Greed: “No, I’ll never have enough”

In the third of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Jane Williams highlights how Greed destroys both individuals and societies.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

In the old Humphrey Bogart film, Key Largo, the villain, played with a vicious childishness by Edward G. Robinson, is asked by Bogie what he wants. Rocco, Robinson’s character, thinks for a bit and then says that what Rocco wants is MORE! ‘Will you ever have enough?’, Bogie asks, and Robinson thinks about it for a moment before replying, ‘I never have so far. No, I’ll never have enough’.

That is Greed, in a vivid nutshell. Rocco doesn’t want anything particular, and he doesn’t value anything in itself; he just has a vast, unspecific, insatiable desire for anything and everything, particularly if it belongs to someone else.

Rapacious greed does not love what it desires; it is driven to possess; it does not value what it has.

Greed, like all the Seven Deadly Sins, is a ‘capital’ or ‘cardinal’ sin, meaning it is a disposition from which destructive, abusive actions flow. Having this over-mastering tendency to Greed makes us act in a whole variety of ways that are damaging and abusive to others and to ourselves. Greed leads to a variety of ‘sins’. Rapacious greed does not love what it desires; it is driven to possess; it does not value what it has, because while there is ‘more’ out there somewhere, greed must have it. It does not care what or whom it attacks or destroys: anything that stands in its way must be obliterated. It does not want to admire or use what it seeks, it merely needs to possess it, and the moment the sought after thing is achieved, all-consuming greed moves onto the next thing, always seeking ‘more’, always despising what it has, as not enough.

Greed is destructive both on the personal front and also as it shapes societies. Individuals ruled by greed cannot maintain love or friendship or loyalty: their eyes are always on the next thing, always hungry for what they have not got. They leave behind them, without a backward glance, hurt and broken friends, family, colleagues, jobs. And if the fallout is clear for all the people around someone driven by greed, it is also obvious that it destroys the greedy, too.

Overpowering greed empties even the greedy of worth; they can never be successful, because they do not have what they want – everything.

Nothing can ever satisfy someone consumed by greed; there is no rest, no peace, no pleasure, because the world is full of things still to be grabbed at. Jesus is quoted as having said, ‘Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be’. It’s a warning to beware of what you long for, because we are so powerfully shaped by our desires. But if all Greed longs for is ‘more’, then, in the end, the greedy person or society has no heart at all. It is shaped only by a drive for possession, opening up a vast and echoing emptiness where an actual longed-for being or thing should live. Overpowering greed empties even the greedy of worth; they can never be successful, because they do not have what they want – everything.

It is obvious how Greed is deadly for individuals, but it is also deadly when it becomes a motivating force for society at large. The media have recently been talking again about ‘greedflation’. The theory behind the term is much debated, but the word itself is instantly memorable. Institutions that are governed primarily by the need for ‘more’ drive an insatiable economy, always needing more consumers, more profit, more rewards. Dissatisfaction and envy are the necessary tools of a society, an economy, of Greed. Individuals and groups that try to opt out of this out-of-control consumerism are viewed as a threat, and must be diminished, dismissed, cast out. It is dangerous in such a society ever to ask, ‘Do we really need more?’ That is the Emperor’s New Clothes question, which must be avoided at all costs. Surveys that ask people at different income levels whether they feel that they have enough nearly always find that everyone would like just a little bit more. Everyone would like to be at the next level up of income and possessions; but if they achieve that next level, then, strangely, they find that it is actually the level above that that really want.

Contentment lays an axe to the roots of Greed. It allows us to see what we have and value it.

The World Happiness Report, which has been regularly updated for the last 10 years, works with a complex set of definitions of what makes for happiness, for individuals and for societies. Finland regularly tops the chart of Happiest Countries in the world, which Finns find a bit puzzling, apparently. They don’t see themselves as cheerful, jolly people, but they do speak of a national characteristic that might be described as contentment. Contentment lays an axe to the roots of Greed. It allows us to see what we have and value it, rather than despising it because there are things we do not have.

