Consider two prominent areas of current concern: sex and money. As in the U.S., there has been widespread condemnation of the salaries and bonuses paid to bankers, broadcasters and executives in public services. Apart from their faults and failures, it is often said to be simply wrong that there should be large inequalities of income and wealth within society. On the other hand, there is the view that aspiration to affluence is a good thing. As Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently put it, “the driving force behind New Labour remains the insight that all people have the chance to rise as far as their ­talents take them … we stand for an age of aspiration in which a strong economy can provide greater opportunities for people to get on in life.” But if getting on is good, and rising as far as your talents will take you is right, then how can there be a duty to limit aspiration by restricting rewards, particularly when these may be necessary for the recruitment and retention of those who have the skills to create and maintain a strong economy?

As for sex, we find ourselves in a very confused condition. On the one hand celebrating sexual freedom, guilt-free pleasure, social and recreational sex, made ever more youthful by the lowering of the age of consent and ever more present through the media and internet. Yet on the other, we agonize about teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and the sexualization of the young. To quote from the recent report commissioned by the U.K. Home Office (roughly equivalent to the American Justice, Interior, and Homeland Security departments):

It is a drip, drip effect. Look at porn stars, and look how an average girl now looks. It’s seeped into every day: … We are hypersexualizing girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired. They want to please at any cost.

Apart from recent headline issues there are ongoing debates about reproduction, abortion, gay partnership, marriage and family life, schooling and higher education, public support of the arts, the treatment of animals, the environment, and so on. Then there are the rafts of ethical issues about conduct within various professions and fields of activity: medicine and health care; science and technology; policing and the legal system; social work and welfare; not to mention sport and journalism.

Seen from the inside, these debates and controversies each have their own particular features, but stepping back some common patterns begin to emerge.

First, there is often superficial agreement on form but deeper dispute about substance. It may be agreed, for example, that at the heart of an issue lies the question of welfare, but then it is disputed quite what welfare involves, and whose welfare takes precedence. Equally, it might be accepted that an issue is about rights, but there is fierce disagreement whose rights are ‘genuine’ or which are more pressing. Again, all parties might insist on the need of principles and codes of conduct, but then disagree fundamentally on what these should be and on how they should be interpreted.

Second, there is an inverse relation between the increasing number and complexity of the issues that confront us, whether personally, professionally or socially, and the common resources we have to draw upon in analyzing and resolving them. Social changes have brought some old issues into sharper focus: fidelity, integrity, respect, justice, etc. Meanwhile, medical and technological developments have created new possibilities such as egg-selection, cloning, genetic manipulation, multiple organ transplantation, electronic surveillance, and weaponry of mass destruction. Yet over the same time-period, from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, our ethical currency has been devalued and our moral reserves have been diminished.

These two patterns—first, agreement in form but disagreement in substance; and second, increasing problems and diminishing resources—are connected, and are largely traceable to a common cause, namely the decline of Judaeo-Christian belief and practice. Such a suggestion will immediately prompt some readers to think that this is just the old complaint of the religious conservative that the world is going to hell in a handcart. What I want to suggest, however, is a somewhat different analysis which poses a challenge as much to a certain kind of religious believer as to a familiar sort of secular atheist. In short, I propose that our problem is that we need, and generally now lack, a philosophical understanding of human life.

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The fact that we describe ethical challenges in certain ways using the concepts of human welfare, of equality of respect, of demands of justice and charity and so on, is not a creation of recent times but has a particular cultural and intellectual history. Central to this history is Christian moral theology, in which were fashioned the ideas of human dignity, of the inviolability of the innocent, and of the duty of concern for those in material and spiritual need. Certainly in the last two centuries there have been important developments in moral philosophy that were not avowedly religious, and indeed often came from the pens of agnostics, but of itself this does not challenge the claim that the core ideas originated in a Judaeo-Christian understanding of human nature.

Let me offer two examples: the impartial promotion of happiness, and the respecting of rights. These are particularly relevant, both because of their rhetorical power in contemporary discussions and because they are often thought to originate in secular rather than religious thought. Indeed, they are often paraded as achievements of secular philosophy working in opposition to religious morality, as represented by the Ten Commandments and other systems of ‘divine law.’

