The Morality of Money: An Exploration in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Money raises deeply perplexing moral issues that run through the whole of our lives. Many central questions in our lives involve financial considerations: Do we have enough money to raise children? How should we earn our money? How much do we want of it? What should we do with it? To whom should we bequeath it? From birth do death we live enmeshed in the skeins of commercial exchange. However, if we cannot escape this enmeshment, we can perhaps understand it; and having done so, we may find things go better morally. Of course, there would be no moral philosophy of money to pursue if it were the case that all of us were simply 'in it for the money', so that all we ever thought of was how to acquire it, or spend it. While we may have cynical moments in which we profess that life is a matter of who has the most money when they die, this is not how most of us think.