Money and Morality Essay

nones AND MORALITY Gifts of eternal verity in moments of the mundane By Cheryl Leis, PhD, vigilance Consultant/Practical Philosopher As inhabitants of this 21st century Western world, we each(prenominal) suck to vision with cash. We participate in the world of commerce as a inwardness to obtain those functions con placered necessities of life. gold plays the role of the most usu whollyy accepted means in this talent and getting from opposites. And the more than specie one has, the greater ones power to regulate the particulars of excerpt ones k straightawayledge and that of differents.We use notes to participate in the ex tack of products or services, individu anyy and corporately whether employed by or take an disposal. In some cases these organizations atomic number 18 publicly funded non-profits, and in other cases they atomic number 18 private, for-profit ventures. Money and object lessonity is a topic that has surfaced on many cause in my line of work. One such instance was during a weightlift with CBC TV to work on the development of a six-part case series titled Beautiful, Filthy Money and the Search for Soul. The title itself speaks to the uncertain nature of our responses to silver and its presence in our lives. As part of the contract, I appe ard as a guest on the panel, where I was asked to complete the sp ar-time activity sentence Money is Yes, what is gold? My response was Money is a cock for finding let out who we really are. What you do with currency, and how you live with silvers presence in your life, tells a lot intimately your values. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it A dollar is not value, nevertheless representative of value, and, at last, of moral values. This is obviously pretty close to what Buddhists believe about capital. There are clock when many of us are faced with an imbalance amid money and morality and find ourselves asking in some form or another How we discount put Money and Morality in the similar sentence and not end up with an ethical contradiction? The repugnance of these Mwords is an inherent, yet complex part of macrocosm benevolent. And it is only when we face the legality of their revulsion that we can come to understand the utter necessity of their coexistence.The quarrel stems from the fact that thither is twain a eldritch side and a material side to our situation. When we dont bring the phantasmal side into talks with the material side, problems result. This is genuine for individuals as well as organizations. conceptualize about Enron what do you think their way of dealing with money says about the moral values that guided senior management there? from each one of us could turn the call into question on our suffer lives. Money, in and of itself, is torpid. It has no intrinsic value, but is a mere yardstick of value, a means of measuring or comparing in the exchange of one subject for another.Money belongs to the class of great ment al inventions, known as 1 measures Measures of distance the meter or mile span the gulf amongst two things or places yet are not themselves things or places. Similarly, money brings things of contrary value together without nice one or the other. Because money is merely a way of measuring, it is in itself, therefore, not real. Thus, money is both neutral and unreal. Nevertheless, we often seem oblivious to this unreal nature of money and equate it with things that are very real, wish our own values.But if, as Aristotle says, all things that are exchanged 2 must be somehow comparable, what are we saying about our knowledge of reality when we measure our sense of self-worth by our net-worth? While money is a measure of value, that value can change depending on what the market is get outing to bear. Its rather similar to the point of the emperors new clothes. As soon as we go something no longer has value, our whole perception of it changes. This change in the perception of the value of something affects humans psychologically and emotionally. So when the value of stocks falls with the floor, people react in fear or paranoia.Conversely, when stocks rise similar crazy, there is frenzy fuelled by hope and even greed. What thence, motivates our relationship with money? With what intention do we strive to accumulate wealth? Do we make what our relationship with money says about our values? Money Obsessing For some the question of ethics and money leads down another path. In Is Lucre sincerely 3 that Filthy? Craig Cox, executive editor of Utne magazine, reflects on his own journey from disdain for the almighty dollar as a child of the 60s to becoming of all things bourgeios, earning money and learning to manage it.There was the example by a leading voice of the counter-culture of the day, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote in Howl of burning all his money in a wastebasket. Times have changed even for Ginsberg, 1. David Appelbaum, Money and the City, Parabola , Volume XVI, No. 1 (Spring 1991), 40. 2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 18. 3. Craig Cox, Is Lucre Really That Filthy, Utne commentator (July-August, 2003), 63. who of course, sold his papers to Stanford University for 4 nearly a million bucks. The irony, points out Cox, is that social justice activists who want to eschew wealth in drift to bring about social justice and tending the poor are in fact helping people to attain the very thing they, the activists, abhor a comfortable life. He sets up an interesting plight when he insists that If you insist on embracing poverty in your own life, how do you hold out a credible advocate for folks who would do almost anything to 5 escape it? True enough, there are those who become enslaved to money in their attachment to mere accumulation of more and more capital.However, there are similarly those who are enslaved to money in their stern avoidance of it. Both are obsessive behaviours obsessed with having money or obsessed with avoiding it want the alcoholics family that is obsessed with avoiding alcohol. In uncomplete case is money at the service of the individual as a means of providing for the necessities of life rather, the individual is at the service of money. Our emotional responses to this neutral thing called money often lead to an automatic attachment of value-statements.We picnic on to labels such as evil, bewitching, aweinspiring, or filthy lucre. Respect for money is replaced with either worship or condemnation of it. Emotional and value-laden responses are likewise evident when conversation turns towards money and self-righteous posturing rises very pronto to the surface with comments like Well, I dont soil my hold with money. Or I certainly dont 4. Ibid 5. Ibid work for money. A lot of judging of others happens Hes just in it for the money. Or Shed do anything for money. This