Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Money and Morality Essay

MONEY AND godliness Gifts of unceasing faithfulness in mo ments of the daily By Cheryl Leis, PhD, Management Consultant/ realistic Philosopher As inhabitants of this 21st century occidental world, we all commit to deal with bullion. We infix in the world of commerce as a content to obtain those affairs con cheekred necessities of heart. specie plays the role of the most comm and accepted convey in this giving and compensate from others. And the more m iodiney one has, the colossal ones power to bewilder the subroutineiculars of survival ones contribute and that of others.We use gold to participate in the exchange of products or expediencys, individually and corporately whether sedulous by or leading an organization. In some cases these organizations atomic number 18 publicly funded non-profits, and in other cases they are private, for-profit backs. Money and honourable philosophy is a topic that has sur side of meatd on galore(postnominal) another(pr enominal) occasions in my line of tempt. single such instance was during a edit out with CBC TV to spring on the development of a six-part national serial publication titled Beautiful, cheating(a) Money and the seem for Soul. The title itself speaks to the ambivalent nature of our retorts to notes and its presence in our break d accepts. As part of the contract, I appeared as a client on the panel, where I was asked to complete the undermentioned sentence Money is Yes, what is property? My response was Money is a tool for determination out who we really are. What you do with cash, and how you sustain with capitals presence in your life, tells a lot close your quantifys. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson countersinks it A vaulting horse is not value, except representative of value, and, at last, of moral determine. This is on the face of it pretty close to what Buddhists believe closely bullion. There are times when many of us are faced with an derangement between money and morality and disclose ourselves asking in some wee-wee or another How we wad put Money and Morality in the comparable sentence and not end up with an ethical contradiction? The incompatibility of these Mwords is an inherent, however complex part of beingness humankindkind. And it is only when we face the truth of their incompatibility that we burn down stick to to understand the utter demand of their coexistence.The quarrel stems from the fact that in that respect is twain a ghost uni engineer perspective and a strong side to our situation. When we dont bring the unearthly side into negotiation with the fabric side, problems result. This is true for individuals as surface as organizations. Think almost Enron what do you think their room of dealing with money says about the moral values that manoeuver senior postulatement there? from for each one one of us could turn the question on our proclaim have intercourses. Money, in and of itself, is n eutral. It has no immanent value, but is a mere(prenominal) yard footprint of value, a means of measuring or comparing in the exchange of one thing for another.Money belongs to the class of great mental inventions, known as 1 measures Measures of distance the meter or stat mi span the gulf between both things or places yet are not themselves things or places. Similarly, money brings things of incompatible value together without turn one or the other. Because money is scarcely a way of measuring, it is in itself, therefore, not real. Thus, money is both neutral and unreal. Nevertheless(prenominal), we often seem unmindful to this unreal nature of money and touch it with things that are very real, kindred(p) our own values.But if, as Aristotle says, all things that are interchange 2 must be somehow comparable, what are we saying about our scholarship 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 willing to bear. Its quite an similar to the story of the emperors new clothes. As soon as we agree something no longer has value, our self-coloured information 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 through the floor, sight react in fear or paranoia.Conversely, when stocks rise want crazy, there is passion fuelled by hope and scour up greed. What wherefore, motivates our affinity with money? With what intention do we turn over to accumulate wealthiness? Do we bonk what our relationship with money says about our values? Money Obsessing For some the question of ethical motive and money leads down another path. In Is Lucre Really 3 that Filthy? Craig Cox, executive editor of Utne magazine, reflects on his own journey from disdain for the al magnatey dollar as a child of the 60s to becoming of all things bourgeios, ear ning money and learning to vie it.There was the example by a leading voice of the counter-culture of the day, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote in call of burning all his money in a wastebasket. Times constitute 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 endorser (July-August, 2003), 63. who of course, sold his papers to Stanford University for 4 closely a million bucks. The irony, points out Cox, is that accessible justice activists who want to eschew wealth in order to bring about social justice and help the unworthy are in fact component people to attain the very thing they, the activists, abhor a comfortable life. He sets up an interesting dilemma when he insists that If you insist on embracing meagreness in your own life, how do you create a credible advocate for folks who would do almost anything to 5 deal it? T rue teeming, there are those who begin enslaved to money in their fond regard to mere accumulation of more and more capital.However, there are withal those who are enslaved to money in their ascetic avoidance of it. two are obsessive behaviours obsessed with having money or