BING CROSBY'S Pennies from Heaven

Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders with you for The Philosopher's Zone. And this week, money. It makes the world go round, love of it is the root of all evil, but it can't buy you happiness. Just some of our money-related clichés and I'm sure you could think of some of your own.

But where do our ideas of the morality of money come from, and do they need a good shaking down? Ancient and mediaeval philosophers spent a lot of time thinking about money, but more often these days, our philosophers have focused on the market, rather than on money.

Well Adrian Walsh and Tony Lynch, two philosophers at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, have just published a book called The Morality of Money and Adrian Walsh joins us now in our Tamworth studio. Adrian, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Adrian Walsh: OK, thank you Alan, it's a pleasure to be here.

Alan Saunders: Now let's be specific about what we mean when we talk about money, because we don't mean the market or the economy, do we? What do we mean by money?

Adrian Walsh: When Tony and I were talking about that, what we meant was simply just simply coins and notes and funny little digits that come up in your bank balance.

Alan Saunders: So the things that we exchange for goods and services.

Adrian Walsh: That's right. The point that we wanted to make was that money itself has been around for a long time, much longer than, say, the market or the capitalist market as we understand it now. And so we have quite entrenched moral attitudes. And interestingly, we can go back and look at writers like Aristotle; we can look at Plato or Aquinas in the mediaeval period and find interesting and fruitful discussions. So if you go back to say Aristotle, who talks about the way that money has a tendency to - well to pursue money is an activity that doesn't have satisfaction conditions.

Alan Saunders: Yes, when you say satisfaction conditions, you mean that if you're pursuing money there is potentially no end to it, not point at which you will be satisfied. It's not like building a boat where you know it's all over once you've got a boat.

Adrian Walsh: That's exactly right. So Aristotle thought a proper activity was one which had an end, an end point, or I'm calling it satisfaction conditions but that's sort of little bit anachronistic, he wouldn't talk in those terms. But nonetheless, the analogy that you just used about a boat is right. For him, proper activity is one where you know when you've finished it. Unfortunately, making money didn't count for Aristotle as a proper activity because we didn't have any point at which we knew when it was over. And you can see still, I mean the relevance of that to the way we relate to money and it's still there, and even though, as I say, he didn't live in the kind of economy that we live, one of the commonalities between us and the ancients is this attitude towards money.

Alan Saunders: Well I want to come back later to the idea about why it is morally a problem that the pursuit of money doesn't have an end point or a satisfaction condition. But I think it's interesting that you go back to Aristotle and you mention the mediaeval philosophers. Clearly the ancients and the mediaevals were interested in the morality of money; what's happened to modern philosophers, aren't they interested in money?

Adrian Walsh: I think a lot of discussion as you said in your introduction, is about, or a lot of philosophical discussion is about the market. So there is - I don't want to overstate this - there is a lot of discussion about the ethics of the market; what there isn't is about money. And I think one of the things that happened was that there tended to be a divide amongst philosophers, particularly political philosophers, so you get pros on the left, from the socialist tradition who just wanted to eradicate money in a sense. So it wasn't as if you could have - you weren't going to draw distinction between morally legitimate and morally illegitimate uses of money because say someone like Marx wanted to get rid of money. On the other hand you have I suppose a lot of modern economic theory that just wants to say there aren't moral issues there. So I think what's happened is it's become lost, and yet at the same time as philosophers aren't talking about it, there's at an everyday level I think there's still an interest in moral attitudes to money.

Alan Saunders: Well an everyday level, that's interesting, because you talk in the book about 'folk views on the morality of commercial life'. Now this sounds similar to what philosophers of mind call folk psychology, which is the notions that underline our everyday views of human behaviour. Philosophers of mind aren't always very impressed by folk psychology; what's your view about the folk psychology of money?

