Are other people allowed to have more than you and still be moral people?

slant

slant

Capitalist pig
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Simple question:

Are other people allowed to have more than you in the sense of wealth or privilege and still be moral people? Can you associate with those who have more than you, or is it too much of a problem? Where do you draw the line between somebody having an ok amount more than you or having too much to see them as moral people?


I know the question is implying a certain dynamic, feel free to dispute it, too. My observation is that people do associate morality with having less or not enough and there is a level of having "more" that is unacceptable to most people. I would like to explore that.
 
slant said:
What does it depend on? What ways of getting more is not moral?
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Screwing people over, more or less.

And then when they get money, are they greedy fucks, or do they help others in some way? Or, are they just neutral people who sometimes do good things and sometimes make poor decisions, which is how most people are.

We could go down a rabbit hole about what screwing people over means because a large percentage of people who make a lot of money are screwing people over in some way somewhere down the line, but I'm choosing not to in this case just to illustrate that choices make us moral or immoral, not money.
 
slant said:
Are other people allowed to have more than you in the sense of wealth or privilege and still be moral people?
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I think these two things are very complex and ramified, so there isn't a straight vector between them. Of course there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wealth ethically as long as it's honestly gained and justly deployed. For me, it's a bit like asking if someone can be cleverer, or stronger, or happier than you and still be a moral person. Wealth can be obtained immorally though, and it can corrupt, but that is not a feature of the wealth possessed but the character of its owner.

The situation is reflexive as well - envy is a poisonous moral fault that can destroy people's lives, but it's not the wealth we envy that causes it but our personal response to it. That's very different of course from championing a response to wealth used by someone in an overtly immoral and oppressive way.

There is a problem of relativity in the question too - like, who is asking? If it were someone living in a poor state in Africa on $5 income per month, then pretty well everyone in the developed world would be wealthy, and so immoral, in comparison. That's food for thought - and raises a lot of further questions about the morality of the world order.

slant said:
Can you associate with those who have more than you, or is it too much of a problem?
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I can, but with many qualifications. I don't feel ethically obliged to avoid associating with them, but many of them are not comfortable company for me. They may be of a different social class, or have different social attitudes, and they can trivially engage in social activities that are beyond my financial resources. But I do associate with lovely people quite happily who I subsequently have discovered are pretty wealthy, but it wasn't obvious until I'd known them for quite a while. I would tend to avoid someone who I knew had become wealthy through what I felt were unethical means.

slant said:
Where do you draw the line between somebody having an ok amount more than you or having too much to see them as moral people?
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I don't draw any such line myself. It's more about their character than how much wealth they've got. To give some extremes, a young guy from a poor family who is discovered and becomes a football star doesn't suddenly become immoral because he's suddenly very rich, though it might well go to his head and he may fall into 'sin'. It's the same for lottery winners - someone in the UK has just won over £190 Million, and good luck to them. It's what they do with it, not it's possession that determines the right and wrong like @Asa says.
 
I'm allowed, yes.
Especially after I win that MegaMillions on Friday.
 
slant said:
Are other people allowed to have more than you in the sense of wealth or privilege and still be moral people?
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Inasmuch as I don’t think people are subject to moral judgment—or at least I don’t think that way—the question isn’t really relevant. I prefer to consider actions.

slant said:
Can you associate with those who have more than you, or is it too much of a problem?
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Sure, but it must be said that there is a point where one has so much less than others that they will choose not to associate with you.

A big part of that is the meritocracy myth which says people are poor for reason of not deserving more on account of their poor moral character.

slant said:
Where do you draw the line between somebody having an ok amount more than you or having too much to see them as moral people?
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I don’t.

Also, the economic system in which I participate is predicated on the exploitation of the peoples and resources of the Global South.

So even the little I have is dirty. Who am I to judge? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can say a person’s gains are this way or that, and my opinion means fuckall and is just another arrogant stance of know-better-than.

Let’s go this way instead: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.

It’s All Rotten,
Ian
 
Interesting, thank you all for the responses. I was raised with the idea that the more in poverty you are and the less you have the more moral you are. My mother would often use the quote that the meek will inherit the earth, reference Jesus being poor and hanging out with poor people or admonishing wealth.

