Is wealth immoral?

[Mike]

My sister-in-law has the coolest job: she's an interior designer for airplanes. Sometimes this means small airlines, but the bulk of her work is private jets. It's amazingly cool. Currently in her hangar, she is working on a plane belonging to the richest woman in [country with a median income far below ours], and it is beyond opulent. Every interior metal surface is plated in genuine gold. Cabinet doors cost US$35,000 each. Fireproofing the coffee station cost US$80,000. Etc etc etc.

This is a multi-million dollar plane that has been decked out with a multi-million dollar interior, and seeing it and hearing all the numbers made me super uncomfortable. All I could think of was the unbelievable amount of cash being spent on totally unnecessary and non-functional additions. How many families can she feed in her own nation by not choosing to gold-plate the interior? How many children could access quality education with that money?

I understand that much of morality is subjective. I'm not looking for absolutes of right and wrong here, but...

Most religions and moral frameworks agree actively causing harm/suffering to others is bad. Most of them also agree that causing harm/suffering through inaction is immoral as well. This is especially true if the action required comes at a minimal or negligible cost.

So even if we grant the woman's need for a private jet, there's a way to do it at a fraction of what she spent while still maintaining a high level of comfort and elegance and professionalism. Are those excess millions immoral? Is it morally wrong to "waste" that much money when it could potentially do so much good with negligible effect on the giver?

Carry this to an extreme and you get the people who keep just enough money to live on and then they give away all excess time and cash to help others. I don't say go that far, but somewhere between a vow of poverty and gold-plated toilets, is there somewhere to point to and say, wow... this level of extravagance is immoral?

[poorpete]

I guess, hmm. It'd be cheaper for this rich woman to get therapy to help her be at peace with a personal jet not having a gold-plated interior, then go with the cheaper option.

[Kyle]

Yes, I think it is. But I also think everyone on this website needs to come to terms with it. Because the labor, resources and bullshit that go into our handheld portable computers is one of the grossest luxuries we have. No wait. That's not right. The amount of water we waste washing our pets is the grossest. No that's not right. Buying carbonated sugar water in an aluminum can that was shipped over a thousand miles to be refrigerated in your Piggly Wiggly is the grossest.

You get the point. Even the poorest of us is wealthier beyond the dreams of most of the world's population. And we don't think about it.

Now I'm super depressed. Thanks, Mike.

[Phoebe]

[Mike]

@Kyle

Exactly though. That's the reason it made me uncomfortable. If this was a problem of the richest of the rich, I'd just be outraged and disgusted. But once you accept that there IS a level of wealth/spending that is immoral, then you look for where the bright line is to divide moral from immoral. And sadly, the line is not that easy to find, but cursory examination reveals that you are almost certainly on the wrong side of it.

@Phoebe

And there is the outrage and disgust I mentioned. But the fact that someone else's crimes are much larger does not absolve me of my own.

[Phoebe]

But what are your crimes? Do you give some of your surplus resources to help people who lack things you enjoy? If the goal is to find the magic Line, there is none. Meanwhile, actual public policy that affects everyone is the main determinant of whether we have extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few. Did you set this public policy? Did you vote for those who set it? Do you try to lobby against it or support candidates who will dismantle it? To me those are the relevant moral questions.

[Phoebe]

Here is some brief context for what I'm on about: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... den-wealth

In a nutshell, you have ultra-wealthy people getting and staying that way not by creating value or contributing back to the society that makes it possible for them to obtain great wealth, but by cheating in whatever way helps them to avoid paying taxes. These people could collective END global poverty. They could make it so that everyone had clean drinking water and vaccines. They choose not to. We can contribute in a smaller way, and hopefully the more money we make we can continue to do more, but the problem is that "we" - i.e. nations like the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Russia, etc. are systematically permitting global plunder.

[FlameBlade]

Bezos. Making millions into his pocket each day.

Makes me curious. Does he really need that much wealth? What if he channeled some percentage of that money into his grunts, raising salaries, so perhaps that they would have living wages where working 40 hours are sufficient for living?

[Cazmonster]

This is the simple and uncomfortable answer for the Rich here in the States. The system is gamed for their benefit.

We don't have socialized medicine. This means our health care is dependent upon having a job.

We have the least nationally mandated leave. This means we have fewer days where we might volunteer or protest.

Money is now protected speech. The Rich can speak much louder than us, because they have the money to do so.

The Rich and the Powerful in the States have made it so that their voices are far louder.

[Phoebe]

What boggles my mind is that when people like Warren Buffett lay this state of affairs out in simple terms and explain that it doesn't gotta be like that, most people ignore tralala whocares. But then, he goes on buying Goldman Sachs or whatever. BTW I hear they have great online CD rates.