Many today associate the principle of acting so as to promote the happiness of all, treating each as equal, with the liberal utilitarians of the nineteenth century, who avowed it without reference to Christian doctrine. Yet if one asks why this should be done, and in particular why each should count equally in one’s regard, it is hard to find a coherent secular answer. For the Christian, by contrast, the principle of equality of consideration is rooted in the idea that each human being, whatever their condition or talents, is equal insofar as they are adopted children of God whose existence was divinely chosen and sustained. Likewise, in asking the question “who are we to care for,” the answer, “whoever one encounters who is in need,” has its origins in the parable of the Good Samaritan offered by Jesus in answer to the question “who is my neighbor?”

Similarly, the idea of human rights has its origins not in the secular enlightenment but in the world of the scholastic theology. In the middle ages there was a debate over holy poverty, which turned in part on the question of whether Christ and his Apostles owned anything individually or held everything in common. The conclusion was that everyone has inalienable rights of ownership and control over their own bodies, from which was developed, by extension, the idea that people have rights over what they create through their labor. These various ideas of equality of regard, of duties of beneficence and charity, of the universality of rights of bodily integrity, and of ownership of one’s body and of the products of one’s labor, are fruits of a particular religious understanding of human nature. Detached from that understanding it will only be a matter of time before they dry and wither. Of course, one might seek to develop equivalent fruits from a different source, but the question is whether that can be done.

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We continue to use concepts and language that have their origins in a religious outlook, but we now lack the single coherent source for that use. We speak of “universal rights” and of the “equality of all people” but by any natural measure human beings are evidently unequal, so whence comes this elevated status and inviolability? We speak of the obligation to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry but whence comes that duty, if not from some broad notion of common membership in an all-inclusive moral community? And what can be a natural basis for this that can substitute for the religious idea of brotherhood?

Not only has the original foundation been lost sight of without an evidently adequate alternative being provided, but in losing touch with the source of moral meaning, our moral thinking has become confused. On the one hand we invoke the principle of the inviolability of innocent life in condemnation of the bombing of civilians, but on the other we set it aside when it comes to the matter of abortion. We assert the principle of non-exploitation in opposition to slavery yet countenance the creation of “sibling saviors” for the purpose of harvesting tissue from them. We deploy the language of innocence in relation to underage sex, yet switch instantly to talk of a right to gratification with the passing of a birthday. We assert the importance of community and of autonomy, yet legislate to restrict the latter in ways that will forseeably destroy the former. We oscillate between understandings of doctors, nurses, teachers and judges as motivated by vocations to serve the common good, and as salaried service-providers in a consumer economy. Little surprise, then, that we face confusing and apparently irresolvable conflicts.

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How then to procede? It will not be surprising if a professional philosopher suggests that philosophy is the place to start, and perhaps even the place to end. Nor will this seem a novel suggestion to those familiar with the burgeoning fields of “applied” and “professional” ethics, which often presents themselves as providing guidance to those in moral need. But these are not what I have in mind, since applied ethics generally takes for granted the ethical position it applies, and professional ethics tends to restrict itself to fashioning codes of conduct for practitioners in specific fields. Our need, by contrast, is for an enquiry into ethical foundations sufficient to provide a guide to life more generally, which is something far broader and deeper.

One thing that philosophy, even of a preliminary sort, does well is to improve one’s grasp of an issue by clarifying it. Philosophy involves the analysis of ideas, assumptions, and arguments—and that brings with it the resolution of ambiguities and confusions. For example, it is increasingly common in talking of “rights” to conflate liberties and entitlements. A clear instance of this is the argument that people have a claim to reproductive services based on article 16 of the Declaration of Human Rights which specifies “the right to marry and to found a family.” On analysis, however, it is clear that this refers to a right of non-interference from the state (a liberty) not a right to the provision by it of the means necessary to conceive and bear children (an entitlement). Again, in speaking of “acceptance” there is a tendency to confuse toleration with approbation. So, while it may be reasonable on grounds of liberal toleration to require secular humanists to tolerate public displays of religious devotion, or to require traditional Christians to tolerate public recognition of gay partnerships, it does not follow that it is reasonable to require either party to approve or support these. Acceptance-as-toleration, and acceptance-as-approval are distinct, and it is both a confusion and an imposition to require the latter on the basis that a liberal society should be a tolerant one.

