Money Talk
What is most familiar to us is sometimes most mysterious. Consider money. What is it? Most people think of it as a certain kind of physical object: paper or metal made at a certain place and stamped in a certain way. But that's cash, not money. To see the difference, think about the prediction that there will be little or no cash circulating twenty years from now. All transactions will be electronic. When you buy something, credits will be transferred from your account to the account of the seller. No coins or bills will move from one place to another but we will still have money. Our money will exist as numbers in certain electronic files; or, more accurately, it will exist in the same way any data stored on computers exist.
We think of money as a kind of thing partly because that’s how we talk about it. In fact, we talk about money as if it were a thing with amazing powers, like a genie. We can put it to work for us and it will make more money. We also talk as if it were a plant. We can put down seed money and watch our dollars grow. All this talk of making and growing suggests that investors earn their livelihood the way that that craftsmen and farmers do. They make something or they make something grow. Also, this talk about money working and money growing disguises the fact that while investors bask on the beach or obsess at their laptops, their dollars (not other people) are out their making money for them.
Then there is all that talk about banks lending money. Ordinary loans are generous gestures. If I loan you my car I don't expect you to pay me for its use. I just expect you to return it the same shape you got it. If I make you pay for using my car I don't loan it to you, I sell you the use of it (that is, I rent it to you). What holds for cars, holds for money. If it changes hands for a price it has not really been loaned. So, the fact that banks expect more than a heartfelt "thank you" for making it available to us means that they rent it to us (or, maybe, sell it to us on credit).
Like our agricultural metaphors, this misleading talk creates a warm, fuzzy feeling about what is really going on. It assimilates bank loans to favors; acts of kindness between neighbors and friends, or expressions of generosity by benefactors. Banks like us to think of them in these ways, especially in hard times when repossessions and foreclosures are common. The image of the banker as a kind, understanding person there to lend a helping hand in time of need is an important theme of bank advertising. If banks described themselves as renting money or selling money on credit, it would be harder to perpetrate this hoax. In that case we would simply think of bankers as business people who deal in money as opposed to some other commodity. They buy (or rent) money from us at a relatively low rate and they sell (or rent) money to us at a relatively high one. The buying transaction is disguised by language as well. As the bankers portray it, they are doing us the favor of helping us save our money.
(If this sounds familiar to some of you, it’s because I originally published it as an op-ed piece in the New York Times).
Monotheism
Jews, Christians and Muslims share the belief that there is one and only one God. They think of this as the common cornerstone of their religions. Apart from a few theologians, no one feels the need to prove this. Almost everyone simply accepts it on faith. So I wonder: if you're going to take a leap of faith, why land in a place that gives you one God, instead of many? Why not land in a place that gives you many gods with different powers and different areas of responsibility, like the Ancient Greeks and Romans?
Of course, some Christians are closer to the Greeks and Romans than they'd like to think. The Trinity isn't supposed to be polytheism, but it takes big doses of questionable theology to explain why. Sometimes Christians praise and pray to God, sometimes they praise and pray to Jesus. And sometimes they are visited and moved by the Holy Spirit. In practice, anyway, that sounds just a little polytheistic.
And what about all those saints and angels? Catholic and Orthodox saints are a bit like demi-gods with different powers and areas of responsibility. Believers pray to saints and pray to different saints for different purposes; one finds lost objects, another redeems lost causes. How do the saints do what they do? If they have powers to act directly on their own—if they are God's deputies--they really are like minor deities. What's the difference? Sure, they can be overruled by God as a sheriff can overrule a deputy. But some polytheistic religions have major gods who are more powerful than minor gods and reverse their decisions too. So how big a difference is that, really?
Well, maybe saints and angels don't have independent executive powers. Maybe they just intercede on our behalf with God. But why would they need to intercede? What does that say about God? That He's not paying attention? Or that He is paying attention but that a saint can talk Him out of what He was going to do (and therefore that His first thought was wrong)? Can we say that about God? Most theologians can't. The received Wisdom is that God marks the fall of every sparrow; He is All-Knowing and He can’t be wrong about anything. Well, then, what are saints doing when they intercede? How does that work in a monotheistic system?
And then there are angels. Often, they seem to be God's deputies, acting on His command. But sometimes they seem to have authority of their own. Jacob wrestles an angel all night long to be forgiven for a sin against his brother. In the end, the angel gives in to him. There is no mention of God telling the angel to hold out for a night and give up in the morning. The angel appears to be acting on his own. And even if that one isn’t, what about all those fallen angels—Satan and his minions. Clearly, they do. Why aren't devils gods gone bad? They’re not as powerful as God Himself, of course, but they do have all kinds of supernatural powers and sometimes they win.
