Summary
The Sackler Trust has suspended new charitable donations in the UK, following claims that the Sackler family billions are linked to the opioid crisis in the US. The family denies the allegations, but both the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate group have refused its money. Whether that money is tainted or not (the question is hotly disputed) the controversy raises important questions about the ethics of funding for the arts, sport and philanthropic charities. Purists believe that good causes should always refuse money from bad sources, no matter how much potential benefit that money could bring. More grateful recipients hold their begging bowl with one hand and their nose with the other, insisting that there is no such thing as dirty money because a coin is morally neutral; whatever real, perceived or alleged crimes may have been committed to earn it should not rest on the conscience of the recipient. How should we view this quest for moral purity? It does appear that society is becoming increasingly intolerant of moral grey areas. It’s a short step from turning down dodgy donors to ‘no platforming’ those with unfashionable opinions. Perhaps that’s a good thing, an inspiring translation of principles into action predicated on equality and justice for all. Or perhaps such thinking is a new form of secular puritanism which is intolerant and dangerous. When does the enforcement of moral principles make us better? When does the attempt to resist moral pollution become its own form of rules-based bigotry?
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.5 | Good evening. Is money morally neutral? If not, what's important? Where it's coming from or who it's going to? |
| 0:11.6 | It's a question worth asking in the middle of what appears to be an outbreak of moral fastidiousness amongst our major arts institutions about who gives them money. |
| 0:20.5 | The National Portrait Gallery and the Tate have spurned the Sackler families millions. |
| 0:25.1 | Activists don't like the way their fortune is based on a pharmaceutical company |
| 0:28.6 | that makes a drug, they say, is linked to America's opioid crisis. |
| 0:33.1 | The Man Group hedge fund has stopped backing the Man Booker Literary Prize. |
| 0:39.0 | Tata, owner of Jaguar Land Rover, will no longer sponsor the Hay Festival, both after campaigners and artists |
| 0:43.8 | accuse them of activities that were, in their eyes, morally questionable. The narrow issue is |
| 0:49.4 | whether the insistence that people giving them money should be free of any possibility of |
| 0:53.4 | moral taint will damage |
| 0:54.8 | our great institutions, or looked at the other way, whether it's right to call out companies, |
| 1:00.7 | perhaps with image problems, buying themselves a philanthropic halo in this way. |
| 1:06.0 | The wider question is whether we're witnessing a new secular puritanism that embraces not just donors it |
| 1:12.4 | judges to be dodgy, but no platforming unfashionable speakers at universities, or indeed |
| 1:17.8 | fashionable but amongst the old right professors like the Canadian Jordan Peterson, who's had |
| 1:23.0 | his Cambridge Fellowship withdrawn. Is this a new and welcome moral clarity, or a narrow-minded, self-defeating intolerance |
| 1:31.2 | of life's ambiguities and those not fully signed up to an approved point of view? |
| 1:36.2 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:37.4 | The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator of the Times, Claire Fox from the Academy of Ideas, |
| 1:42.2 | the former Conservative Cabinet Minister |
| 1:44.2 | Michael Portillo, and the priest and |
... |
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