I have been following your blog with great interest for a couple of years now and I feel honored knowing that there are people like yourself on this planet in our times. I live in the Ukraine and represent the post-soviet cultural enviroment where philosophy has been practically persecuted and distorted by Marxists. I have a Licentiate in Philosophy from University Urbaniana in Rome and teach philosophy at the Diocesan Seminary of Ivano-Frankivsk.
I've been asked recently if currency trading (Forex) and stock trading are sinful. I mean, if they are done as income generating speculation. I've tried to look up official Church documents and just generally search the Internet and it's resources but am unable to find a clear and logically consistent answer. I can see how people who received socialistic education (like everybody in the Soviet Union), can find speculation morally wrong and sinful. But many of my Western friends don't think this. There is a difference in the basic comprehension of the "market" in its most fundamental components and things that define it. There is a problem of "property" as it is understood differently in socialist and capitalist views. Then I think of the American situation with your president pushing forward so many things that were clearly defined as socialist in the country where I was born (SU). And the underlying concepts of "property", "market", "goods" etc. that are substituted with other even in the question of the health reform.
I am happy that you have noticed that the present administration of the U. S. government headed by Barack Obama has accelerated the move in the socialistic and totalitarian direction. The move in this direction has been going on for a long time, since F. D. Roosevelt at least, but since the 1960s has achieved a 'metastatic' state of growth -- to employ a cancer metaphor. The irony in all this is that we won the Cold War only to become more and more like the Soviet Union which we labored so mightily to defeat. (I am old enough to remember the anxiety here in the States over Sputnik and the suborbital exploits of your cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.) And like the SU, we may well collapse under the weight of our own fiscal irresponsibility, foreign overextendedness, and 'internal contradictions' -- to use a Marxist phrase. We are no longer "The land of the free and the home of the brave." We have become a land of wimps willing to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage, i.e., for cradle-to-grave security to be provided by an ever more intrusive nanny state. I am of course brushing in very broad strokes. The details of the situation are messy and complicated indeed.
You ask whether currency and stock trading are sinful. Such activities fall under the Seventh Commandment -- "Thou shalt not steal" -- in the Roman Catholic (RC) numbering of the Decalogue. The following, from the RC Catechism, is relevant to your question:
2409 Even if it does not contradict the provisions of civil law, any form of unjustly taking and keeping the property of others is against the seventh commandment: thus, deliberate retention of goods lent or of objects lost; business fraud; paying unjust wages; forcing up prices by taking advantage of the ignorance or hardship of another.192
The following are also morally illicit: speculation in which one contrives to manipulate the price of goods artificially in order to gain an advantage to the detriment of others; corruption in which one influences the judgment of those who must make decisions according to law; appropriation and use for private purposes of the common goods of an enterprise; work poorly done; tax evasion; forgery of checks and invoices; excessive expenses and waste. Willfully damaging private or public property is contrary to the moral law and requires reparation.
As I see it there is nothing morally wrong with buying and holding stocks and realizing a profit upon their sale. There is nothing wrong with buying and selling stocks in general. A stock is an equity. When I buy a stock I buy a bit of a company that produces goods and services, some of them indispensable for human flourishing. By buying stocks I contribute to human well being, not all stocks, but most. When I buy stocks I am engaged in a productive activity, not directly, but indirectly: I help fund a productive enterprise that produces food and medicine and books and computers, etc.
Same with bonds. A bond is a debt instrument. I loan you money so that you can engage in a productive activity such as open a book store. You pay me interest for the use of my money. That is perfectly reasonable and perfectly moral.
But what about day trading? This strikes me as morally dubious. Here what you are doing is playing a game in which you generate an income without directly or indirectly producing anything. It is entirely unlike buying a house when it is cheap, fixing it up, maintaining it, paying property taxes on it, and then selling it at a large profit. The profit, even if quite large, is justly acquired since one has engaged in activities with promote not only one's own good, but the good of others. One has improved the neighborhood by fixing up the house; one has made it available to others to rent; one has paid property taxes to support locals schools and fire departments, etc.
Currency trading? I don't know enough about the details of it to have a firm opinion, but I suspect that is shares the moral dubiousness of day trading. A Roman Catholic, I suspect, would consider it be "morally illicit: speculation in which one contrives to manipulate the price of goods artificially in order to gain an advantage to the detriment of others."
Let me add this. (I am now speaking for myself.)
1. There is nothing wrong with money. It is absolutely not the root of all evil. The most we can say is that the inordinate desire for money is at the root of some evils. I develop this theme in Radix Omnium Malorum.
2. There is nothing wrong with making money or having money. There is for example nothing wrong with making a profit from buying, refurbishing, maintaining, occupying, paying propery taxes on, and then selling a house.
3. There is nothing wrong with material (socio-economic) inequality as such. For example, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates' having a vastly higher net worth than your humble correspondent. And there is nothing wrong with the latter's having a considerably higher net worth than some of his acquaintances. (When they were out pursuing wine, women, and song, he was engaging in virtuous, forward looking activities thereby benefiting not only himself but also people who come in contact with him.) Of course, I am assuming that the inequalities have not come about through force or fraud.
4. Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under the law. It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial of equality of opportunity -- via 'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever -- from the premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome. There will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between individuals and groups. Equality of outcome is not even a value. We must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where they may.
5. We the people do not need to justify our keeping of what is ours; the State has to justify its taking. We are citizens of a republic, not subjects of a king or dictator or of the apparatchiks who have managed to get their hands on the levers of State power.
6. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. Socialism and communism spell the death of individual liberty. The more socialism, the less liberty. The bigger the State, the smaller the citizen. (D. Prager)
7. The inidividual is the locus of value. We do not exist for the State; the State exists for us as individuals.
8. Property rights, contra certain libertarians, are not absolute: there are conditions under which an 'eminent domain' State seizure (with appropriate compensation) of property can be justified. "2406 Political authority has the right and duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right to ownership for the sake of the common good."
9. Governments can and do imprison and murder. No corporation does. Liberals and leftists have a naive faith in the benevolence of government, a faith that is belied by that facts of history: Communist governments in the 20th century murdered over 100 million people. (Source: Black Book of Communism.) Libs and lefties are well-advised to adopt a more balanced view, tranferring some of their skepticism about corporations -- which is in part justified -- to Big Giovernment, especially the omni-intrusive and omnicompetent sort of governments they champion.
10. Our social and political troubles are rooted in our moral malaise, in particular, in inordinate and disordered desire. It is a pernicious illusion of the Left to suppose that our troubles have an economic origin solely and can be alleviated by socialist schemes of redistribution of wealth.
To wrap this up. I only hope that my question will not seem too naive, but I would really appreciate your input on the ethical aspects of trading. Thank you for your work and the blogging. It's like a breath of fresh intellectual sanity I get, every time I read your posts.
Rev. Iouri Koslovskii
Ivano-Frankivsk Theological
Academy
Assistant Professor
64 Vasylianok str.
Ivano-Frankivsk 76019,
Ukraine
о. Юрій Козловський
Івано-Франківська Теологічна
Акадеімя
Доцент Кафедри Філософії
вул. Василіанок 64
Івано-Франківськ
76019, Україна
http://koslovskii.org.ua
skype: doniouri
Recent Comments