I also have had difficulties associating with people outside of my socioeconomic class. There was a lot of anger/blame placed on anyone not living in poverty like myself and my family. Basically if you are not struggling to survive you are privileged and obviously evil. If you weren't, you would give up everything you had to poor people effectively becoming poor yourself. Nobody deserves to not live in poverty if even a single person lives in poverty . It is shameful to have, nobody can deserve wealth, but nobody deserves poverty so I'm not sure what the solution was.

So I guess I just have had an extreme world view, lol. I found a lot of people who also felt the same way.
 
slant said:
Interesting, thank you all for the responses. I was raised with the idea that the more in poverty you are and the less you have the more moral you are. My mother would often use the quote that the meek will inherit the earth, reference Jesus being poor and hanging out with poor people or admonishing wealth.
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I don't think Jesus saw poverty as intrinsically virtuous and wealth as intrinsically immoral. It's rather that wealth is a very great distraction and pursuit of it can very easily displace a seeking for God and what is good. In his times, the majority of people were very poor and only a small number were wealthy. The wealthy Jewish people controlled the Jewish religion of his day, and used it to exclude ordinary folk from full participation in their faith - so they were wealthy not just in terms of money, but in terms of religious opportunity and political power. He used his strongest language in condemning them - but very much for the way that they made religious virtue only possible for the rich rather than for the wealth itself, a terrible distortion of the true meaning of their religion.

Poverty too can lead us into vice of course - this scene has always moved me. The film is a surprising contrast of humour and deep pathos.

There's a difference between being poor through circumstance and actually choosing poverty. There's no virtue in extreme poverty in an otherwise rich society, only a condemnation of that society if it doesn't strive to eliminate it. Actually choosing to be poor can bring great virtue, but it can also mean you become a burden on other people who have to pay in some way for your livelihood and that's not a virtue at all.

It's all so complicated. Personally I think the way for me is to live the life I'm given to the best of my ability and conscience, and not to look too hard at what other's have if they are better off than me, unless I see them using their wealth in unjust ways. Even then, it would be a matter of responding to the action not judging them as a person - that's a matter between them and God, or whatever star guides their inner lives.
 
I don't consider a persons material possessions as part of any evaluation on their morality.

A thief can have continuous poor returns for his efforts while a model citizen can have bags of money and vice versa. From a biblical point of view, it is more the love of money than money itself that gets most people into trouble.

Assumptions and generalisations rarely ever make a good combination when forming world views and opinions.

Although I have always found the word privilege interesting, even before it became a popular word to kick around by the masses.
 
Billionaires are immoral. They can only amass that amount of wealth through exploitation of working people. Some millionaires are immoral like this as well.

However, the real issue is the economic system. Capitalism is destroying the environment and gives people the choice of either being taken advantage of or starving. Nobody seems willing to entertain the possibility of an alternative though.
 
I love this thread idea. The title is outrageous, but I think it expresses a thought that most people have had at one time or another.

It is obvious (to me, anyway) that there are some people who are wealthy who did nothing to deserve it: People whose wealth came from exploiting people with less power than them, or people who simply got lucky. I think that most people object to this kind of "needless" material inequality, although there is room for disagreement about whether you describe those people's choice to hold onto their wealth as a moral failure.

But the question at hand primes us to think about relative wealth: Those who "have more than" me. To be perfectly honest, I think that I work harder than most of the people I know, and if we take it as axiomatic that hard work should correlate with wealth (*), then I could muster a bit of moral outrage against those who both have more than me and work less hard (and there are plenty of those people!).

(For the rest of the post, let's use the term "hard work" as though it has an unambiguous definition, with the understanding that people can disagree about which kinds of work are hardest and whether/how someone's psychological/physical capabilities should factor into the calculation. The thrust of my argument is that the moral situation is complex, so allowing the definition of hard work to vary will only introduce more complexity, thereby strengthening my point. And you can substitute "hard work" for "moral virtue" if you want a more expansive definition.)

I'm not sure I am prepared to accept what would be required of me morally if I were really to accept the axiom (*). For starters, when I speak about wealth relative to amount worked, I am thinking within my own Western framework, but the truth is that there are people in impoverished countries who work just as hard as me for pennies. I don't believe that morality changes just because someone lives in a different country with a smaller GDP, so if I sign up for the idea that wealth should correlate with work, then I am pretty sure I would come out as a loser in the final analysis.