The value of philosophical clarification could hardly be overstated, particularly for a culture that is generally mentally sloppy. Yet clarity is not enough: for a position can be sparkling in the distinctness of its formulation and still false. Beyond lucidity one needs truth. It was, and remains, the business of philosophy to state such truths as there may be about morality and the conduct of life. Judaeo-Christian belief and practice in its mature forms was itself the embodiment of a philosophy of life, but with its decline no equivalently comprehensive account of human existence has emerged to take its place.

This matters for two reasons.

First, without such an account we are threatened with the thought that human existence is absurd and pointless. That was the dread possibility explored by Albert Camus and the pessimistic existentialists in the 1940s and ‘50s. For them it raised the question of whether, faced with meaninglessness, one would do better to kill oneself. This prompts the question, of course, whether rising rates of self-harm and suicide among young people today may be connected to a similar sense of the absence of human meaning.

Second, with such an account we will fail to see the intrinsic value of every person at every stage of life, and this returns me to my theme of contemporary ethical conflict and confusion. For what the Christian philosophy offered was an overarching narrative, an account of human life in total, from conception through infancy and childhood into adulthood and old age and towards and beyond death. In that respect it was a fully comprehensive theory. But more importantly it was one that identified dignity in each phase, aspect and part of the totality of life, singly and socially. Within this scheme the value of childhood was accounted for, as that of old age. Similarly, the value of male and female, of parent and child, of laborer and administrator, etc., were each understood in relation to their expression of divinely gifted powers, and their contribution to the common good of society.

Such a narrative relates persons not as separate, autonomous individuals but as socially completed persons. It is an evident fact of human life that we are not regularly or uniformly contoured, like round pegs fitted to round holes. But what from one point of view look like awkward and pointless shapes, from another can be seen like the contours of jigsaw pieces made to fit together to create a larger picture. What otherwise appears fragmentary takes on a larger and fuller meaning than could be contained within the boundaries of separate pieces.  Moreover the fuller narrative, or larger picture, is one that ennobles human life by seeing it as a sacred creation made for eternal joy.

None of this, of course, establishes the truth of the Judaeo-Christian philosophy of life, but it helps to explain the sources and original meaning of the moral ideas with which we are left. In doing so, however, it also reveals why in the absence of the narrative that gave them point, and which integrated them as parts of a larger account of human meaning, they no longer seem to function to guide us, so much as to leave us conflicted and confused. Such is the case, for example, with “respect for life” which is now invoked equally forcefully by opposing sides in debates about abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia; or again “material wealth” which is one day denounced as an indulgence, and the next praised as an aspiration.

If ethics is ever again to make the kind of sense it did to generations past, it will have to be set within a broader philosophy of life. That is a challenge to secularists who have yet to provide a non-religious alternative, and to Christians who wield biblical passages as if they were swords provided for the striking down of unbelievers. For they too need to seek out the larger narrative. Supposing then that both step up and meet the challenge, how might we tell which is true? The only possible answer, I think, is that we should favour that philosophy which best makes sense of human life including both its intimations of human transcendence and its demonstrations of human depravity. It is hard to see how such an account could be other than a religious one, at least to the extent of identifying something in humanity that transcends its material foundations and orients it towards some kind of spiritual fulfillment. Certainly there are intellectual challenges in recovering such an account, but there are also moral dangers in trying to live without one.


John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs in the University of St. Andrews, and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest books are Practical Philosophy (2009) and Reasonable Faith (2010).

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

I hope this finds you well, though no doubt exhausted from the long period of campaigning and commentating leading up to the recent elections. Most people on this side of the ocean think only of the presidential contest. More than once I have had to explain that in addition to the race for the White House there have been senate, congressional and gubernatorial contests going on, along with a number of state referenda and local elections. Britons can easily forget, if they ever really understood, the federal character of the Union, and when this and the electoral complexity are explained they either respond by saying, “but the presidential election was the one that mattered, wasn’t it?” or else, “so what does that mean?”

