Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There's moral meddling for you.
The problem is that not everyone thinks it's meddling for the good.
I think we need the view of a modern moral authority.
Lambeth Palace it is, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
The suggestion that there is some area of choice and policy and imagination and so forth which is right outside the scope of ethics has to be very unreal.
You couldn't say that there's a descriptive category of life onto which we can graft moral or ethical values?
Certainly there are transactions we can just describe, but my worry sometimes in some kinds of economic rhetoric is that these transactions are described as if they were not actually performed by persons, as if they just happened somewhere out there in this mysterious virtual world called the market.
And I don't want to lose sight of the fact that economics is something which is about human relations at the end of the day and therefore about human choices.
You've had the extraordinary explosion of what you might call speculative finance, the shift of profit-making from the actual to the virtual economy, from actually making and trading things to shifting currency patterns around and handling loans and all the rest of it.
And that, I think, has intensified the feeling that economics is or can be, again, a rather impersonal thing.
It happens in this virtual world.
You feed the information in, mysterious things happen, and out comes a lot of money at the end, rather like a slot machine.
I think what's worrying about this, what's morally worrying about it, is the sense of detachment.
The sense that once the button's pressed, I don't really have responsibility for what then goes on.
Rowan Williams argues that economics and morality can't be separated, after all, and that something, in the language maybe, made the divorce bad for us.
Or is that just what a moralist would say?
Let's try it on an economist.
John Kay is one of Britain's finest.
How does he see one of the great questions of the moment, bankers' pay and bonuses?
I don't think even if these arrangements are functionally efficient, that actually that...
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