The Pope Speaks

[jonsonite]

Here's a Financial Times article about Pope Benedict XVI's newest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. In it the Pope talks about, among other things, justice. (all excerpts are from the article, not the encyclical)

Unfortunately, one of the lost insights concerns justice. The Pope would like us to think about justice as having three aspects. There is

Comments

[bayashi314]

A) I'm not backing up his views in any way, nor necessarily declining them

[jonsonite]

I prefer friends for my culture sharing needs...

[bayashi314]

Well, I would agree that the bulk of my culture sharing comes from closer interactions with friends and family. To what extent does our culture derive from less-involved culture sharing? Learning about the religious ways of a group we don't interact with or know anything about except via what they share with us on a cab ride from the airport we're sharing, for instance.

Or like yesterday when Lisa and I were helping out at Northwest Harvest as individual helpers and a group from a large bank was there on a coordinated mission. While talking with some of the volunteers, we learned a lot about a type of person (30-40 something lower-level professional with drinking and childcare as 2 major self-professed hobbies) that I might not otherwise have known.

I suppose my question to you Jon - do you only want to learn about culture in a proactive way? Do you want to avoid learning about culture in a passive or reactive way? I'm not sure I know the answer for myself and I'm pretty sure I don't find other answer good or bad, so I'm truly

[jonsonite]

I enjoy learning about other cultures, but the passive/reactive learning is enough for me at its current level without fretting about it. The Pope seems to be fretting.

Maybe the difference is that I'm around enough interesting and different people already that I get my hit of culture without having to look for it...

[zabrahl]

I'm confused do you mean that there is no justice in commutative matters like there is no possibility of good/bad for buying and selling things or that the justice isn't directly related

[jonsonite]

The word "FaceTube"--I can never truly get that out of my mind now, you know

[bayashi314]

In a perfectly set-up natural world, wouldn't the laws of survival keep the idiot with 10,000,000 from getting to a point where he could lose it to the smart guy with a legal and slightly imbalanced plan (sell you 1 peanut for 10,000,000!). I admit my point is taken from an extreme and / or the Simpsons.

If we're going to reference natural laws, don't we need to ensure we have a better process of vetting the lower level laws? It feels like we're saying "Commutative justice" is just "trade" and should follow natural laws (with fraud and coercion restrictions). Why then do I feel like we let people have a lot of ability to violate / lose at these laws quite quickly with little or no training / leveling up? Base analogy - "Wow! I've got all these cool magic weapons and such. How did I get to be a L15 samurai? Sweet! Ummm...I'll cast magic missile at the darkness!"

I see things like that all the time in observing neighbors, some friends, and strangers making odd purchases and engaging in financial behavior that I don't quite get or

[jonsonite]

Well, people who make bad decisions and take risks that don't pay off do lose their shorts all the time. But that isn't unjust. In the absence of fraud or coercion, they're voluntarily making bad decisions, and so there's no injustice in bad things happening to them. Conversely, the people who make good decisions have good things happen to them, and there's no injustice in that either. There's a healthy dose of luck as well, but you can mitigate that by taking a risk-averse strategy. If you choose to take risks, you don't really get to complain that there's luck in the game.

Often, of course, this is self-correcting. People make stupid mistakes when they're young, they lose their shorts, and then work their asses off to get back in the game. It's the people who wait to make their mistakes until they're too old to recover who are in real trouble.

[eversearching]

I am wondering if what the Pope might be getting at is that in our current global system, we can only protect what can be given a set monetary value- and perhaps he is introducing the notion that things which lack a set monetary value need to be protected out of a sense of justice ("it is just to protect x intangible thing").

That the Pope is coming from a place inherently unmaterialistic (in the philosophical sense) and that you, I believe, operate from a place that is inately materialistic, means there is a huge gulf between your essential givens. Perhaps to make sense of his ideas, you have to first put yourself mentally in a place where, for the sake of argument, you allow for the notion of a divine entity which sets the ultimate values, which then exist regardless of human valueing of them? I think that is what the Pope is doing. He is referring to a different value-setter than human beings.

[jonsonite]

That's an interesting problem. What value does God assign to goods and services? It seems like the two basic answers to anything about God are to look at revelation or at physical evidence. Physical evidence suggests that things are worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Do we have any revelation about how to value things?

Well, I guess according to the Pope's encyclical, we should value labor more highly. So that's revelation.

Can you suggest a framework by which we can discover the ultimate value of all goods and services? If you can suggest something as elegant as supply and demand, I want to hear it. (That looks sort of snide in print, but I actually do want to hear the framework for ultimate value.)

[sonofzeal]

This is tangentially related, but I'm hoping you can help clarify it for me.

I occasionally hear people decry the use of fiat money, insisting that we should instead return to the gold standard. I don't really understand why that would be beneficial, either in theory or in practice, because as far as I can tell, all monetary value is a function of human convention. The question "How many dollars is a pound of gold worth?" has no meaning without humans (or, I suppose, another intelligent species) there to make that determination, whether through supply and demand or decree from the Party.

[jonsonite]

Here's the problem with fiat currency instead of gold standard: Since the government can print more money, it doesn't maintain its value as well as gold does. If you just stick your money under your matress and take it out a year later, it'll be worth less than when you put it in. Furthermore, the government can make as much money as it wants, which means that as your money is losing value, the government is getting free money. And, as you can imagine, it's a terrible temptation for the government to print more money when it runs into money problems.

With the gold standard, you don't get inflation unless you capture a Spanish galleon. With fiat currency you get inflation whenever the government wants more money. Which is all the time.