Theologians make various moves to evade these problems, but it's a constant effort. It's especially hard for Evangelicals who take the Bible literally. They can't really say things like "Well, the angel in the story isn't literally an angel; it symbolizes an aspect of Jacob's psychology" or even things like "Saints, angels and all the rest. They are all really just aspects of God's nature." Well, that's not how it sounds in the Bible, and God wrote the Bible and God is no deceiver. Satan's the one who talks in riddles.
In the end, monotheistic religions with large casts of lesser supernatural beings force their theologians beyond the literal. And maybe it's not so strange after all to think of saints, angels, and the parts of the trinity (or two of them) as aspects of a single divine nature. But that also considerably narrows the gap between monotheistic and other religions. Most Jews, Christians and Muslims think of Hinduism as polytheistic, for example, but Hindus may also think of their deities as aspects or expressions of a single divine nature and some of them do.
It's also a little strange that the major statement of monotheism—the First of the Ten Commandments—is not entirely clear on the subject. As it is often translated it reads "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other god before me." That doesn't say "I am the only God"; it says don't put any of the rest of them "before me". I'm not the only one who's noticed this, of course. Theologians scramble to make sense of it too. Many of them say that the "god" at the end of the sentence doesn't refer to a supernatural being, but rather to any goal or object around which we organize our lives; money, fame, family, country, etc. So understood, the commandment tells us to love God above everything else in our lives. But that's not what the commandment literally says. And if we think of it in time it was written, at a time when many tribes occupied the desert, each with it's own gods, there is some reason to think it was intended to say just what it literally says.
This blurring of boundaries between monotheistic and polytheistic religions is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, as I asked earlier, if one is going to take a leap of faith, what is the advantage of landing on the square that offers just one God? What’s so bad about polytheism anyway?
Moral Luck And Moral Theory
A school bus driver swerves to avoid a dog crossing an icy road, loses control of his bus and runs into a tree. Twenty children die. It is discovered after the accident that the driver’s blood alcohol level exceeded the legal limit. It was also discovered that he had been driving in this condition for twenty years without a mishap. Every school day, before his scheduled run, he visited the same bar and downed a pitcher of the same beer. His habit was widely known. Some people disapproved mildly, but no one made a public issue of it. Attitudes changed dramatically after the accident. The fact that he was now responsible for the death of twenty children made him a villain in the eyes of many. It didn’t matter that his ability successfully to avoid dogs on icy roads was no worse on this occasion than it was on many earlier ones. (This is based loosely on an actual incident).
An enraged woman empties a seven shot pistol into her estranged husband at point blank range, intending to kill him. Miraculously, he survives without permanent injury or disfigurement. She is blamed for her act but not nearly as much as she would have been had he died or suffered permanent disability. In fact—this is an actual case--she serves no jail time and (after some months) she is reintegrated into her old social network.
Our judgments in these cases seem odd, even paradoxical to many moral philosophers. The action for which we are blaming seems to be the same in cases in which we blame lightly (if at all) and cases in which we blame quite harshly: driving under the influence and shooting with the intent to kill. But if the actions seem the same, how can the moral judgment differ? In particular, how can outcomes that seem to be a matter of luck make the difference? How can our assessment of a person’s goodness or badness—her moral worth--be a hostage to circumstance in this way? Isn’t our moral worth something that should, in some fundamental sense, depend entirely on us?
This problem, called the problem of Moral Luck, has received considerable attention in the ethics literature. This is partly because much (perhaps most) discussions of moral issues are driven by intuitions and these are cases in which our intuitions about cases seem to conflict with our intuition about a principle. Most people rather strongly feel that the murderer does deserve more blame than someone who merely fails in the attempt (even if they are spared this additional blame simply by virtue of their incompetence). Most people also blame those whose negligence injures far more than those whose negligence does not. And yet many people accept as intuitively obvious the principle that our moral evaluation of a person should not be a hostage to fortune. This problem is deeply troubling to many moral philosophers.
It is not just that this is a case of conflicting intuitions. God knows, conflicting intuitions are no novelty in moral philosophy. Rather it is deeply troubling because it threatens what I call “The Metaphysical Conception of Morality”. According to the Metaphysical Conception, there is a set of knowable moral standards binding on rational agents as such that is sufficient for the moral life. The term “Morality” is a proper name for this particular set of standards (as “London” is a proper name for a particular city). These standards provide a kind of metric for judging the rightness and wrongness of acts and the goodness and badness of people. They are the basis on which God would judge us on Judgement Day if there were a God. They have and need no point or purpose beyond that. Moral worth, on this view, is a very deep fact about persons. It is the most important fact. Our criteria for determining moral worth must reflect this. So it is disturbing that our actual judgments of moral worth seem not to be based on the standards by which God would judge us (were there a God) but rather on events beyond an agent’s control. This seems not only unreasonable but also incompatible with the idea that one of the main points of morality is to provide us with a metric for measuring the goodness of our wills or souls.