Also, those who say "wealth is granted to those who work hard" (plus those who accept risk, those who make great inventions, etc—there are other clauses we can tack on here) often end it there, without explaining exactly how much wealth should be granted for the marginal unit of work. For example, if a hardworking CEO pulling 80-hour workweeks took home four times as much money as a part-time cashier working 20-hour work weeks, this is hard to call immoral: it's just proportions. Even if the CEO were making eight times as much, we could say she deserves the extra pay because she probably had to take out student loans to get to where she is, she is at greater reputational risk if the company fails, etc. But in the real world, we routinely observe income differences of fifty- or a hundredfold. That extreme of a gap is pretty hard to attribute to hard work or moral desert, no? Not to mention the fact that the cashier may be doing all kinds of taxing nonrenumerative work by acting as a caretaker, volunteering somewhere, dealing with a disability, etc.

In summary, there is probably a limit to how much money people can earn and still have their wealth be morally justified. But I am not prepared to say that the wealthy are specifically, morally culpable for their wealth. While it would be extra morally good of them to give their wealth away, the mere fact that they are wealthy isn't (always) a sin; rather, it is a failure of our society to reward people fairly for their labor. So, wealth is a moral issue, but an issue that emerges in the context of society rather than a particular wicked act you can always attribute to individual wealthy people.
 
slant said:
I was raised with the idea that the more in poverty you are and the less you have the more moral you are. My mother would often use the quote that the meek will inherit the earth, reference Jesus being poor and hanging out with poor people or admonishing wealth.
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I wasn't raised with this idea, but became steeped in it during my evangelical phase, plus lots of time hanging out with woke millennials. While lots of people reject the strict notion that wealth itself is always evil (and I do think that Jesus's views were pretty close to this strict notion: camel/eye of needle, etc.), I think that most people believe in what we might call the "statistical version" of "meek shall inherit the earth": Namely, that the most viable and common paths to wealth in our society demand some degree of aggressive self-promotion and selfishness. And while it's not always the case that wealthy people are narcissists, narcissism, selfishness, and cunning are character traits that correlate positively with wealth outcomes.

The rate of correlation could be small—say it's 10%—but (most people believe on some level that) it's there, and it follows that if you see someone who is at an extreme end of the wealth distribution—say 100 times as wealthy as you—then, in expectation, this person is going to be about 10 times as narcissistic, selfish, and cunning as you.

And humans, being risk-averse creatures, will take this statistically founded suspicion of wealth and run with it, making the prior assumption that if someone is wealthier me, then absent further information, they are (statistically speaking) less moral than me. They might even say that

Faye said:
Billionaires are immoral. They can only amass that amount of wealth through exploitation of working people. Some millionaires are immoral like this as well.

However, the real issue is the economic system. Capitalism is destroying the environment and gives people the choice of either being taken advantage of or starving. Nobody seems willing to entertain the possibility of an alternative though.
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Personally, I agree: I don't understand what a dude or dudette could do with a billion dollars, and I think billionaries should hurry up giving their wealth away if only for the fun of it. But there are some billionaires who didn't exploit anyone—they just inherited a highly profitable business from their parents. You can argue that their failure to divest themselves of the blood money is morally wrong—I might—but this is a different kind of argument than to say that they, specifically and personally, exploited people who worked for the company before they were even born.
 
edited
slant said:
Simple question:

Are other people allowed to have more than you in the sense of wealth or privilege and still be moral people?
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This isn’t answering your question, but I’ll start by telling you about the first place my mind went when I read this thread. It’s a memory.

My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Costa Rica. It was a very modest yoga & wellness retreat center in the mountains. We were both super excited and felt great about our choice to spend a week there.

It was a long drive from the airport to the center itself. The whole way we were confronted with extreme poverty. I found it overwhelmingly uncomfortable and extremely emotional. I remember trying to verbalize to my wife what I was feeling as I wiped tears from my eyes. Was it shame?

It was easy for me to imagine that the people we crossed paths with would feel resentment about what I imagined would be perceived as over abundance and indulgent luxury.

After having that memory brought to mind, the next place my mind wanted to go when I read this thread was to ask, “is there a point at which I find myself resenting the amount of wealth another person has?”

My parents are first generation immigrants. My sisters and I grew up under the poverty-line and had less growing up than many, if not most, of the people around us. My mother would sometimes take us to the Salvation Army to shop for clothes. I also remember a couple occasions where she left food behind at the cash register at the grocery store when she realized she had gone over the grocery budget for the week. I remember wishing we had more. I remember feeling resentment.

