Morality and Money
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In her first public comments since leaving office, the Ex-PM Liz Truss has argued that her plans to boost economic growth were brought down by "the left-wing economic establishment". Losing the confidence of the financial markets at a time of global uncertainty has made us all more aware of our income and expenditure. If the news accurately reflected our lives, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that life is all about money - inflation, interest rates, pay demands and profits. The overriding objective of measuring economic growth is to help as many people as possible to have more money. But how have we become so pre-occupied with what is, after all, an artificial construct that is intrinsically valueless – paper and numbers in themselves morally neutral?
The love of money may be the root of all evil, but its use demands trust and co-operation, its possession brings freedom and agency. Money may have given much of humanity richer lives, in every way, but it’s made us into transactional, rather than relational beings, and it corrupts as much as it enables; a tool that so often seems our master. It’s impossible for us to judge when we have enough of it.
If the best things in life are free, can we imagine a world without money – and would it be better?
With Charlie Mullins, Darren McGarvey, Tomáš Sedláček and Anitra Nelson
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening, as far as the surviving evidence is concerned, 20,000 years ago, |
| 0:09.2 | somebody on a riverbank in the Congo headwaters of the Nile |
| 0:12.2 | whittled a baboon's thigh bone as a measurement of exchange and invented money. |
| 0:18.7 | This week, the Bank of England said it was thinking of reinventing it, |
| 0:22.4 | working on a new digital pound to use for payments on and offline. |
| 0:28.1 | If you'd just dropped in from Mars and were mulling our media, |
| 0:31.2 | you'd probably think human life was all about money. |
| 0:33.8 | Recession, inflation, wage demands, the holy purpose of economic growth. To be sure, money has |
| 0:39.4 | arguably dragged humanity from wretched subsistence to widespread, if not universal, prosperity, |
| 0:45.3 | having it's nice, it gives agency and freedom, not having it the converse, of course. |
| 0:51.0 | Money itself is valueless morally and paradoxically in terms of its intrinsic worth. Even St. Paul |
| 0:57.5 | said it was the love of it that was the root of all evil. But it has perhaps made us inter-transactional |
| 1:03.5 | rather than relational beings. It can corrupt as well as enable, a tool that often seems our |
| 1:09.7 | master. Can we imagine life without money? |
| 1:13.5 | And would it be better? |
| 1:15.4 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:16.7 | Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, |
| 1:19.9 | Ash Saka, editor at the Navarra Media Group, |
| 1:22.8 | the feminist author Ella Weillan, |
| 1:24.4 | and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. |
| 1:27.1 | Giles, you're not bang on about |
... |
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