This problem is especially acute because there is an alternative conception that makes sense of our “intuitions” in the moral luck cases. I call this “the Instrumental Conception”. The Metaphysical Conception is at one end of a continuum, the Instrumental Conception at the other. According to the Instrumental Conception, there is no such thing as Morality. There are only moralities. Moralities are among the means by which we regulate our collective existence. Their point or purpose is to regulate our collective existence wisely. Very roughly, they do this by promoting and protecting reasonably valued ways of life (i.e., ways of life that realize and acceptably distribute reasonable values). Instead of tying judgments of blame to some deep fact about the person himself, Instrumentalists fix our standards for blaming in ways that promote our reasonable values. Blame is not regarded as a fitting response to some deep Moral aspect of a person; some Moral defect of will or soul. Roughly, it is a means by which we influence one another’s behavior. This is just the barest sketch but enough of a sketch to show that moral luck need not be a problem for Instrumental accounts. (As the reference to continua implies, there are also intermediate positions. For a lengthly exposition, see my Between Universalism and Skepticism, OUP, 1994).
If we conceive blame in this Instrumental way, our apparently inconsistent “intuitions” in the moral luck cases make perfectly good sense. The case for this is best made by contrasting our actual policy with a plausible Metaphysical strategy for dealing with moral luck. According to that strategy, our intuition that moral worth should not be a hostage to fortune should take precedence over our intuitions about blame in particular cases. On this view, failed attempts should be judged the same as successful ones and lucky negligence the same as unlucky negligence. Suppose we follow this policy, e.g., suppose that we blamed someone to the same degree for all cases of negligence involving equal risk of equally serious harm. We still need to decide how much to blame. Should we blame the one responsible for the deaths as little as we now blame the lucky one? In that case we would do very little to discourage negligence.
Should we, then, blame the lucky bus driver to the same degree as we now blame the one responsible for the deaths of twenty children? Think about it. Even very conscientious people have lapses of attention—how many times have you adjusted your radio in traffic or taken your eye off the road to chastise a child? How many times have you momentarily left a small child unattended? Are we to blame ourselves and be blamed by others as much for these things as we would were our negligence responsible for, e.g., the death of a child? Do we want to live in a cauldron of resentment and recrimination? Imagine what our emotional lives would be like under this suggestion.
How much blame, then, is appropriate? The Metaphysical conception has no way to answer this problem save by appealing to their intuitions (which diverge considerably on this question). The Instrumentalist insists that the point of blaming people for their negligence is to discourage the harms born of negligence. She may also regard blame as a healthy outlet for the anger and pain of the injured and as a means by which we collectively affirm our values. But she also wants to do this without drowning us in a torrent of guilt, blame, resentment and recrimination. Arguably, our current social practice achieves an acceptable balance. We blame to some degree for negligence per se, but much more strongly for negligence resulting in harm (the more harm the more blame). This means that those who are negligent put themselves at risk not only of causing harm but also of serious recrimination (from self and others). If this is defensible, it achieves an acceptable balance between deterring negligence and channeling negative emotions, on the one hand, and minimizing guilt, resentment and recrimination, on the other.
Our policy in relation to failed attempts can be explained and evaluated in the same way. Degrees of harm being equal, we blame people more for attempts to do wrong than we blame them for negligence. In general, attempts to do wrong are more likely to do harm (one almost always gets away with fiddling with one’s radio in traffic). This policy does not inundate us with excess resentment and recrimination because we don’t both try and fail so very often. Still, it makes sense to blame failed attempts less than we blame successful ones. Failed attempts produce less injury and hence less anger. So there is less need for outlets.
Like most matters of social policy, these issues are underdetermined by the evidence. Still, it is clear what counts as evidence for an Instrumentalist and sometimes the evidence is decisive (e.g., drunk driving is no longer the laughing matter it was thirty years ago). In any case, Instrumentalism explains our “intuitions” in the moral luck cases. They simply reflect our policies currently in place. Instrumentalism makes sense of these policies and provides us with a basis for arguing for and against them. The Metaphysical Moralist is faced with what she can only regard as our conflicting “intuitions” in these cases and has no principled basis for choosing between them. We are asked to peer Godlike into the souls of our neighbors and measure their moral worth on the bases of principles accessible to rational agents as such but there is no agreement on these principles.
A final note: what I am calling the Instrumental approach to this problem resembles at least certain Utilitarian approaches. Each evaluates our policies of blaming on the basis of how well they achieve our ends. But Instrumental theories are grounded in a different understanding of the nature and role of morality than at least many versions of utilitarianism and need not be vulnerable to the objections from justice that plague standard Utilitarian theories. In particular, an Instrumentalist can plausibly argue that justice itself is a reasonable value. But this is a topic for another article. (Although, for a detailed account of these matters, the reader is shamelessly referred to Chapters 5 and 6 of Between Universalism and Skepticism).