judgmental posturing also leads to ideological positioning.Anyone who focuses on making money is immediat ely dubbed a capitalist and conversely, anyone who speaks of communal manduction is dubbed a socialist. Subtleties are lost and conversation ends right there. No dialogue is possible. We move from love of money to love of ideology, where anyone who thinks differently than I do about money is immediately evil. Spiritual Moments of Mundane Existence To pronounce from one side or the other is to forget that we inherently have one foot in heaven and one foot in the mud of the earth below. The challenge is to live in both at the same time. accompaniment as a human being means learning to deal with money whether one has a lot or a small(a) issuings not. It will do us no good to merely take a spiritual life unless we are living equally and simultaneously in the material world. Christians are exhorted to remember that even Bishops, or spiritual leaders, are told to balance both. For if someone does not know how to manage his own contributehold, how can he take care of Gods church s ervice? (1 Timothy 35) A life of wholeness, or one in which the spiritual and the material are in balance, guarantees freedom from distortion.Yet the rent for wholeness is also at the heart of the contradiction. The spiritual and the material are of entirely different natures. Not only must they live in the same world, both the spiritual and the human sides of our existence must also have 2 their own identity and remain in ample relationship with each other. We have to work at accepting this incompatibility for what it is. These are separate move of who we are and of our daily existence. These separate parts are in a dynamic relationship one to the other, like notes in a beautiful song you might have concurrence, but you still have separate notes.If they are all the same note, there is not harmony, there is unison. Harmony has tension. It is beautiful because of the tension. Unison is nice, but harmony is richer. Morality And Business Just as it will not help us on an individua l level to focus only on the one side of our nature at the expense of the other, likewise it will not help to divide our culture into the spirit-lead and others. It reminds me of a story I recently heard Two men met for the first time, in of all places, a church on a Sunday morning. The one asked the other So what do you do? To which the second responded I work as a director of XYZ division of a employment. Youre in crinkle? quipped the first, who was a teacher, Oh thats too bad. The work of the businessman was seen as inherently less worthy. How far could the conversation go after that? It is a serious chasm. One finds a classic case of a religious-affiliated venture that refused to certify that it must run itself like a business. After decades of mismanagement, the publishing house cried out to its constituency to get it out of a multi-million debt.One former shape up member was even quoted in a church publication as saying that this was seen as a church venture, not a bus iness venture. The mistake lay in this eitheror posture. There was no acknowledgment that gifts and talents and skills of different sorts were exacted. The disdain goes the other way too. One has only to think of the now infamous corporations like Enron or Livenet, where the situation is merely the reverse a business enterprise that lacks spiritual sense, and results in moral bankruptcy.If our moral principles add us the framework within which we operate and the ability to continue operate depends upon financial viability, then legality is automatically lost for any organization when either half of the morality and money equation is lost. Balancing the par Only when we pay oversight and only when we come to name the true(a) place and role we have waiveed money in our lives, only then can we possibly hope to reach a deeper understanding of how authoritative a balance between the material and the spiritual is.This deeper understanding whitethorn only come in flashes, only fl eetingly. Yet the truth that is understand in an instant opens us up to the truth of our everyday actions and existence. In other words, we must become conscious, we must become aware of our human condition this life lived in a dynamic balance between the spiritual and the material and be attentive to both. But instead of giving the right amount of anxiety to those mundane and material aspects of life like taxes and monetary demands put upon us, we often get caught in a deviate against money.We would rather point fingers and condemn in broad strokes than engage in dialogue of particular money matters. We would rather alienate than seek to understand. sort of of casting judgment or pretending we, personally, are above being affected by money, we need to face our human situation and recognize we live in two worlds simultaneously. Maybe then we would do a better job of living in both. If great truth does not enter into our relation to money, it cannot 6 enter our lives. And if w e do not allow ourselves to face that truth, the negative aspects of our relationship to money will sneak up on us unawares.Bad debts, overdue bills, or an empty fridge will suddenly demand so much of our human attention that we will have no energy left to focus on matters of the spirit. Undeniably, it can be a challenge to live out our moral principles in the marketplace it is inherent in the challenge of being spiritual and human at the same time. Not giving enough attention to either the spiritual or the material, on an individual or an organizational level, leads to bankruptcy, whether moral or financial. In his book, Business and the Buddha, Dr. Lloyd Field states, greed is a choice. We can choose to allow our insatiable desires to form our intentions or we can choose to recognize where our intentions are ultimately leading us. It is not money or wealth or even the capitalist system that is the problem, he argues. Buddhists regard wealth as neither bad nor negative. Rather, th e problem sits seemingly with us, human beings, and the intentions which we allow to motivate our thoughts, our emotions and our actions. It cannot be stated any clearer than utter in this book we are exhorted to continually make the connection between money and human values. And then the question that really gets to the heart of the matter What price do we put on our ethics? We will need to move past our biases and disdain for those whom we consider to be on the other side of the money and morality equation and allow moments of eternal truth and even grace to infiltrate our discussions and our questions. When all gifts and skills are welcome and when integrity is our priority, then there will be the possibility of a true and dynamic relationship between money matters and morality. 6. Needleman, 265.