Is Greed Good?

The phrase 'Greed is Good', from the film Wall Street, is a paraphrase of an assertion by Ivan Boesky, 'Greed is Right'. So, the association of the 80s with the former is not a mere Oliver Stone plot. The idea behind the phrase seems to have induced a lot of head-shaking, but is it true? Well, the two most significant Moralists of the past several centuries, Kant and Mill, would certainly condemn it. And, it is listed as a 'mortal sin' in religious circles. So, probably the only credible support for the principle is presumed to come from Adam Smith, who asserted that the pursuit of private interest by each is equivalent to the pursuit of the Good of the whole. Now, such a computation has over the centuries been repeatedly criticized as over-simplistic, just as the repeated economic failures of the attempts to implement the principle as policy have paralleled. But the more problematic aspect of the invocation of Smith is that it is half-assed. As his presumed acolytes seem oblivious to, Smith wrote TWO major books in his lifetime, the other, his first, presenting a Moral theory that proposes that the Good is based in sympathy for others. Smith never repudiated the latter view, which suggests that his promotion of self-interest in the Wealth of Nations was meant to be taken, at minimum, in conjunction with the promotion of the welfare of others. So, even Adam Smith would likely condemn much of what passes as business as usual in this country. But the definitive diagnosis of Greed probably comes from Aristotle. First, he believes that anything that anybody does is for what they believe is a'Good', the potential shortcoming being that what they believe is 'good' is not always what in fact is so. Secondly, his theory of balance applies to both Ethics and Psychology, so, in other words, Greed is both a Vice and a form of psychological imbalance. Thus, when in one of his novels Salman Rushdie suggests that Greed and mental illness are related, he is approximating a literal truth, one confirmed by the pride with which the goodness of greed is often trumpeted.