Adrian Walsh: I tend to think that it's a good starting point. Obviously you're not going to just take all of your morality of money or your philosophy of money from what our folk views are. I mean this way I'm sort of an Aristotelian; I think where do we start? We've got to start with our folk views and there are all these interesting folk views out there, and let's see if we can rationally reconstruct some of them in a way that will make them plausible. So I suppose the default assumption here is that if people have these views, there might well be something to them, and it's worth pursuing them and seeing if we can kind of give a rational reconstruction of them.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at some of these views. And you begin your book with a number of examples of them that get to the heart of our often complex feelings about money. How do we feel, for example, about mercenary soldiers who fight for money rather than some personal, political or national commitment? And what do we think of a bridal registry where you are told what sort of present someone wants and the price at which you must purchase them?

Adrian Walsh: That's right. I mean I think those are important cases where people have very strong views often about the role of money. So mercenaries get called dogs of war, I mean it's quite strong language that gets used. And part of the reason is I think people think it's legitimate to, and often obligatory to fight in the defence of your nation, but to do so simply for money and to hire yourself out to any country, seems immoral to many people. Now I think a lot of objections to the mercenaries as just simply the fact that they take money, aren't going to get going very far. But if you put a bit of pressure on it, you can see there are some good reasons. Often mercenaries will fight for governments who - I mean one of the only reasons people will hire a mercenary is because they can't get the ordinary citizenry to fight for them. So it may well be the case that it's not that it's intrinsically wrong to be a mercenary, but often you're fighting for corrupt regimes.

Alan Saunders: What about the bridal registry thing, because that's curious in that we possibly have a folk belief that a gift ought to be freely given, it's something that I give to you because I want to give you something, and I don't really want to be told what to give you and how much to pay for it, and that this somehow pollutes the very idea of a gift.

Adrian Walsh: I think that's right. One of the things you are asked in a bridal registry to purchase a gift at a certain price. Putting precise dollar value on what it is that you will be given seems to take away from the idea of the freedom of a gift. You know, a lot of philosophers have looked at the nature of friendship and the meaning of friendship and the importance of gifts in that context, and putting precise dollar values on those gifts seems somehow - I mean you need to tease that out a little bit more, but it seems inappropriate in that context.

Alan Saunders: I just used the notion of polluting the idea of a gift. At what point do we start thinking of money not simply as a means of exchange, but as a pollutant, as something that pollutes our relationships with other people?

Adrian Walsh: Well it's interesting. If you go back to both Plato and Aristotle, you get that idea of the corruption of money. I mean they talk quite extensively about it. Just beginning with Plato, Plato in The Republic had the guardians, the philosopher-kings were not to have anything to do with money. In a later book, The Laws, he doesn't want his citizens to have anything to do with money there either, so he brings in I suppose guest workers who are merchants, so that the citizenry themselves won't be corrupted by trade. Similarly with Aristotle, and again, Aristotle differs from Plato in lots of ways here, but he thought that it was all right to sell goods if they were excess from your household consumption. But to actually deliberately produce goods with the intention of making money out of them, was to corrupt the activity in itself. So it's interesting; for him to actually deliberately produce a commodity was a form of corruption.

Alan Saunders: We do, don't we, have a somewhat entrenched suspicion of people doing something merely for profit. You give an example in the book of a sign on a butcher's door that says 'For your convenience, we will be open on Christmas Day', rather than saying, 'We will be open on Christmas Day because we would prefer to make some money than to celebrate the day'.

Adrian Walsh: I think that's right. The point of that in the book was that we are very suspicious of people when they have a profit motive. But I think in a way that's a little bit unfair because - and we can have mixed motives in this area, so it's not as if the mere fact you have a profit motive means that there aren't other possible motives that you have, that you may well have good intentions, or alternatively, you may well produce something that's useful for the rest of us.

Alan Saunders: Well when we think of the profit motive, or when I think of the profit motive, I think of a philosopher who wrote an epoch-making work on economics, Adam Smith. He famously said that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we expect to find bread or meat on our tables, no, it isn't, it's from their desire and of course their need, they've got to live too, to make a profit. They make a profit, I get something to eat. So this seems to suggest that the profit motive is mutually beneficial and therefore morally good, doesn't it?