One of the values that The World Happiness Report notes as making for greater happiness is altruism – doing good and receiving goodness from others makes both parties happier. The Christian tradition has known this for a long time. Cardinal Sins have their opposing Cardinal Virtues, dispositions that we can cultivate to help us to free ourselves from enslaving habits, like Greed. ‘Charity’ is the Cardinal Virtue that undermines the sin of Greed. When we give to others from our own resources, of time, money, attention, care, prayer, help of any kind, we begin to loosen the deadly grip of insatiable Greed upon ourselves and our world. Greed can’t live alongside Charity, or altruism; charity sees real people and situations in need, and supplies what it can from its own resources; Greed sees only more and more objects to be acquired, never able to see what it already has, never able to share or be content.

Deadly Sins lead to behaviour that makes for misery, both for those driven by them, and for those on the receiving end of them. That is why they are called ‘deadly’. They are not just a bit naughty; they are actively destructive of human flourishing, both personal and communal. There is so much in our society that positively encourages Greed, the reckless desire for More, which can never be satisfied. But there are ways of combatting this most pernicious of habits.

One is the practice of gratitude: instead of thinking about what we haven’t got, or would like to have, or what someone else has, we can think of what we have got, and think of it as gift, something to say thank you for. It’s a good habit to build into every day, perhaps as we go to bed, taking just a few minutes to think about the good things that have come to us that day: a child’s smile, a gleam of sunshine, a hug from a friend or partner, a delicious piece of bread; everyday things that we can take for granted, in which case they go unnoticed; or we can see that they are gifts to be grateful for, which enlarge our spirit and our wellbeing. Gratitude is a virtuous circle: it is lovely to be on the receiving end of gratitude, as well as to practice being grateful. And gratitude often leads to another excellent practice for undermining Greed, which is charity, or altruism. If we are learning how to say thank you for what we have, we may also want to share what we now notice that we have. If we’ve given the gift of gratitude, and seen how it makes us and the receiver feel, we may want to extend that further and further. Worth a try?

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

3 March 2023

6 min read

Justice: a premium virtue

In the third of his series on virtue, Andrew Davison weighs what justice says today, particularly on impartiality.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A statue of Justice holds a sword aloft in one hand, and set of scales in the other.

The statue of Justice on London's Old Bailey court.

Sang Hyun Cho, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Next after prudence comes justice. Our guide in this series on the virtues is Thomas Aquinas and, for him, virtue is about justice. Indeed, it is in justice (quoting Cicero) that

‘the lustre of virtue appears above all.’

Placing such a premium on justice might seem a little deflationary. Yes, we might think, by all means be just, but is that enough? Later in this series, we will see that Aquinas does, indeed, think that all human virtues – including justice – need to be set aflame with faith, hope, and love. But that doesn’t stop him from also thinking about the virtues from a human point of view, at least as a first pass. And within that frame – one in which he might also talk to a non-believer, for instance – he insists that to be virtuous is to be just. Indeed, we could make that comment even more deflationary, and say that the gold standard of justice is simply to be fair. Justice, again drawing on Cicero, is simply to give to each person what is due.

‘However true it might be that our communal life cannot attain its fullest realization through just exchange alone',

wrote the German writer Josef Pieper,

‘it is no less true that it is in the exemplary form of just this sort of justice that the irreducible core of social relations finds expression’.

We can wish for something that outstrips justice. Nonetheless, there is a steely realism in Thomas’s insistence that the foundation for virtue is acting justly, even simply being fair. Fortunate is the country at the moment where day-by-day newspaper coverage need not draw attention to people in positions of public trust failing to live even by that standard.

I once attended a lecture course as an visitor in Rome on ‘Justice and Allied Virtues in Thomas Aquinas’ that lasted for an entire semester, so there’s a lot that can be said on this front. I will limit myself to three angles: impartiality, dues, and the role of a useful minimum.

