wealth, it must have been their understanding that one person’s wealth left less for others to share. This zero-sum understanding of wealth would of necessity lead a moral philosopher to conclude that it is evil to focus on the “excessive” accumulation of wealth.
But as soon as (modern) man comes to understand that wealth is not zero-sum, that one man’s production of wealth actually makes other men better off, the entire philosophical underpinning of wealth and money as evil collapses.
When you work hard and make a lot of money, or even an average amount, you can choose to build a mansion on a hill, or a hospital in a remote area of the world that needs help. In a free society, you choose. You can even do both. You also can choose to work or not, serve your country or not, start a business, go to church or not, how to educate your children, but there is choice – free will. In a society with no freedom, everything goes in the soup pot, and those in charge decide all of the above. Does freedom come from God or the government? When all of life’s privileges come from government, we have reached a turning point. Better go back to the Founders and read their warnings.
These two.
OK, I am seeing a theme… Virtually everyone disagreeing with Mike is saying the same thing, but seemingly missing what he is saying. The question is not whether wealth is bad, or even whether excessive wealth is bad, but whether an individual’s desire to pursue extravagant wealth is immoral, regardless of the possibility for positive outcomes. It is very easy to get caught up in the values and benefits of capitalism in order to dance around Mike’s actual question… Perhaps better phrased, it can be summarized as greed or selfishness, or a lack of kindness. All of those things are clear when analyzed on an individual level, I think. It is too bad how easy it is to intellectualize away our own personal responsibility for basic human kindness.
In light of eternity, it is not neighbors or peers who make the ultimate judgement on the morality of an individual choice, or life…
In the end, each individual must decide how to live. And be accountable for that life.
Ryan: That’ part of it, but there is more. For Aristotle as fopr Aquinas, man has a nature which is ordered towards man as rational–reasoning, truth seeking, moral animal. Trye happiness or, in Aquinas holiness, comes from maximizing, to the extent possible is a passing world, man’s nature. When external and temporal desire are elevated above his pursuit of virtue or holiness, he frustrates his nature.
Let me try an analogy. Alex Rodruguez is artguably the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Baseball excellence might be called his highest purpose. Unfortunately, he subverted that excellence by reorienting his purpose to the desire for money. Rodriguez has a contract for $250 million. To earn all that he was req
Really Mike, if you’re going to use Yankee metaphors, pls don’t refer to Alex Rodriguez. He is not a Yankee.
Jeter, Rivera, Wells, Williams, O’Neill, etc. are the true modern bearers of the pinstripe.
Now carry on with your argument.
Ryan: That’s part of it, but there is more. For Aristotle as for Aquinas, man has a nature which is ordered towards man as rational, truth seeking, moral animal. True happiness or, in Aquinas holiness, comes from maximizing, to the extent possible in a passing world, man’s nature. When external and temporal desire are elevated above his pursuit of virtue or holiness, he frustrates his nature.
Let me try an analogy. Alex Rodruguez is arguably the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Baseball excellence might be called his highest purpose. Unfortunately, he subverted that excellence by reorienting his purpose to the desire for money. Rodriguez has a contract for $250 million. To earn all that he is required to reach certain minimum numbers of hits, runs batted in, and a bunch of other things. His focus shifted away from the pursuit of excellence. The money tempted him to use PAFs–to cheat. Worse, he had to hide his cheating by lying, engaging in actions to conceal his cheating, and betraying the game. When he got caught, he went to great lengths to avoid the consequences. Today, even though he is still a great ball player, everything he does is questioned. Is he still cheating? Do his accomplishments mean anything? Will he ever get into the Hall of Fame? Basically, he ruined his life and thereby sacrificed his happiness.
I have great sympathy for Rodriguez. Who isn’t tempted by the promise of great riches? I still enjoy watching him hit, but the spark has gone out of his eyes.
In the modern world we don’t think teleologically. We elevate choice above all things. There is no hierarchy of values. There are certain strict limits, e.g., homicide is still forbidden, but the broader understanding of the purpose of life has been lost.
This is one of the reasons that we can never seem to find solutions to moral or political questions. We tend to look at means as ends in themselves. Both liberals and conservatives fall into this trap. Both see wealth as an end when it is only a means. For the left, people need the force of government to lift them up. For the right, we need wealthy men who create jobs to lift up the poor. But the two sides never quite get at the question of true human happiness so they end up yelling at each other. I’m no fan of the welfare state, but I am not fully convinced by the economic conservative side either. Good work is certainly an essential means, but it is only a means. I haven’t read Arthur Brooks’s new book, but from what I hear he sees the hierarchy of ends over means. As I understand it, he is arguing that after good work and reasonable wealth, the ultimate human good is the spiritual life. If I understand correctly, he is closer to Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas, than he is to Milton Friedman.