Still, some of us are fairly knowledgeable when it comes to American politics, and I’d like to offer an account of how things look from the perspective of one British observer. It is based on a close following of the campaigning and on general knowledge of the United States gathered over 20 years of visiting (some 35 states of the Union) and two periods of residence (in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia). While the political race has sharpened many issues, I am primarily focused on matters of moral and social outlook. Indeed, one point I would like to emphasize is that it looks to have been a mistake to identify these matters too closely with political parties and their presidential tickets.

Some American conservative commentators have been eager to press the idea that rather than the Democrats winning the White House election on the strength of their candidates and policies, the Republicans lost the contest because of the defects of the McCain-Palin campaign. While this view has the comforting advantage of simply requiring a better communicator of unchanged positions in order to win the next election, such an idea is distorted to the point of self-deception. Viewed from afar, and I would think that viewed from nearby through a clear glass in broad daylight, it is apparent that voters chose the Democratic ticket on the basis of preferred policies. Voters were tired of what they regarded as a discredited administration led by a confused and ineffective executive that had drawn them into an unnecessary and costly war while yet neglecting domestic needs.

Even many social conservatives felt let down by the administration’s failure to pursue favourable policies regarding marriage, family, education, and the economy. Some may suggest that plans to implement a positive domestic agenda were derailed by the “war on terror,” but even if true it remains the case that the administration put the invasion of Iraq ahead of securing the status and well-being of home, school, family, and the economy.

It should be remembered at this point that concern about the moral legitimacy of the second Gulf War was felt across the range of political positions. Not everyone who judged that the securing of sanctions, the decision to invade, and the conduct of hostilities involved systematic immoralities was a ‘leftist’ or a ‘liberal’. In 2003 I wrote in opposition to the idea of launching a war against Iraq in the introduction to a reprinting of Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay on the Second World War, “The Justice of the Present War Examined.” It would be presumptuous to say what her verdict on this current conflict might have been. Yet, someone who followed her reasoning, and was informed of the circumstances of going to war in Iraq—and the subsequent conduct of it—would at least be drawn to the conclusion that grave, extensive, and enduring injustice had occurred.

Anscombe’s statements on other matters challenge a conventional notion of political alignments. Many of you share my high regard for her intellectual insight and rigour, as well as her dedication to the discernment and practice of truth. Consider, then, an essay she wrote entitled “Philosophers and Economists: Two Philosophers Objections to Usury,” which is relevant to the recent conduct of American Banks and investment agencies. In her essay, Anscombe explores the practice of earning interest on the mere strength of a loan, in effect securing an income from renting out money or increasing one’s wealth out of the ownership of debts. Near the article’s conclusion she states:

These considerations appear to me to throw some light on the necessity of communism, as I might call it. The capitalistic system—to put it in a nutshell—necessarily leads to things like a housing shortage: that is an epitome of its consequences, which I will leave to your imaginations to expand in accordance with my thesis.

Whatever one thinks of her position, it should be noted that Anscombe was a by-word for Catholic orthodoxy, for the sanctity of life, for exclusive, life-long marriage and for chastity within it, and for various other Christian and traditional moral values, yet she could denounce U.S. (and allied) war policies as murderous and accuse the capitalist system of structural injustice and injury to the common good.

Today we face a danger of oversimplifying the structure of political thought to the point of dividing policies between left and right, and then associating these positions with particular political parties. In truth, one may be a social welfarist or socialist and a moral conservative, or equally a free-marketeer or classical liberal and a moral radical: pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and aggressively secular.

The fact is that some voters chose against the Republicans not just for pragmatic reasons, and not because they had bought into a general liberal package, but because they took moral exception to some of the policies pursued by the Bush administration, and I believe that in this their judgment was correct. The Bush years were marked by policy immoralities of omission and commission. Not all of those who voted for Barack Obama did so because they favoured every major element of his policies. Rather, as is generally the case, people made an overall judgement of past performance, of the strength and weaknesses of the candidates, and of likely future performance.

