Stefan Skrimshire
Of the debates to have emerged over the Occupy London protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral, one of the more interesting has been to question the relationship between capital and ethics. But consider just how broadly the terms of this debate have been framed. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, has asked Ken Costa, a senior investment banker turned church advisor, to “reconnect the financial with the ethical”[i]. The Telegraph has interpreted this as a search for the holy grail of “ethical capitalism”[ii] whilst church leaders have taken the opportunity to accuse bankers themselves as losing their “moral moorings”[iii]. BBC Radio 4 has couched the debate variously as “can capitalism have a heart?”[iv]; “what would Jesus do? (in response to the crisis)” and whether there was a “moral framework” to financial markets. Meanwhile, the camp that started the whole thing off is asking for a debate that will lead to “structural change towards authentic global equality”[v].
I cite all of these expressions because they are not the same, and their differences (as well as their connections) are important to the study of ethics. Critiquing the moral code of banking sector workers (an extremely wide range of roles) is not the same thing as questioning the very concept of deregulated financial markets. One is about professional conduct whilst another is about the value foundations of capitalism. Both discussions could have a place at the same table, one could argue, but an inevitable problem will be the parameters of debate and the answers we could expect.
The cheap criticism levelled at the protesters for not having drafted a global economic manifesto after 3 weeks of chatting in the cold, is therefore misplaced for two reasons. For one, the nature of the problems they are raising may be such that an alternative simply isn’t conceivable within the existing framework by which everybody understands ‘the market’: starting a cultural shift may simply involve, at first, a rejection of the values that underpin the current system. Secondly, the main problem is not that the protest camp has invited diffuse ideological positions (it might legitimately claim to have had Tory MPs, Cathedral deans and Marxist students singing from the same hymn sheet at least temporarily), but rather that it is asking several very different questions simultaneously. This produces, not ‘no alternatives’ but too many alternatives: from greater government regulation, to bankers bonus capping, to the Tobin Tax, to socialist revolution. And all this underlines is that ethics works at every level of thinking in matters economic: from the everyday to the systemic. Inviting a ‘debate about ethics and banking’ should anticipate nothing less.
Are all debates equal, however? We should be on our guard not to allow the emerging ‘public dialogue’ (whatever that means) over ethics and capital to be co-opted by only one interpretation and diagnosis of ‘the problem’. An opportunity to revisit ethical foundations that underpin a deeply entrenched ideology (free markets) must not be hijacked by those who would have us discuss only whether or not to reduce bankers’ Christmas bonuses: a pathway between the two by asking some more fundamental questions about social values would be far better.
Since it has kicked off the most high profile of such debates, the Church of England (or any other denomination for that matter) must be similarly on its guard. For whilst it has started making welcome noises about values and reconnecting economic activity with the people for whom such activity matters[vi], such discourse also operates on a number of levels, from the mundane to the metaphysical. Asking whether banking can have ‘a heart’, ‘a spirituality’, ‘an ethics’ or a ‘moral mooring’ should at least admit the profound dimension of such questions as well as the fluffy ones. In doing so we would need to admit the possibility that if capitalism does have an undergirding morality, it may be one we should reject. For as contemporary theologians have reminded us, capitalism itself, at least in its early articulations as the outworking of divine providence, emerged as a form of faith in the future and would never have had the success it did without the religious and moral structures of the societies that developed it. Are those structures the ones we want to maintain? If faith in capital, much like Nietzsche’s God, was finally to die, what values would replace it?[vii] You won’t hear these questions on Newsnight or Moneybox, but they have an equal right to the domain of ethics and the debates taking place on the streets of London.
[i] Ken Costa,
The Telegraph 5 Nov 2011.
[ii] ibid
[iii] Ibid
[iv] BBC Radio 4, 11th Nov 2011
[v] http://occupylondon.org.uk/
[vi] See St Paul’s Institute, Value and Values: Perception of Ethics in the City Today (2011).
[vii] The insight belongs to Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002).
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