Moral vacuum

Brown: Gordon Brown hasn't only just discovered the importance of morality. The UK prime minister said “markets need morals” when he addressed the congregation of St Paul’s Cathedral in London back in March. This week he repeated the idea in his keynote address to his party’s annual conference.

But Brown doesn’t seem keen to use the vocabulary of virtue outside these groups of the faithful. If he was asking G20 leaders to think and talk in such terms, he has been almost as unsuccessful as with UK voters.

In the world leaders’ two most recent communiqués, there were only three instances of what could be read as the terminology of moral value. True, one would not expect the 201 instances found in the recent papal encyclical on social matters. But it seems a bit lame for the G20 to have made so few references to what is good, bad, ethical, moral or of value in this of all years.

 

It is hard for economists to talk about morality and markets. In their world, all market participants are assumed to be self-interested rather than interested in virtue. From such a starting point, it’s difficult to conceive of finance having rights and wrongs.

But the economists on the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress made a helpful quasi-ethical suggestion — that the financial sector should be considered as an economic cost, not an output. Pope Benedict XVI took a slightly different approach, saying that finance should be “an instrument directed towards improved wealth creation and development.” He argues that the industry moved away from this good purpose to serve less virtuous aims in recent years.

By contrast, Brown’s contribution to the debate is narrow and populist. He focuses on bankers' greedy desire for unjustly high rewards. A thorough moral analysis would cast the net of blame much wider: everyone who strives for unmerited financial gains is culpable. The problem is that to say so would be political suicide. Few politicians will be willing to name and shame homeowners searching for capital gains and consumers who spend more than they earn. But they should screw up the virtue of courage. It will be hard to get finance right without paying much more attention to rights and wrongs.