The opponents of John McCain and Sarah Palin did not tend to depict them as bad people, but rather as flawed or ill-equipped politicians. But the critics of Obama often sought to represent him as evil. My judgement is that the American people not only did not share that opinion, but that they drew conclusions about those who pressed it, and in fact came to regard Obama as a generally admirable character.

Here let me suggest a parallel between two examples where Republican critics have represented leading figures as damnable only to have that verdict rebuffed in a way that its rejection injured their own cause. One is that of Obama, as we just witnessed. The other is that of President Clinton. I was in the U.S. for periods during the Lewinsky scandal and when the case was being pressed for impeachment. There were those on the side of that policy who took a sober and dignified view of the matter, saying that by his conduct with a junior employee in the setting of the White House the President had disgraced his political office and should resign. Alongside these, however, were others who simply hated Clinton with feral intensity and who delighted at the thought of heaping public humiliation on him.

What they thought might ensue was less clear. What was evident, however, was that the prosecution of this policy led to the degradation of media news and commentary to the point where it was impossible to listen to radio or television news or read a newspaper in the company of children (I have four and so felt that degradation at every turn).

What began as an effort to unseat a President by exposing and denouncing him without qualification or consideration for collateral effects led to extensive damage being done to standards of public discourse and harm to the reputation of his political critics. I fear that something similar may already have happened to the cause of social conservatism through some of the attacks on Obama, which have also proved ineffective. My advice to those involved in this strategy would be that when you have worked yourself into a hole, stop digging and start thinking about how you might get out of it.

It has been a mistake for moral conservatives to associate their concerns with opposition to one candidate and one party. Not only has the previous administration proved itself unworthy, but the state of the Republican party continues to be divided over values such that, had it won the White House and Congressional elections, it would not have delivered a range of policies that would have addressed moral concerns about the conduct of war, the management of markets, the securing of marriage, or the protection of the unborn.

While it would be wrong to abandon the political parties, it would be equally mistaken to side with one of them. The fact is that elections will always be fought and decided on a range of issues and the balance will sometimes favour one side, then another. Social conservatives who look to politics should be seeking to work within both parties, and in the case of the Democrats, seeking to return them to a historical position that was once more in line with Christian moral values and Catholic social teaching than was that of the Republicans.

There is also a further reason to be wary of confusing moral concerns with the fortunes of a political party. Those within a chosen party whose primary interest is pursuing electoral victory may prove fiercer enemies of one’s moral position than political opponents in other parties.

A sobering example is that of the British Conservative Party as it has re-branded itself in response to electoral defeat. Tony Blair brought Labour to power with the promise of renewing Britain, rendering it a contemporary country for contemporary times. The superficiality and near vacuity of the language belied a definite programme of social reformation initiating civil partnership, gay adoption, publicly funded stem-cell research, and other policies designed to ‘modernise’ the values of British society. Opposition from orthodox Christians was as it should have been, but the Conservative Party responded to defeat by associating itself with the very same policies, seeking to overcome its self-described reputation as ‘the nasty party’ by adapting enthusiastically to the need for ‘changed values’ for a ‘forward-looking society.’ There is reason to believe that the Republican Party will now follow the very same trajectory with the ironic consequence that those who invested their hopes in it as a vehicle for pursuing moral values will be encouraged to stay quiet and perhaps even be denounced.

It is an old saw that when America sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. By the same token, if America holds fast to that which is good and implements it in its public policies, then the rest of the West might be improved. Now we see an administration coming to power that is predicted to promote policies inimical to many of our shared vales. What are you, and we, to do? The answer can only be to go on as we have learned to do already, arguing the case, fighting the battles, seeking to influence policy, but not investing our hopes in political parties that are more like one another than they are like us. Perhaps American social conservatives might reflect on that experience and prepare themselves for what are likely to be very difficult times ahead.

The common need is for a serious and sustained reflection on the content of a conservative social philosophy that can be advanced within all major political parties: Democrat and Republican in the U.S.; Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat here in the U.K.

From the window in my study I have a view across lower college lawn to the 15th-century tower of St. Salvator’s, through which generations of masters and students have passed. One such was John Mair, friend of Erasmus and teacher of Jean Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola when in Paris. Another was James Wilson, who in 1765 set off for North America and subsequently became a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Committee of Detail, which produced the first draft of the United States Constitution in 1787.

