You can get a lot of mileage with a question like that amongst ethicists.
Today, Adam, one of my co-workers took issue with the idea of owning a car worth six hundred thousand dollars. While I would also take issue with it, I simply don’t like it. Although I could write a long argument which justified (or tried to justify) my opinion, that’s all it would be: an opinion. In fact, it’s just a feeling. Adam narrowly avoided contradicting himself when he explained that he agreed that it was only an opinion, and that even though he wasn’t trying to convince anyone that he was right, that it wouldn’t be right for him, for ethical reasons. That is, he implied that his feelings about (excessively) expensive (luxury) cars, and the (inferred) self-centredness of owning one, underlie his negative feelings about such.
I could have discussed the issue all day, because it highlights all kinds of questions and issues which fascinate me eternally. We didn’t have all day, unfortunately, but only our lunch break. So I will bore you with it now.
Part of Adam’s reasoning is that owning an expensive car would not, for him, be the best way that he could do good in the world with the money which that car cost. More specifically, that in some way, it empowered him to do good in a way which he could not without it. At some point, he also gave me the impression that any person should follow the same kind of thinking. He used complicated logic to state what would otherwise be obvious, except for one point, which he left unspoken.
His argument comes from that of utility. Personally, I love the idea of utilitarianism, but in most cases, you simply cannot evaluate with any reliability the outcome of such decisions in terms of the amount of good that comes out of them, except in the initial act. Moreover, and this is the real point: everyone works on the utility principle anyway, unless they are working on the pleasure principle.
But we are all working on the pleasure principle. We simply all take pleasure from different things. The disagreements in life have nothing to do with anyone being more or less right than anyone else. There is no monopoly on right and wrong, despite what countless people will tell you (including a great number of non-faithful, non-religious yet nevertheless self-righteous people—even me, some of the time, though ideally only in the context of an explicitly or tacitly shared belief system, in which case I am attempting to point out a contradiction in thinking). Utilitarianism itself is about pleasure. Pleasure is the only measure of goodness—except for irrational feelings which seem to transcend pleasure, and are simply intuitive or instinctual morality. You can argue that the satisfaction of such personal morality is itself a pleasure.
Unfortunately for utilitarianism, there is no way to either a) measure relative pleasure, or b) calculate the long-term ethical consequences of any decision. Society is a non-linear complex system. There are certainly some acts which have undoubtedly bad long-term consequences … or perhaps I mean mid-term—it depends on the time scale! The butterfly effect means that by lending someone a quarter to make a phone call, you might set off a chain of events that leads to a bomb being detonated.
In economics, your purchases are the concrete expression of how you value something. If you buy a luxury car, then you are saying that your pleasure in owning that car exceeds the pleasure that would come from, say, that of the group of people who could eat and sleep in a shelter for a few months or years if you were to donate the balance of the money after buying an affordable car (or using public transit, or working within walking distance from home, or whatever).
Buying things is a person’s way of acknowledging their belief that they (pardon my genderless plural singular) are more important than other people. Not buying things says the opposite.
If someone has a problem with one person acting out their belief, as a consumer, in their own superiority over others, then there is little (though not no) point in telling them so. (It’s not “no point” because guilt can be effective, sometimes.)
My preferred method would be to point out that short-term self-indulgence equates to long-term self-neglect, although the vast majority of self-centred people already know this, but simply can’t sufficiently imagine how badly they will feel in a future of poor health from bad eating and other habits and a broken down, desperation-driven paranoid society, versus how good they will feel this minute from chocolate cake, smokes, porn and fast automobiles right now. Of course, it’s even easier to give in to indulgence when one has the mind’s power to rationalize, shift blame, and deny that there will be any consequences to short-term selfishness at all.
So, what was ultimately problematic about Adam’s discussion was that he glossed over the key fact which makes it moot: people aren’t that smart, nor very imaginative, nor very honest. Lacking those essential qualities, then you will be hard pressed to make even the slightest dent in their thinking. Especially since the lack of those qualities generally means that they don’t think very much at all. And certainly not reasonably.
A last word on capitalism. There is no immediate moral or ethical problem with wealth. Money is simply an agreement about how to trade work. Society as a group decides what work is valuable (well, mostly people with money decide that, so unfortunately it isn’t very democratic). But it’s what you do with the money you have that matters. Few people simply hide it under their mattress or stockpile gold and jewels (though I suppose some do). Surplus money is banked or invested. It’s the investment that makes the difference, ethically. Again, it’s not about universal ethics, but merely how well one person’s preferences gel with others’, and in particular, the ethics which are inherent in the law, a reflection of society’s beliefs.
Interestingly, the Bible makes the same point about hoarding wealth (the parable of the talents). Idle money is akin to an idle person. Idleness is to sacrifice tomorrow to a kind of nothingness today. This hurts everyone, and comes from a tendency to self-destruction borne of self-hatred. Though I’m not sure why that parable ignores the case where the money is invested on the stock market before a big correction.
The point is that money is just a concrete representation of effort, and it’s the effort that has ethical value. Wealthy people are not necessarily more selfish than others. It’s a question of how the money (and time) we have is put to use, and how we encourage others to use their time, not how we use the things they produce, necessarily. If we need things (tools) to do something, we will acquire those things, or do our best with the things we have, unless we are are irrational.
All in all, it is best to ignore attempts to evaluate actions on so-called Utilitarian principles. The ends cannot be used to justify the means. You must accept that some actions are ethical in your world view, and some are not, because you cannot effect the cause you want by the efforts you exert in any but the simplest cases, and you certainly cannot determine the happiness of others by your purchases, except for those from whom you buy an enable them to buy things that they need, without with they would be very unhappy. Though who you spare unhappiness in this way is not especially important; it will always be someone.
So you must determine your own virtues, and they must be active, not passive, or they are not real. You cannot profit by idleness or restraint alone. You must act. It is not about not lying, but spreading truth. It is not about not murdering, but about preserving life. It is not about preventing ugliness, but about creating beauty. It is not about escaping ignorance, but embracing enlightenment. Go forth, and do good things.
