Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

Is it a crisis of morality?
Moral condemnations were swift to follow. In the early days of the crisis, bankers and
business executives were fiercely criticised, in terms of ‘greed’ and ‘irresponsibility’. If the
system had failed, it was held to be greed and irresponsibility that had built the system,
beyond either the power or the will of governments to control. At the World Economic
Forum in Davos, in January 2009, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao blamed the banks for
their ‘blind pursuit of profit’ and ‘lack of self-discipline’, but also spoke of ‘the failure of
financial supervision and regulation’. Evidently he referred primarily to the USA, since
China had an estimated $1.95 trillion invested in dollar assets such as US Treasury Bonds. 3
Wen Jiabao was not wrong. At the level of social morality and social psychology, it is
hard to overlook the element of greed in the development of the crisis: that is, the search
not only for reasonable profit as the legitimate reward of a company’s provision of goods
and services, but for maximum profit. Old ‘common sense’ business maxims (e.g. that
high profit margins are normally an indicator of high risk) were ignored in favour of a
glorification of the rare skills of the fund managers who exploited the intricate possibilities
of a system that only their ilk could identify. In the midst of this euphoria, to allow the
financial sector’s profit margins to fall to ‘reasonable’ levels would count as entrepreneurial
failure. 4 The trap was plausible because this form of ‘greed’ is part of capitalist culture, the
signifiers of worth being precisely profit and growth. It may be remembered that greed as
one of the classic ‘seven deadly sins’ is defined precisely by excess. The question cannot be
evaded: can liberal capitalism accept the concept of excess?
But fear (a demoralising form of consciousness that impedes both judgement and selfgiving,
oddly not counted among the traditional seven deadly sins) also played its part. If
greed drives the growth phase of an economic bubble, fear drives the overreaction. Under
pressure of fear, a cycle of excessive growth is not reversed gently, by restraint or even by
moderate austerity. Instead, the bubble ‘bursts’ – instantly seems to have been an illusion.
The mass selling of shares in some company drives the price down so rapidly that it does
not restore necessary equilibrium, but endangers the very existence of what had admittedly
been overvalued. Pessimism is as contagious, as irrational, as optimism: both irrationalities
project some current trend indefinitely, as if the trend were irreversible and determined.
A variant on this kind of moral judgement is to say that the crisis has demonstrated a
truth that we had hidden from ourselves for too long, because we have wanted to hide it. In
other words, the moral failing is that of blindness, or what the theologian Bernard Lonergan
calls ‘bias’: that block or distortion of intellect that derives from individual or group
3 BBC, 29th January, 2009.
4 On profit and the dangers of ‘short-termism’, cf. Benedikt XVI (2009), § 32.
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