In the course of his academic and judicial career Wilson developed a number of important ideas about the relation between personal morality, public policy and political service, at the core of which lay the idea of integrity or truth to one’s deepest convictions. That has long been celebrated and taught in America, but now it has to be reapplied to the context of current political circumstances. It may be that the conclusion is uncomfortable, suggesting that the existing political alignments offer no easy home for those adhering to traditional morality.

With every good wish, yours faithfully,

John Haldane

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Virginia, and Vice-President of the Catholic Union of Great Britain. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the Editorial Board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Yet several apparently unconnected developments in the U.K. that occurred last week may contribute to a moment of some significance for social conservatives concerned about contemporary society and the quality of political, cultural, and corporate leadership.

I have in mind three events occurring on consecutive days in the U.K. and involving legislators, broadcasters, and bankers, respectively; more precisely the Westminster Parliament, the BBC, and Barclays Bank.

On October 29th, the House of Lords considered and voted on amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. This marked the last stage of the passage through Parliament of the proposed legislation. Once the formality of Royal Assent is granted, the HFE Act will come into operation bringing with it provisions that only a few years ago would have been judged unthinkable.

Among the worst of these measures are the creation for experimentation of animal-human hybrid embryos, the production of ’savior siblings’, babies selected to provide genetic material for seriously ill relatives, and the removal in the provision of publicly funded fertility services of any reference to a child’s need for a father – the point of this last being to facilitate IVF treatment for lesbian couples.

Further, the government chose to add a late provision allowing tissue for animal-human hybrids to be garnered from children whose parents give permission, from people who lack the “mental capacity” to give consent, and from anyone who has previously donated samples to hospitals for medical research but can no longer be traced.

Collectively and along with other aspects of the legislation this represents an unparalleled assault on human dignity, on respect for persons as ends, on the principle of consent, and on the integrity of the father-mother-child family relationship. It may seem shocking that a country that led the world in the recognition of civil rights and constitutional law should now turn those instruments against the innocent and in violation of fundamental human goods. However, it may be less surprising if one also remembers that Britain has the highest abortion rate of any Western European country, and almost the highest in the world–higher than the U.S.

The day after the passage of the cloning bill, October 30th, the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, met with members of its governing body in an unscheduled crisis meeting. Britain’s national public broadcasting corporation, funded out of a compulsory TV license fee, was forced into confronting the fact that two of its leading presenters, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, had made and broadcast obscene and harassing calls to a 78 year-old. Their victim was Andrew Sachs, well-known and fondly recalled as the actor who played the Spanish waiter ”Manuel” in Fawlty Towers. In the first of these calls, Ross announces that Brand ”f—ed your granddaughter!” and in a later call Brand himself sings ”I had sex with your granddaughter. But it was consensual and she wasn’t menstrual, it was consensual lovely sex”. In between times they speculated that in reaction to this news Sachs might hang himself.

It is worth adding that Ross is the BBC’s highest paid employee, earning 6 million ponds a year, while Brand is the character who in hosting this year’s MTV Video Music Awards in Hollywood described President Bush as ”that retard and cowboy fella . . . who in England wouldn’t be trusted with a pair of scissors”.

Every day that Ross and Brand have entered and exited BBC Broadcasting House in London they have walked past an inscription on the wall of the foyer. It is in Latin but translates as follows:

To Almighty God: This shrine of the arts, music, and literature is dedicated by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown will produce a good harvest, that everything offensive to decency and hostile to peace will be expelled, and that the nation will incline its ear to those things which are lovely, pure, and of good report and thus pursue the path of wisdom and virtue.

I doubt that Ross and Brand have ever read this, or if it were pointed it might well have been in derision. It is hard to imagine what the current Director General thinks of the values affirmed in this lapidary inscription, though having been educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst he might well recognise the echo of the words of St Paul in Philippians 4:8. How again, and how far, a once noble nation seems to have fallen.

