WUCWO
Panel at General Assembly
SOWING HOPE FOR THE COMMON GOOD:
MONEY, LOVE & VIRTUE*
FATIMA, OCT. 23, 2014
MARIA JOSÉ PEREIRA MELO ANTUNES
* The talk is based on a book-in-progress
Challenges
• Economic
• Ecological
• Social
• Political
• We live in difficult times!
•
•
Crisis?
Or opportunity for reform?
Interconnecting Levels of Perception
Consciousness
Systems
Problems
Ideology behind Financial Crisis
Wealth maximization
Purpose
For self (self-interest)
leads to
Benefits for all (invisible hand)
Result
Government’s role: to keep the economic wheel turning
Aristotle
• Oiko-nomus: home management - economy
• Market: place of exchange – money
• Harmony in the city state
• A life well lived > eudaimonia or happiness
• Required
• Philia: friendship, a form of love
• Virtue
•
Justice, the virtue that permits all other virtues
• Proportionality or balance
Economy & Money
• Economy
• Management of material needs in society
•
Focus cannot be just on money, but also on the person at the
centre of the economy
• Money
• Life-blood of society
•
•
•
Franciscan monks
Quesnay: economist and physician to Louis XV
Brings nutrients, but can also carry toxins
Civil Economy
• Civil economy in society: the common good
• Reciprocal relations
• 2 foundations for economic markets as expressions
of virtue
•
•
Justice
Humanity
• Essential preconditions
• Reciprocal confidence in the other
• Public trust in the system
• Mutual assistance
•
Friendship or fraternity
Virtue in Markets?
• Prevailing theory: setting of prices
• Self-interest alone required
• Choice and preference will set the price
• Contract w/o moral content: no virtue necessary
• Private incentive, not mutual assistance - no sacrifice needed
• Virtue in markets (Bruni & Sugden)
• Trust and reciprocity (no sacrifice implied)
• Market allows for dignity (humanity)
•
•
No need to beg
Fairness in exchange (justice)
•
Each party must reap benefit
The Person in Society
• Who is the person?
•
•
Material: the ego (primal needs)
Spiritual/cultural: capable of generosity
Money,
Love &
Virtue
• The person in society
•
•
Each person as part of the whole (contributes & receives)
Interdependent (impacting on each other and the whole)
• The common good
•
•
Not just collection of public goods (commodities and services)
But also the sum of the civic conscience
•
•
Liberty as a mirror image of the other
Sense of what is right
Competition vs. Cooperation
• Darwin’s survival of the fittest: competition
• Later Darwin: cooperation
•
Humans possess “social instinct...becoming more tender and
more widely diffused until they are extended to all sentient
beings.”
•
“[as] soon as this virtue is honored and practiced by some few of
us it spreads through instruction and example to the young and
eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion”
Survival is as much about cooperation, symbiosis (living
together) and reciprocity
Ontology of Love
• Empathy
• “Entering the private world of the other and...moving in it
delicately without making judgments” (Carl Rogers)
•
“The glue that makes social life possible” (Martin Hofmann)
• Compassion
• Sharing in another’s suffering
• Love
• Not simply emotion
• Moving power of life
•
•
Drive towards unity > harmony/happiness
Christian commandment of love
Financial Stewardship
• Government
•
Safeguard financial system and control risk
•
•
Financial legislation
Supervision
• Institution
•
•
Solvency
Risk management
• Human
• Proper understanding of risks: bank and consumer (not buyer beware)
• Does it not involve more than this?
Finance & the Good Society
• Finance
•
Permits constructive investment: Long Term focus
•
•
Better future
Involves stewardship of assets
•
Security
Finance is fides or trust and a means (life-blood) to an end (the
common good)
• Love and virtue required to work alongside money
Building the future
• Education
• Reflection
• Virtue derived from within
• From love
• Not simply from rules
• Human Community
Money, Love & Virtue
•
Love
Money
Virtue (or lack thereof)
Money, Love & Virtue
•
Love
Money
Virtue
Love
• “Goodness tends to spread.” (Pope Francis)
Money
Virtue
WUCWO
Panel at General Assembly
SOWING HOPE FOR THE COMMON GOOD:
MONEY, LOVE & VIRTUE*
FATIMA, OCT. 23, 2014
MARIA JOSÉ PEREIRA MELO ANTUNES
* The talk is based on a book-in-progress