I'm not
sure why you are confused.

I'm also not sure why you say that there is no blame to be distributed.

Morals are defined and created by society. To be immoral means to act without 'proper' behaviour.

To recklessly push people into life threatening debt without considering the repercussions is not proper behaviour as defined by the society in which we live, therefore, the way in which banks have operated is, ergo, immoral.
(dchurch bah, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 10:22, 1 reply)

...
I'm confused becasue your claims about social contract came from out of nowhere, and seem to have no direct link to the discussion.

I didn't say that there's no blame to be distributed. I said that you have to establish that there is before you can talk about badness equalling wrongness. The mere presence of badness doesn't generate a cause for blame. (When the surgeon leaves a scar, that's bad. It doesn't follow that it's wrong. So badness and blameability, though often related, are separable. The same could well apply here.)

The idea that morality is simply a matter of social fiat has never convinced me; and, again, you're being unrealistically simplistic in your description of the situation. Not all consequences are foreseen or intended.

Indeed - the protagonist of your story may simply be unlucky. After all, we'd expect banks to act dispassionately, wouldn't we? We'd want the same rules to apply to everyone. Now, this may mean that some people get into trouble. But it's practically, and morally, much more problematic to try to come up with different rules and exceptions for everyone. That is: there's no reason to assume that the banks have been reckless with a particular customer, or pushed them into problems intentionally. What seems much more likely is that there's one set of rules, and an open market. That banks don't monitor each and every account and make exceptions ad hoc seems to be completely straightforward.


Just for the record, I'm no lover of the free market. But I do think that if we're going to make a moral claim about the way it operates, it behoves us to get things straight to begin with.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 10:41, closed)

It seemed
to me that there was an argument leading the way of "who owns land" in as much as "who says I have to abide by the way society is laid out" - that was the point of the social contract argument.

I agree that a set of rules exists and that they are applied equally to every one of their customers - the fact that those rules are very deliberatly designed to push people into debt that they cannot afford, and that those rules are operated by ALL banks (and thus the cartel element) is fighting against morals as defined by the way we live. Morals HAVE been defined, and most arguments on here seem to suggest that they haven't been. To act in a way that is detremental to the whole of society and the banks own customers IS immoral as it breaks with these definitions.
(dchurch bah, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 10:51, closed)

...
I still don't know what you mean by social definition. Different members of a society will have different accounts of rightness and wrongness. Talking about what society as a whole thinks is therefore specious - it doesn't think anything, and what its members think is often fractious.

But suppose for the moment that there is an aggregate social view, and that that does determine what morality is. That'd imply that it was wrong to think differently, or for that view to change, since it'd necessarily involve moving away from "the right". It'd also probably be incoherent, since it's possible that public virtues such as wealth rest on private vices. Some things are for the public good - but public goodness isn't much of an incentive for private individuals.


Your accusation that banks are deliberately putting people into debt is huge and unsubstantiated. Another way to view it is that they're selling money in the form of credit, and if people buy credit they can't afford, that's foolish in exactly the same way as is buying a kitchen they can't afford. That's the consumer's problem: you can't blame the seller for that, can you?
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 11:01, closed)

It's
not unsustantiated.

I have proof, and in fact was involved very heavily with a BBC programme which was aired about a year ago, called "The Whistle Blower".

I have absolute proof that his goes on, and I have circumstantial proof, and two witnesses that an 'unofficial' cartel is operating between the largest 8 banks in the UK with regards to 'price fixing' with charges, insurance etc... Admittely, with this part there is nothing set in stone and nothing that anyone should take seriously, until that proof becomes more solid at least.

These claims are NOT unsubstantiated at all. If they were, do you think the BBC (and Sky News/Five) would have run with the story on national TV? These are corperations/companies that would actually sympathise with the banking industry, yet faced with the proof that I provided STILL went ahead.
(dchurch bah, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 11:08, closed)

Right.
Now we're getting somewhere.

You've gone some way to establishing a factual claim. Nevertheless, that won't tell us anything morally important on its own. There's a huge difference between a fact and a value.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 11:12, closed)

The
fact that a national broadcaster ran with the story, despite the fact that the law says it's perfectly acceptable to do as they did, should surely show that society in the main see the way those particular banks acted as imoral?

If 'good' is defined by majority rule that is.
(dchurch bah, Wed 24 Dec 2008, 11:16, closed)