The next day, October 31st, Barclays Bank announced that rather than follow the pattern of other major U.K. banks and avail itself of capitalisation afforded by the Government in response to the credit crisis, it had chosen to secure its balances by raising money from sovereign investment funds and royal families of Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

U.S. readers unfamiliar with Barclays as a banking outlet may yet have heard of the ”Barclays Center” under construction in Brooklyn. It is planned as a large sports, entertainment, and luxury suites venue which will also serve as home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. Beyond New York the bank is represented in the U.S. through its Global Investors department headquartered in San Francisco, and by the fact that over 3 million Americans hold credit cards issued by it for a variety of U.S. partners. So the behaviour of Barclays should be of more than simply foreign interest.

While U.K. taxpayers may feel some relief at a reduction in the expected Treasury banking bailout it is worth reflecting on the impact and motives of Barclays’ decision. The terms of the Saudi Arabian deal are less generous to Barclays than U.K. Government support, but the latter comes with significant constraints. First, it requires that banks halt cash bonuses for bank board members and restrict shareholder dividends in the current year. Second, it requires that lending be made available in support of small and middle-sized U.K. businesses. Barclays’ choice of independence is also made more comfortable by the fact that part of what it will provide to Quatar and Abu Dhabi investors is tax deductible, so U.K. taxpayers will be subsidising the deal and hence supporting the bank in any case.

In the context of domestic recession, with businesses failing, unemployment rising and the main political parties favouring policies of collective national reconstruction, Barclays’ decision is in marked contrast to a long-standing British tradition of solidarity and of ”troubles shared.”

Three days, three institutions, three decisions; each is in a different sphere: reproduction and family life, public broadcasting and entertainment, borrowing and lending. While there are no logical connections between these, nevertheless they represent moves away from traditional British values of respect, decency, and social responsibility; and each expresses a condition that has eaten through the fabric of the country, eroding institutions, communities, and families. It has no single name but it combines individualism, materialism, and hedonism in a consequentialist outlook that instrumentalizes relationships and even human lives in pursuit of the gratification of preferences.

In one sense the temporal conjunction of instances is accidental; but the rapidity of their succession and their manifest grossness may be providential in attracting attention to a pervasive malaise. North American readers accustomed to look with regard across the Atlantic Ocean may be moved to pity, but they would do better to consider the extent to which their own societies are moving in the same directions.

More positively, it may be that populaces that have tended to be indifferent to corruption in respect of the treatment of innocent life may now be lifted to greater moral consciousness through their reaction to indecencies of other kinds in other areas. Surprising as it may seem, it may yet prove that the beginnings of a U.K. reversal of the wrongs done in regard to bioethical matters began in the days following the passing of the HFE bill, in reaction to the deeds of broadcasters and bankers.

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy in the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Virginia, and Vice-President of the Catholic Union of Great Britain. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the Editorial Board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

What he writes about the importance of ethics in the conduct of business and about the development of pre-modern and modern ideas about virtue and justice are very much to the point; as are his observations regarding the role of law in shaping ideas of corporate responsibility. Rather than comment or elaborate on these points, however, I should like to focus on two further aspects of the issues raised by the recent credit collapse. The first of these has to do with how it is to be explained; the second concerns its possible long-term effects.

In popular history and commentary it is common to focus on events and individuals rather than on conditions and processes. This is understandable, for it helps in telling a clear and gripping story to single out moments, episodes or characters. In reality, however, significant and consequential changes in human affairs are almost always ‘multi-factorial’.

This is the general pattern of change. Suppose a window breaks and someone asks ‘why?’ It is then explained that a branch was blown against it. What could be simpler? Well, had the branch been smaller, or lighter, or differently shaped, or blown with less force, or had there been a countervailing gust, or had the glass been denser, or less rigid, and so on, then the window might not have broken. Likewise, suppose you are diagnosed with blocked arteries and the doctor says it is because of the fat in your diet. But had the arteries been more elastic, or had the blood pressure been different, or had you not also had diabetes, or had you had a different metabolism, and so on, then the arteries might not have become blocked.

Two points arise. First, we should be wary of simple, single-factor explanations: they may omit other relevant causes, but also what they choose to highlight may not be that important in the larger scheme. Second, since change is due to many factors, including longstanding conditions and ongoing processes, its effects often reach back to alter these. It may be important to know this in order to understand both what has happened and what is likely to follow.

