The tension becomes especially clear when bourgeois morality is faced with widespread, stark, and damaging immoral conduct like the sort we saw in the lead up to the financial crisis. It demands reform and yet since ethics is a matter of the heart, it restricts itself to individual conscience, persuasion, and proselytizing, which inevitably prove impotent.
“The Ethicist” captures this very tension: it rightly acknowledges that we’re living in a morally anxious time, but at the same time it quarantines that anxiety to light, front-of-the-book material. It channels such reflection inward, towards the personal and the banal. And even on the rare occasions when larger social issues are addressed, it becomes a matter of how we feel and what we believe about such issues (“at least I know this is wrong!”) rather than a matter of what collectively is to be done.
“The Ethicist” is also instructive — not in the way it purports to be, but because it assumes a posture similar to that taken by our elites. When they identify political and social problems as moral, they interpret that to suggest that reform will come from each individual looking into his own heart. From a political standpoint, this should be unsurprising. Since elites are, by definition, those who are rewarded under the status quo, they are the ones who tend to be most eager to persuade the public that widespread evil and bad conduct are moral issues rather than political ones. It’s never about failing institutions, political economies, or social conditions. No, it’s about individuals making bad choices and about the public tolerating (read: tacitly consenting) such behavior. The prescription is not political change — we of course have the best system possible — but calls for everyone to look within.
Consider our leaders’ stunningly lame responses to the massive fraud at the heart of the financial crisis. First there was President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner insisting (absurdly) that though there was plenty of greed, stupidity and immoral conduct behind the meltdown, no one broke any laws. Not only is this claim false, but it also condemns their subsequent political proposals. Just a decade prior, after Enron, when it became clear that some conduct by company executives may have been deeply immoral but not criminal, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which, among other things, required CEOs to certify to the accuracy of their companies’ financial statements. By contrast, despite grossly immoral conduct prior to the 2008 crash, Dodd-Frank focused on making the banks and the economic system more stable and less susceptible to meltdowns and bypassed criminalizing such conduct. Surely Sarbanes-Oxley criminalized the recent conduct of many executives, from Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld on down, but the Obama administration hasn’t pursued them. It seems Congress and the White House believed that vague condemnation and financial settlements (without admission of wrongdoing) sufficed.
The commentariat has chosen to echo our political leaders, despite the obvious inadequacy of their reactions. Take, for instance, Fareed Zakaria’s June 2009 Newsweek apologia on the financial crisis, “The Capitalist Manifesto.” (Yes, the cover even embossed the title on a red booklet.) His main thrust? Not a change of the system — in several years, he predicted, we’ll want more capitalism, not less. The revolution we need lies within:
Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system — capitalism, socialism, whatever — can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.
What is particularly noteworthy about Zakaria’s thoughts here is that they seem blind to the possibility that institutions steer people as much as people steer institutions. American capitalism, as William K. Black points out, is suffering from a Gresham’s dynamic, in which the profitability of immoral behavior is driving out moral behavior in the competitive market, thanks to lack of regulatory oversight and the inordinate influence of money." -David V. Johnson, Jacobin
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