[Phoebe]

Really struggling with this issue lately due to two simple things: college costs and the failures of health care coverage. We can choose to do things so much differently, but we have a completely obstructionist block of people sitting in the Senate who won't compromise on any legislation with Democrats. We have Betsy DeVos, who has no interest in wielding for good the extremely powerful leverage the federal government has via financial aid, which is a significant revenue stream for most of the universities who graduate most of the students in the U.S. today.

Instead of practical progress, we're going to get a year of campaign slogans about free tuition for all and we're going to get objections that this is economically unfeasible. Meanwhile, most people with anything close to an average income can barely afford to send their kids to college if at all, and many students don't benefit from college the way they should because they have to work their asses off to make enough money to survive through it, and that's assuming they're not literally suffering from malnourishment (witness the proliferation of food banks on campus and how desperately they're needed).

And anyone very well-off but whose income isn't in the top few percent is stockpiling whatever they can because college is SO crazy expensive. I can't even go into the health care thing - it's like, so much is uncoverable, or poorly coverable. And never lose a tooth as adult. Luckily people who make more than me will be able to afford a new tooth with Trump's/GOP's tax cuts, so I propose a new voting litmus test that if you aren't making enough money from Trump's tax cuts to pay it in cash for a new tooth/implant if you should lose one when you're 60, then you have no business voting for Republicans and are living in a dream land where you fancy that those tax cuts are for you. I mean, even putting aside everything else about climate and morals and security and extortion and lying and whatnot that would cause a person to be concerned...

[FlameBlade]

Depends on how well one treats the underlings in order to get the wealth. If one is grounding down workers to bare essence, then maybe not. But if workers are sharing in the wealth a bit (after all, without the workers, the wealth wouldn't be there, right?)

Not to mention all the infrastructure put in place by others that allows for wealth to happen -- that includes, road, sewage, utilities, all the basics.

If all are treated well, and well-looked after, then by all means, spend that money any way you want.

[Phoebe]

It's all immoral but what isn't, at this point? The whole spinning wheel is immoral.

[Tahlvin]

Money is amoral: it's neither good nor evil. Accumulating money is neither good nor evil, though as Flameblade implies, what one does to accumulate that wealth may have moral implications. Having a lot of money just tends to amplify a person's underlying being. If they are a jerk, then having money will tend to make them a bigger jerk. If they are kind and compassionate, having money doesn't change that, it just allows them to be that in bigger ways. And yes, it is possible to be kind and compassionate and donate money to worthy causes while still accumulating wealth. It does not have to be one or the other, and if that is one's view of money, then that is most unfortunate.

[Phoebe]

Counterpoint: there comes a point when people have obligations to share their surplus resources with others. Reasonable people might differ about where that point is, but it exists, and as wealth inequality grows so staggering, the richest few people are now obligated to donate most of their surplus. If we were all living in a tiny village together and none of you had food, and I lived at the utmost level of comfort and had enough food to feed us all comfortably, but chose to let you starve to death when I could easily prevent it without sacrificing any aspect of my own luxurious lifestyle, wouldn't that be wrong? I think it would be especially true if there were no way for me to accumulate that type of comfortable lifestyle without relying on the successful functioning of our whole village.

The consequences of the lack of sharing from today's top .1% are the needless deaths of millions of innocent people. I do think the kind of work Bill and Melinda Gates are doing is incredibly heroic but I also think it is morally demanded of them. When precious few others are doing what's morally demanded, maybe doing it makes you a bit of a hero?

This brings me to the example of Bezos: . He has many admirable qualities (I'm especially impressed by some genius things about how his company runs). He's also investing a lot of his money in trying to accomplish good in the world. But why should he get to do that without his company paying any taxes, since taxation supporting our successfully functioning society is part of what allows him to make all of his billions? Why should he in effect be the exclusive arbiter of where all of his surplus resources get spent, when we're all playing a rigged game in which it's far easier for the people who have more resources to keep and get more of them? For the super rich it probably makes sense to establish a space colony where small numbers of people can thrive and everybody else suffers. For the rest of the planet it might make a lot more sense to invest that effort in helping prevent further climate change damage. But since he's the one who doesn't pay any taxes and rakes in the billions hand-over-fist, he's the only one who gets to decide. And tragically when we have somebody like Trump as president, the vision of someone like Bezos seems absolutely wonderful in comparison. The whole concept of common good is being (has been?) destroyed in our democracy.

[mimekiller]

I see this meme bandied about on social media with a DOLLAR AMOUNT on world hunger, are people really walking around with so much water in their head that they think WORLD HUNGER is something as simple as cutting a check?

[Phoebe]

Doubtful, but the comparison is useful food for thought. Surplus wealth = x. Amount needed to save lives = x - y. Money doesn't auto-solve things but it sure as hell would save millions of lives very quickly if it were applied as poultice.