Adrian Walsh: You're right. And what you're talking about there is am invisible hands that has been so much a part of modern philosophy of economics and has had a tremendous influence on public policy, and this is the idea that people pursuing their own self-interest can give rise to public benefits, and I think that's right. One of the things Tony and I wanted to say though was that what's unclear when discussing the invisible hand is what kind of profit motive it is that you're talking about. Now we distinguish between kinds of profit motives. You can have a profit motive which has no moral side constraints, so you'll do anything in order to make a profit, and you can also have profit motives which have moral side constraints on them. So I want to make money, but there's also things I won't do. Say if I'm a butcher, I won't sell tainted meat. The point here is that people tend to talk about the profit motive, and the profit motive generates all these social benefits. But at the same time, what we don't tend to recognise is that maybe we should talk about profit motives.

Alan Saunders: Let's turn now to another 18th century thinker, the great German philosophy Immanuel Kant said that everything has either a price or a dignity. But why can't it have a price and a dignity?

Adrian Walsh: That's an interesting question. Kant set it up very strongly, and it's been tremendously influential in applied ethics. If you go into something like debates about the sale of human organs, a lot of the bioethical literature on this will say the problem with it is, is you're putting a price on a human body part, and in so doing you are treating it as a mere means, you're not treating it with due respect, you're not treating it with dignity, because both price and dignity are mutually exclusive. Now one of the lines that we run in the book is that in fact there are many cases where price and dignity are compatible. So when you think about the job, so you do presumably you're paid for being on The Philosopher's Zone, but presumably you also find intrinsic value in it. The mere fact that you gain money from that pursuit doesn't necessarily mean that all dignity is taken from it, or that you treat it merely as a means to gaining money.

I think with the human organs it's another issue that's going on. It's not just about the corruption objection that money corrupts. I mean people have concerns about the possibilities of desperate exchange, and I think one of the things that worries people about human organ sales is that people are only going to engage in it or typically are going to engage in it when they're in some sort of some financial difficulty, and I think it's the idea of desperate exchange that's motivating some of the concern.

Alan Saunders: Another objection to money is that the pursuit of profit is destructive of human solidarity. This seems to me interesting because Montesquieu, the great 18th century political theorist coined the term 'le deux commerce', 'the sweet, or soft, commerce'. The idea being that contrary to this objection, commerce brought people together. To put it simply, trade was possible only if people were going to be, and nations were going to be, polite to each other.

Adrian Walsh: Smith had a similar view. He thought that the - he writes somewhere in The Wealth of Nations the Dutch are the most mercantile, and therefore the most reliable. And he thinks that important moral virtues arise from being engaged in trade. So I think what we find is that it's a mixed bag, and I suppose that's why Tony and I tend to take a middle ground in a lot of this. There has been a tendency among some philosophers to want to say All money is corrupting, and to want to abandon any kind of engagement with it. On the other hand, as you say, Montesquieu, Smith, a number of other philosophers want to say not only that it is morally acceptable to engage in trade, but sometimes there are virtues associated with it, so yes, the 'doux commerce', the 'soft commerce' thesis is that because we have to engage with one another, we have to engage in trade, and there are sort of market-related virtues, that in fact softens us and makes us more virtuous. I think where people like say, Fourier, who were very opposed to the market, and very opposed to monetary relations, the sort of thing that they're worried about are cases of I suppose exploitation, where we're engaged in activities that involve cheating and lying and so on, and we want to run a much more middle line. And so there are good and bad aspects to this.

Alan Saunders: There's an argument that you refer to in your book that the development of money produced philosophy. Specifically the development of money in Ancient Greece involved having to display a calculative rationality, and you say that in this sense monetarisation lies at the very heart of philosophy.

