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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
‘Overrides’? Really? Are you saying there are no Old Testament rules that should be followed?
I’m quite familiar with the Bible. I grew up with it. I’ve read it many times. The idea that the New Testament totally invalidates the Old Testament seems pretty radical to me. Sure, lots of Christians today believe exactly that, and therefore believe that all that is necessary to reach the gates of heaven is to accept Jesus as your saviour.
Those orthodox Mennonites were Christians. My Grandfather was a Christian. They never thought that Jesus gave them a blank check for ignoring everything God said was moral in the Old Testament. And among Christian faiths there is a lot of disagreement over which rules are still sins and which aren’t. What has happened is that Jesus is now invoked to justify whatever side of the line you fall on with each question.
What does it mean to accept Christ into your heart? Does it mean showing it by following the laws of his father to the best of your ability? Sure, if you have a moment of true repentance on your deathbed you will be accepted into heaven, but what if you’re struck by lightning while crassly ignoring a rule of God’s that you could easily have followed?
Doesn’t it at least show disrespect for God’s word if you drop dead while eating a rack of pork ribs at the expensive golf club while bragging about your round and dripping sauce on your expensive wool blend golf pants?
And are you saying that it’s still a requirement for Christians to at least follow everything Jesus says you should do? Because it seems to me that there’s even a lot of dispute over that. Some Christian churches not only welcome gay people, they allow them to become pastors. And they invoke Jesus’s love for all men as justification for doing so.
And how is that functionally different than giving all my wealth away at the expense of my family so I can show my no-good ex-girlfriend that I’m a better man than she thought I was?
See, once we allow that context and motivation matter, suddenly the action itself seeks to have any relevance at all. It’s ALL motivation and context. And that makes discussion the ‘rightness’ of accumulating ‘excessive’ wealth pointless.
The real answer is that we should always be looking at the motivations and consequences of everything we do, and trying to live within a moral context. Accumulating wealth may be bad in some contexts, while failing to accumulate wealth bad in others. For example, choosing to live a life of leisure chatting on the internet and ‘advocating’ for causes, and then requiring the forcibly extracted ‘charity’ of others to provide for you in retirement because you didn’t accumulate any wealth of your own.
Don’t all such questions really boil down to, “Hey, just try to be a good, responsible person, okay?”
Eh, the Bible as a whole isn’t unilaterally against accumulating wealth. Some parts of the Bible describe material prosperity as a blessing, and the Parable of the Talents describes not investing in the gifts you have to offer the world (which don’t have to be exclusively spiritual) as a sin.
We can choose to interpret the Bible out of historical context, or elevate some admonitions far above others. But we can also choose not to. We could also choose to describe the absence of any predictions from Jesus on the role genuinely free enterprise would play in lifting the world from poverty as a shortcoming of the Bible – or of the Christian religion itself. But even if Jesus had predicted the advantages of free markets, who would have understood him well enough at the time to find those predictions worth recording?
As it is, the philosophy of free markets sprang from a Christian culture. We can argue whether – or rather how much – Christian thought contributed to the development of free-market ideas, but it’s not the worst position for a religion to be in with respect to economic truths.
Agreed.
Honestly, they seem to.
I really didn’t want to take up political questions, but I do have one thing to note. Conservative/libertarian economist Tyler Cohen has offered the theory that in an increasinglt techological societry–especially as AI becomes common place–the middle, and mayber even the upper middle class, is doomed. In Average is Over, he argues that the gulf between those who are equipped to work with AI, and those who have no aptitude for AI, will grow to the point where 15% of the population will control the vast majority of wealth, while the remaining 85% will live in relative squalor. While there are many flaws in his argument–which he acknowledges–if his theory is proven in experience we have to ask whether this is morally tolerable.and if not what should we do about it. Cohen is a bit opaque about the morality question, and I don’t blame him since his book is a work of economics and not moral philosophy. I find some of his arguments compelling, and others not so much. But no matter, it is certainly an interesting thesis.
The effect of such an outcome could be devastating to everyone. In his theory he argues that the 85% will gather in communities in which the goal is to survive. The 15% will live in unimaginable splendor.
What could happen? The 85% could engage in constant revolution, but without effective weapons. The 15% could engage in combat among themselves–a Nietzschean clash of the titans.
In either event, virtue would be at a premium. The question is whether virtue would all but disappear, and with it those aspects of the soul that allow us to reach our true telos.
Nitpick: That’s Tyler Cowen, not Cohen. And he’s probably wrong, and if he’s not, he has no idea how automation will play out throughout society – and neither does anyone else. Trying to use a hypothetical future as a moral argument is kind of like arguing for the existence of aliens by quoting Star Trek.
The opposite view of Cowen’s would be that of Nassim Taleb, who argues that the continuity of the ‘march of progress’ is an illusion, and that real changes to society happen in bursts after a ‘Black Swan’ event. WWII was a Black Swan event. So was the invention of solid state electronics and the integrated circuit. The internet is probably the biggest Black Swan in history. What happens is that we have a major shock to the status quo, then society reconfigures itself to the new reality.
Artificial intelligence may or may not be a Black Swan. But there are many other potential Black Swans just waiting in the wings to change our lives forever. The nearest of them may be virtual reality, which will be here in just a few months and could change the way we work, play, and consume. Nanomaterials may be another. Life extension yet another. Perhaps the opening of competitive commercial spaceflight will change everything.
You can’t predict these things. You don’t know when they will happen, or how society will react to them. The Segway was predicted by many to be a Black Swan – an invention that would reconfigure our cities and change the way we move around. That never happened at all. Google Glass was supposed to be a breakthrough, but no one could foresee the spontaneous social disapproval of the technology. But Google itself certainly was a Black Swan.