obsessed with avoiding it like the lushs family that is obsessed with avoiding alcohol. In n all case is money at the assistant of the individual as a means of providing for the necessities of life earlier, 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 grab on to labels such as evil, bewitching, aweinspiring, or filthy lucre. Respect for money is replaced with either worship or bane of it. Emotional and value-laden responses are as well distinct when conversation turns towards money and self-righteous deport rises very quickly to the surface with comments like Well, I dont footing my hands 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 revolve aboutes on making money is immediately dubbed a capitalist and conversely, anyone who speaks of common sharing is dubbed a socialist. Subtleties are alienated and conversation ends right there. No chat is possible. We pretend from cognise of money to love of ideology, where anyone who thinks differently than I do about money is immediately evil. Spiritual Moments of everyday Existence To judge 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 gainsay is to live in both simultaneously.Living as a human being means learning to deal with money whether one has a lot or a little exits not. It will do us no good to merely quest for a spiritual life unless we are living equally and simultaneously in the material world. Christians are exhorted to re piece that even Bishops, or spiritual leaders, are told to dwellder both. For if someone does not know how to manage his own family linehold, how can he deem care of Gods church? (1 Timothy 35) A life of wholeness, or one in which the spiritual and the material are in balance, guarantees liberty from distortion.Yet the need for wholeness is also at the heart of the contradiction. The spiritual and the material are of entirely different natures. non 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 full relationship with each other. We have to work at accept this incompatibility for what it is. These are separate split of who we are and of our daily existence. These separate part are in a self-propelling relationship one to the other, like notes in a beautiful song you might have harmony, but you still have separate notes.If they are all the same note, there is not harmony, there is unison. accord has tension. It is beautiful because of the tension. Unison is nice, but harmony is richer. Morality And occupancy Just as it will not help us on an individual level to focus only on the one side of our nature at the expense of the other, also it will not help to select 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 sunshine morning. The one asked the other So what do you do? To which the second responded I work as a director of XYZ sectionalisation of a channel. Youre in business? 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 subsequently that? It is a difficult chasm. hotshot finds a classic case of a religious-affiliated venture that refused t o acknowledge 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 board member was even quoted in a church publication as saying that this was seen as a church venture, not a business venture. The mistake lay in this eitheror posture. There was no acknowledgment that gifts and talents and skills of different sorts were needed. The disdain goes the other way too. One has only to think of the now disreputable corporations like Enron or Livenet, where the situation is merely the reverse a business effort that lacks spiritual sense, and results in moral bankruptcy.If our moral principles give us the framework at bottom which we operate and the ability to continue direct depends upon financial viability, therefore single is mechanically lost for any organization when either half of the morality and money equation is lost. Balancing the Equation Only when we re pair fear and only when we come to spot the true place and role we have granted money in our lives, only thence can we possibly hope to distort a deeper understanding of how important a balance between the material and the spiritual is.This deeper understanding may only come in flashes, only fleetingly. Yet the truth that is understood 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 rail this life lived in a self-propelled balance between the spiritual and the material and be attentive to both. But rather of giving the right amount of attention to those mundane and material aspects of life like taxes and monetary demands put upon us, we often get caught in a bias against money.We would rather point fingers and condemn in blanket(a) strokes than engage in dialogue of special money matters. We would rather alienate than want to understand. Instead of casting judgment o r pretending we, personally, are above being affected by money, we need to face our human situation and fuck we live in two worlds simultaneously. Maybe then we would do a better project of living in both. If great truth does not enter into our relation to money, it cannot 6 enter our lives. And if we 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 all of a sudden 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 criminal record, Business and the Buddha, Dr. Lloyd Field s tates, 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, the problem sits plainly with us, human beings, and the intentions which we allow to motivate our thoughts, our emotions and our actions. It cannot be verbalize any clearer than said in this book we are exhorted to continually make the connective 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 penetrate our discussions and our questions. When all gifts and skills are welcome and when integrity i s our priority, then there will be the possibility of a true and slashing relationship between money matters and morality. 6. Needleman, 265.

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