Adrian Walsh: That's from a book by Richard Siefert, called Money in the Early Greek Mind, and he argues that the development money as you say, produced philosophy, and his idea is that monetarisation makes available the idea of the universe as an impersonal system and involves some kind of calculative rationality. I thought that was interesting, and it's similar to a view that sociologist I suppose, Georg Simmel ran, that with the advent of money, we gain a capacity for more abstract thinking. I think it's an interesting idea but I think it's a little bit overstated (that) philosophy's completely a product of money, I mean this is the sort of alter-thesis to the one we're responding to. I mean some people saying philosophy shouldn't be interested in money, and this is the most radical thesis the other way, philosophy's actually a product of money. But I do think there's something interesting about if you change the social conditions and create a system that involves a sort of calculation, then it presumably does affect our capacity for abstract thought.

Alan Saunders: And this of course is exactly the opposite of what Marx thought. He actually objected to the implications of rational calculation because he implied that everything could be compared by means of a universal measure.

Adrian Walsh: That's right. As I said there has been philosophical work looking at this aspect of money, and there's a number of morally salient features of money, and one of them is this fact that it does provide a universal measure, or a universal form of equivalence. Now some philosophers thought that was a good thing. Interestingly, even though Aristotle is opposed to producing things for money he thinks in The Nichomachean Ethics he talks about how money is useful because it does allow us to compare things, so we can compare - there's a funny example, he talks about one house equals five beds equals ten pairs of shoes. Now I mean houses must have been very cheap in those days. But a lot of philosophers have thought that was one of the positive features of money.

On the other hand, there have been philosophers who think that, that sort of universal system of commiseration is somehow immoral because there are certain kinds of things that should be treated as incommensurable. So if you take something like a cost benefit analysis, one of the objections that some people have to it being used right across the social spectrum, is that there are many things that shouldn't be compared. Say if we put a financial value on your children for instance, this is seen as somehow being immoral.

Alan Saunders: Yes, putting a value on your children, would that be one of those commercial acts that to quote you are 'beyond the pale'?

Adrian Walsh: I think it would be.

Alan Saunders: But where do you draw the line? I can see why you might draw it there intuitively, but where do you draw it?

Adrian Walsh: Where do you draw it? Smith himself thought that using this kind of reason around the home and the hearth was inappropriate so I suppose anything that you think is intrinsically valuable you want to be wary of putting a financial value on. Now that's not to say that you can't, in the sense that we tend to run a moral hazards line on this, so it's not as if the mere fact of doing it immediately somehow corrupts, but I think there's a danger of it leading you to regard it in the wrong kind of way.

Alan Saunders: Well I mean at what point might it become all right for me to put a value on my children? I mean take the story of Hansel and Gretel. Now Hansel and Gretel's parents send them into the dark woods, they get rid of them, and that's probably because they had other kids and in the Middle Ages when the story would originally have arisen, parents were living on the edge and they couldn't feed all their children. Suppose that instead of sending them on their own into the woods, Hansel and Gretel's Mum and Dad had sold them to somebody else, essentially as slaves. Well they would be in less danger from wicked witches in the woods, so that sounds like a less undesirable outcome, or is that another exchange of desperation?

Adrian Walsh: Yes, I think in a way this probably is a desperate exchange. I mean if it was the case that things were so bad that you were better off selling them into another than the life that they had, well you can see why people might do it. These moral claims we have are obviously defeasable. There would be circumstances where you might want to over-ride them because of some greater harm. And there can be cases where you might think that selling a good is a way of ensuring that those who are buying them actually value them. So we had a story there about a pony, and a person puts a certain price on it because they hope that the person who will buy it actually cares for it, and if they're going to bother to spend money on something, then they might well actually show care for it, whereas if you just give it away, it might well not be treated with the same kind of respect. So sometimes, I mean there are cases where putting a price on a thing might well be a mark of your own respect for it.

Alan Saunders: Well the book is called The Morality of Money - An exploration in analytical philosophy. It's published by Palgrave McMillan and the authors are Tony Lynch and Adrian Walsh and I've been talking to Adrian Walsh today. Adrian, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Adrian Walsh: Thank you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McKune. I'm Alan Saunders and here, from her 1975 album Horses is Patty Smith, buying her passage out of the show with Free Money.

SONG