In his most recent offering in the Asia Times, Spengler discusses a free market without morality and praises Cardinal Ratzinger’s insight, “first, that morality cannot be effective without competent economics, and secondly, that economics cannot dispense with morality by trusting to the supposedly automatic workings of the marketplace”. In Ratzinger’s words:
A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralizing. As such it is the antithesis of morality. A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. Therefore it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals. Only in this way will its knowledge be both politically practicable and socially tolerable.
Ratzinger rebels against the notion ‘that the market is incompatible with ethics because voluntary “moral” actions contradict market rules and drive the moralizing entrepreneur out of the game.’ This idea, which he apparently links to Adam Smith, views the marketplace itself as determinative without any reference to exterior moral impositions and that the market will, according to its own rules, create the good. I have not read Ratzinger’s essay (but I certainly shall). I will therefore take issue with the fragments that Spengler has provided and with his analysis.
Like Wretchard, I doubt that people look to the market itself as ‘the oracle of morality.’ And I think that both Ratzinger and Spengler do Adam Smith an injustice. Smith, after all, was preeminently a moral philosopher, not an economist. While Smith published one edition of The Wealth of Nations he went through numerous editions of A Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was morality that occupied most of his attention.
Smith’s intellectual antecedents were also concerned with morality. As Alejandro Chafuen has written in Faith and Liberty, The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics, it was precisely these scholars who created the building blocks of the free market using the scholastic method, which was:
a rational investigation of every relevant problem in liberal arts, philosophy, theology, medicine, and law, examined from opposing points of view, in order to reach an intelligent, scientific solution that would be consistent with accepted authorities, known facts, human reason and Christian faith.
Ideas of private property, public finance, monetary theory, commerce, pricing theory, distributive justice, wages and profits were all discussed by the scholastics from the perspective of reason and Christian morality. Smith is the lineal descendant of these thinkers. Smith’s view of the market was never divorced from considerations of morality and I rather doubt that Smith ever viewed markets in such isolation as Ratzinger seems to suppose. For Smith, the market was composed of individual moral actors and when the actors forget their lines, the play goes awry.
And herein lies the problem: we are actors who have forgotten our lines. Worse, we think we can ad lib without the discipline of morality and survive. And that discipline is called virtue – something that we naturally resist.
So, the problem with contemporary markets is directly related to loss of virtue, not the market itself. And the market can only be as good as we are ourselves. For an exposition of the nature of virtue, nothing is better than the Catholic Catechism:
IN BRIEF
1833 Virtue is a habitual and firm disposition to do good.
1834 The human virtues are stable dispositions of the intellect and the will that govern our acts, order our passions, and guide our conduct in accordance with reason and faith. They can be grouped around the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
1835 Prudence disposes the practical reason to discern, in every circumstance, our true good and to choose the right means for achieving it.
1836 Justice consists in the firm and constant will to give God and neighbor their due.
1837 Fortitude ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good.
1838 Temperance moderates the attraction of the pleasures of the senses and provides balance in the use of created goods.
1839 The moral virtues grow through education, deliberate acts, and perseverance in struggle. Divine grace purifies and elevates them.
1840 The theological virtues dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have God for their origin, their motive, and their object – God known by faith, God hoped in and loved for his own sake.
1841 There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. They inform all the moral virtues and give life to them.
1842 By faith, we believe in God and believe all that he has revealed to us and that Holy Church proposes for our belief.
1843 By hope we desire, and with steadfast trust await from God, eternal life and the graces to merit it.
1844 By charity, we love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves for love of God. Charity, the form of all the virtues, “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col 3:14).
1845 The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon Christians are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.
