Excessive Virtue?
March 29, 2010
Martin Wolf, columnist at the Financial Times wrote an article on March 23rd entitled “Excessive virtue can be a vice for the world economy.” In the article, Mr. Wolf argues that Germany’s first-rate manufacturing products and the competitiveness of its employees (virtues) is a threat to the stability of the Euro Zone because of it provokes a deficit in the balance sheet of surrounding countries in Europe, such as Greece and Italy. Dr. Paul Thind, of Switzerland in a letter to the Editor entitled “Don’t blame the virtuous for the sinner’s fault” writes that “one cannot separate the culture and value system of the inhabitants of nations from the type of economy that has evolved.” He then goes on to praise the financial prudence of both the Germans and the Swiss in not getting their “personal balance sheets in a state of distress.”
He is making an interesting point. In the U.S at both the individual and national level, the tendency is to spend more that what one earns or has. I wonder if this is not at the root of the economical problems we have encountered in the past years and might explain the financial crisis we are facing. There is a paradox in our economic system whereas in order for the economy to grow, consumers have to spend money they don’t have and therefore be indebted.
But can virtue ever be excessive?
Virtue is an interesting concept. The etymology of the word comes from the Latin word “virtut” which means strength. Can you ever be too strong or too powerful? Aristotle and Plato defined virtue as Temperance, Wisdom, Justice, and Courage. Can one ever be excessive in those attributes? I would think not.
However the real moral or ethical question is: How do we use the strength we have, whether it is physical strength, the financial resources at our disposal or the influence we may have? Do we use it exclusively for our benefit? Hopefully we do not. Do we use it at the detriment of others? Most likely we do, to some degree. To what degree is an individual moral decision we have to make.
It is written in Leviticus “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
That means that we should consider, in what we do, our own interest as well as the interest of those we can or should consider to be our neighbors.
As the American journalist and author Sydney J. Harris once said:
“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded and to say <I was wrong>.”
No risks of excess here!
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