The simple story of the ‘credit crunch’ is that this is the effect of money market dealers waking up to the fact that a vast amount of risky debt was circulating through the system, as mortgages were packaged and sold in the expectation of a continuously rising property market.

Unsecured lending is certainly a factor but so too is the willingness to engage risk. Another cause is under-capitalisation of banks. Add to these the discounting of future pains over present pleasures, failures of trust, expectations of government action, a habit of living on credit developed by governments themselves, i.e. public borrowing, and so on. Had some of these factors been different then who knows what?

Generations of economists will think and write about the events of 2008 and still there will be disagreement about their causes. Let me, therefore, now shift attention to future effects as these may feedback into some of the conditions that have brought us to where we are.

We face a period of some austerity intensifying in the course of what may prove to be a long and deep economic recession. Building, manufacturing and sales are already declining; but more alarming is the prior long-term trend in personal indebtedness. Harold James observes that “eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers made ethical conduct a central feature of their political economy”. I imagine he has principally in mind members of the Scottish School: David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and others who related commerce to cultural improvement via morality and prudence. It is embarrassing to note, therefore, that in Great Britain the current ratio of total household debt to national gross domestic product stands at 109%, having risen by 40% over the last decade.

The trajectory of the debt ratio in the US is also rising steadily upwards, raising similar questions about the loss of traditional American habits of prudence and good management. The growth of UK and US household debt is principally a result of ballooning credit, which resulted in easy and large mortgages, as well as personal consumer borrowing. The decade has seen more and easier ways to borrow money, or charge expenditure against general and retailer credit cards. That in turn is both consequence and a cause of changed expectations.

The two-income household has developed as a norm for a large part of society, and singles devote a good deal of their income to clothes, electronics, leisure and entertainment, as indeed do many families. This trend has been compounded by the acceleration of children into adolescence and by the efforts of aging adults to maintain young lifestyles.

The economy has also been affected by declining indigenous birth-rates and growing pensioner populations. Smaller households, working parents, divided families, and childless homes are all transferring domestic care and provision onto the state, or for those who can afford them, onto private providers. Thus we see the pressure on schools to open earlier, close later and run additional services. The same is true at the other end of life, as the UK has also witnessed new demand for state-provided care of the elderly.

One might be tempted to think that this new situation expresses a communitarian outlook of shared responsibilities and common provision. In truth it is a consequence of individualism: turning to institutions to provide what in other times was given within the most immediate and most natural of communities: the family.

Whatever borrowing and spending packages are devised in the coming months and years, the fact is that the state does not have the resources to provide services at the currently expanding rate, and it faces further declines in tax receipts as well as additional unemployment and recession-related expenditure. Thus far it has been banks and other lenders collapsing, but the prospect is now in view of public institutions being ‘restructured’ as treasuries drain lower.

While the near future may be very difficult, with innocents hurt along the way, it may also be brighter. Though recovery of the existing arrangements may not be possible, there is some hope of refashioning older ones. Talk of austerity casts the mind back to poorer days, but those were also days when families and neighbours rallied around the suffering, enabling civil society to flourish.

The credit collapse had many interrelated causes. Similarly it will have multiple interconnected effects including, I suspect, something of a turn against the individualism, materialism and hedonism of recent decades. This may not be in immediate prospect, but the financial collapse was a very long time in the making, and some of its most significant effects may also take a generation to resolve themselves.

As those of one generation watch their parents and grandparents struggle and worry about themselves and their children, it will not be surprising if they start to extol the virtues of settled domesticity, life-long partnership and family life. In praising and seeking that end, however, they will also need to produce it, and that means living out the recommended life.

When windows break or arteries block, the prudent take steps to repair the damage and prevent it recurring. Looking at the condition of the economy and society and recognising the complicity of the state in this decline, the prudent can be expected to begin building stronger and larger families and supportive communities. Meanwhile businesses and corporations might also think about how to contribute to the building up of a culture of trust.

John Haldane is a Professor in the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs. He sits on the Editorial Board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 The Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.