On impartiality

On the first, Aquinas offers an extended discussion of justice in terms of being no ‘respecter of persons’: which is to say, in terms of showing impartiality. His example strikes home for anyone, such as myself, who works in a university:

if you promote someone to a professorship on account of his having sufficient knowledge, you consider the due cause, not the person; but if, in conferring something on someone, you consider in him not the fact that what you give him is proportionate or due to him, but the fact that he is this particular person (e.g. Peter or Martin), then there is ‘respect of the person’, since you give him something not for some cause that renders him worthy of it, but simply because he is this person… for instance if a man promote someone… because he is rich or because he is a relative of his.

As I write this, the newspapers are full of a story about an ex-Prime Minister promoting someone to a position of public honour and trust in a torturous story that involves both wealth and a relative.

On dues

Justice is the lodestone of virtue, according to Aquinas. Above all things, ‘do justice’. Justice is not quite the foundation, however. Justice looks beyond itself to ‘right’, or ‘what is due’. Justice is secondary, because it recognises and responds to ‘right’ or ‘due’ (today, we might say to ‘rights’ or ‘dues’); it does not create them. Those comments would mean a great deal to a group of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, all followers of Aquinas, who rose above the rapacious expansion of the West, and fought for the rights of indigenous people. They left the foundations of international law as part of that legacy. Among them were Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) and Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), both Dominican friars. They offer, to my mind, perhaps the most glorious moment in the whole history of the river of writing and thinking that has sprung from the life and works of Aquinas.

Opposing, at various time, pretty much the entire establishment of the Spanish Empire, they argued that the indigenous people of the ‘New World’ had inviolable rights, such that justice required Europeans to recognise their right to their lands, and to self-government. This rested on the idea that justice deals with what is due, or right. We do not make this up; we are confronted by it. It is attached to, it springs from, human nature simply as such. And, ultimately, it springs from the fact that to be faced by a human being is to be faced with a creature, which is to say, by the handiwork of God.

When he was still in his twenties, and earning his spurs as a teacher, Aquinas had tackled this subject:

something is said to be just not only because it is willed by God, but because it is due to a certain created thing according to the order of creature to creature. For nothing can be due to anything except by reason of its own nature or condition. However, the cause of a thing’s nature and properties is the divine will; and therefore the whole order of justice can be traced back to the divine will as to its origin.

Justice is secondary to right, is responsive to right, and justice is the backstop of the virtues precisely for that reason. If it set its own terms, if it ruled its own roost, it might determine, for instance, that dispossession is just. Who would be to say otherwise? But justice does not set its own terms; it bows before what is right or due. That is why, in the estimation of those Spanish Thomists, it inclines its head in reverence before the dignity and rights of native South Americans, rather than to the Spanish Crown: or at least, it should.

The useful minimum

Approached another way, we might say that justice is a sort of minimum, but also that minima are important because they mark out the limits of human relationships. The twentieth century Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote compellingly about this. The Ten Commandments are all about justice, and while they don’t lay out the beating heart of a good and cohesive social life, they do mark its limits. McCabe (again following Aquinas) thought that the best emphasis in thinking about ethics ought to be on friendship, since that is characteristic of human life at its fullest. It’s clearly not enough, for friendship, simply not to steal, bear false witness, or commit adultery. Nonetheless, those precepts are of enduring worth, because we can be sure that to transgress those bounds is to bring friendship to an end. It’s because of that emphasis on friendship, and guarding against whatever endangers it, that ‘bearing false witness’ was such a major concern for Aquinas. In his long treatment of justice, the subject of theft or murder each receives only a single section. On the other hand, misrepresentation of others – sins of the tongue (and, today, of the keyboard) – receive four (on ‘reviling’, ‘backbiting’, ‘tale-bearing’, and ‘derision’). As the Book of Proverbs has it, which Aquinas quotes at this point, ‘A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches’. The weakness of so much writing on ethics in the past century has been a tendency to make it about difficult problems that are so rare that it’s usually other people who face them. The niggling, awkward glory of the virtue tradition is that it lands squarely in the middle of life, for instance in being just – simply fair – in what we next type on Twitter.