My wife and I are middle-class and my parents are now too. I have found it so interesting that shame seems be something my mom struggles with when she chooses what pictures to post on Facebook. She is concerned about the emotional reactions people in her country of origin will have when they see a picture of what would be considered a modest house here in the states, but probably come off as a mansion to people in her home town.

My third reaction to your question was interest in your premise. Do I think it’s a-morale to be wealthy? I took that as an abstract philosophical question. Upon asking it of myself, I found that my answer was quickly and easily, “no”. In and of itself, I don’t think it’s a-morale to have lots of money.

Having had answered that question in that way though, it made it even more interesting for me to return to the question of why I felt a sense of shame in Costa Rica. Perhaps I’ll change my mind if I think about it more. I don’t know.

I feel that there’s something about examining our attitudes concerning money that is so conducive to personal growth when approached with an open mind. Personally, I have a sense that it’s an energy center of my unconscious. Like it’s a potential gateway into exploring buried complexes and conditioning.

I liked coming across your question @slant :)
 
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I do see those in the comfortable middle and upper classes as being in their own bubbles detached from reality unlike most of the population that are only just getting by often a paycheck or two from being homeless. Look around what most live with around the world and it doesn't get any better especially when one considers the lack of opportunity with education and employment then to look back seeing it all in decline for various reasons. Those with money get to do a lot more than those who go without and have many more opportunities to enjoy life when they want to even in the little things like eating out at a time where the working class is getting crushed due to cost of existence. As for the big things well the middle class can still afford to buy homes and other properties even though it does take longer to pay off never mind be able to buy new cars/trucks. Lastly the comfortable classes have much better access to healthcare either through their employer or out of pocket without having to worry too much of ending up in poverty if something like cancer or a rare disease comes up. For the working class even if you do own a home one is never too far from disaster due to limited income in an economy where increasingly everything is priced for higher income brackets coupled to being more or less forced to work regardless of physical or mental health just to scrape by.
 
Roses In The Vineyard said:
I do see those in the comfortable middle and upper classes as being in their own bubbles detached from reality unlike most of the population that are only just getting by often a paycheck or two from being homeless. Look around what most live with around the world and it doesn't get any better especially when one considers the lack of opportunity with education and employment then to look back seeing it all in decline for various reasons. Those with money get to do a lot more than those who go without and have many more opportunities to enjoy life when they want to even in the little things like eating out at a time where the working class is getting crushed due to cost of existence. As for the big things well the middle class can still afford to buy homes and other properties even though it does take longer to pay off never mind be able to buy new cars/trucks. Lastly the comfortable classes have much better access to healthcare either through their employer or out of pocket without having to worry too much of ending up in poverty if something like cancer or a rare disease comes up. For the working class even if you do own a home one is never too far from disaster due to limited income in an economy where increasingly everything is priced for higher income brackets coupled to being more or less forced to work regardless of physical or mental health just to scrape by.
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If a member of the working class is offered the opportunity to join the middle class, would it be better that they refuse to do so? Is there virtue in willingly struggling with finances?
 
slant said:
If a member of the working class is offered the opportunity to join the middle class, would it be better that they refuse to do so? Is there virtue in willingly struggling with finances?
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The root of the issue is that the ladder for most was pulled up making it much harder for people to earn their way where before one could almost fall ass backwards into being middle class. Hell decades back one could get a decent middle class job with as little as a firm handshake and a cold beer provided one knew who to talk to as it was ridiculously easy back then so long one was willing to work. These days a lot of these jobs require almost walls of certifications, degrees, and prior experience never mind the nepotism that has become increasingly common these days. Those who were born into it or got to ride the coattails of someone else don't realize just how lucky they are.
 
Roses In The Vineyard said:
The root of the issue is that the ladder for most was pulled up making it much harder for people to earn their way where before one could almost fall ass backwards into being middle class. Hell decades back one could get a decent middle class job with as little as a firm handshake and a cold beer provided one knew who to talk to as it was ridiculously easy back then so long one was willing to work. These days a lot of these jobs require almost walls of certifications, degrees, and prior experience never mind the nepotism that has become increasingly common these days. Those who were born into it or got to ride the coattails of someone else don't realize just how lucky they are.
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That didn't really answer my question- if somebody is working class and is presented the opportunity to become middle class, should they morally remain working class?
 
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