So the apparent slowdown in innovation Cowen sees may be just a statistical artefact of the chunky nature of progress, and he would be the first to acknowledge it.
This is probably a subject that would be worth a thread of its own (or many threads).
I agree that we can and do choose how we interpret the bible, but that gets back to my comment that the Bible has become a Rorschach test. It has so many rules and so much advice in it, that if we as fallible human beings are allowed to pick and choose what we want to believe out of it, we can pretty much assemble a personal religion that is nothing more than a codification of the things we already believe or want to believe, rather than being the infallible Word of God.
I’m not buying Cowen’s these (by the way thanks for the spelling correction. Dumb on my part. The book is right in front of me). I am only asking the question of whether, if his thesis proves prescient, whether the result is morally justifiable. I’m leaving the question of economics aside. I am only interested in the moral-ethical issues surrounding wealth accumulation.
No one has really addressed the core issue: Does the pursuit of extravagant wealth negatively affect the individual’s moral and spiritual health (in the the Greek sense) by interfering with his pursuit of both intellectual and moral virtue? For Aristotle, man is a truth seeking animal who, when distracted from his inherent nature, sacrifices his highest good.
Aquinas departed from Aristotle on the need for wealth to achieve happiness. He was more a Platonist on this issue. For Aquinas, man’s first need is the spirit. Even the poor could achieve this. Sometimes better than the rich.
Which might explain why some branches of Christianity (particularly the Catholic and Orthodox) aren’t solely Bible-based, but consider the Bible part of a larger tradition, which contextualizes Biblical interpretation.
I have the same problem you do with assembling a religion based on just any interpretation of the Bible. Agreeing, on the other hand, to become part of a community that has a longstanding tradition of wholesome discourse which habitually references the Bible makes more sense to me. For example, I consider myself a Nicene Christian, thought the Nicene Creed isn’t in the Bible. Nor are the liturgies I’m familiar with described explicitly in the Bible.
I think I understand why many Christians self-identify as sola scriptura (Bible only), I just doubt that sola scriptura works on a literal level. And I suspect that once sola scriptura is no longer meant literally, it becomes prima scriptura anyhow.
I think this evasiveness arises because many of us here see the more sensible way to pose the question as, “Can wealth be pursued at the expense of other important goods in life?”
To which the answer is clearly “yes” – and I suppose you could define wealth so pursued as “extravagant”. But the word “extravagant” seems to be muddying the issue more than it clarifies.
This is where I have landed. I lost my faith in God a long, long time ago, but I still believe the Bible has tremendous value because it contains rules for living that have proven to stand the test of time. And I think Christianity has value in that it gives motivation and a decent morality to people who do not have the inclination, education, or ability to work out their own rules coherently. The golden rule is a good rule whether or not you are a Christian, so having a religious tradition that enshrines it seems to me to be a positive force in society.
To me, the Bible is not the Word of God, but it is a tremendously valuable historical document and an excellent mechanism for organizing moral thoughts into a coherent whole. So when someone asks if seeking wealth is immoral, I might consider what the Bible had to say about it, but I would have no qualms about deciding that in this case the Bible’s viewpoint is not useful because the rule was meant for a different time and place and has no relevance to how we should behave in a society organized in a completely different way from those who God was speaking to.
And some Christians land awfully close by despite not having lost faith in God :-)
We do. But show me a government that doesn’t gain the power to do immoral things when you try to solve this problem.
I think an even better system would give the entity monetary interest in insuring it’s “sovereignty.” People responding to incentives and all that.
Well, at least enough people believe that’s the only way to do it so as it becomes self-fulfilling.
You call yourself “near-libertarian” and can think of nothing the government does that immoral?
Oh! Wonderful! I didn’t realize none of this happens now!
Resorting to force isn’t the problem. Doing immoral things is the problem. If there was a system that was less likely to do immoral things when it’s in an imperfect state, wouldn’t that be a superior system?
You are arguing things I never said. Your claim was that government by definition had to be immoral because it only exists to do things that would be immoral for individuals to do.
I responded with a perfectly valid example of a government function that does not meet your criterion as being immoral. You then moved the goalposts by saying essentially that if we give government that power they would use it for other things that are immoral. But that is a very different argument,
Then you pulled a clever rhetorical trick and asked me if I could think of a single thing the government does that’s immoral, which shifts the burden of proof to me even though you were the one that made the outrageous claim.
To answer you, Of course I can think of many things the government does that are immoral. I basically agree with you that government power is dangerous and needs to be kept in check. But that has nothing to do with your original assertion that government must be illegitimate because by definition it only does things that would be immoral if individuals did them. And that’s still not true.
Ryan M
Ball, I appreciate that you think you’ve made your point, whatever that may be… Let me know whenever you figure that out yourself.
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Well argued.
This is a misconception. It’s very common. I do it to. Taking what one says does happen and claiming they said it always happens. My claim is that if you instate a government, you instate an entity that will do immoral things (and get away with them readily.) We agree that the government only does these immoral things sometimes and not always.
I did?! Awesome! I’m usually baffled by other’s abilities to use rhetorical tricks that I totally missed using one myself! Honestly though, I don’t like rhetoric. There’s no point “winning” arguments based on clever wordplay. It’s all about truth-finding for me. So if I “tricked” you, I apologize. It was probably me misinterpreting your claim.
Did I say only? I would be surprised if I did. That would be simple to refute, wouldn’t it? What I meant to say is much of what government does is immoral, and the ability to contemplate a government that doesn’t readily and voraciously do immoral things doesn’t legitimize practically every government that ever existed (including ours).