Greed
Alexander Sokol
Related terms: anthropocentrism, biocentrism, capitalism, care, community, consumption, environment, flourishing, future generations, generosity, justice, kinship, land ethic, naturalism, nature, resonance, solidarity, sustainability, vice, virtue.
‘Greed’ is the propensity to want excessively for oneself. In our everyday usage, the notion of greed may refer to both behaviour, attitudes or traits. For example, one may say “he acted greedily when he ate the whole cake” and mean that the act constituted an instance of greed. One may also say “he brings a greedy attitude to the negotiation” and mean that the person in the particular situation demonstrates a particular type of thinking, acting or feeling. Or one may say “he is a greedy kind of person” and mean that he is an individual in whom greediness is an ingrained trait which regularly affects his dealings. In these examples, greed manifests in an individual, but the concept may readily be extended to groups, e.g. corporations or societies, by analogy.
Traditionally, greed is taken to be something bad, e.g., a vicious character trait – a vice. To make sense of this, one must understand what traits are and how traits may be identified as virtues or vices. Modern virtue ethics is the branch of modern ethics whose object is the study of character traits and their moral nature. Its inception is often considered to be the seminal paper (Anscombe 1958). Modern virtue ethics draws on the history of classical virtue ethics, particularly Aristotelian philosophy (Sanford 2019) and occasionally scholastic philosophy (Foot 2002; Geach 1977), and fuses this with modern psychology and moral philosophy. Major claims of modern virtue ethics are:
- What constitutes flourishing for humans depends on facts about human nature (Foot 2001)
- It is a fact about human nature that humans have character traits (Russell 2009)
- It is a fact about human nature that certain traits benefit or hinder human flourishing (Foot 2001).
Traits that benefit human flourishing are named virtues, while traits that hinder human flourishing are named vices. Traits that do neither are named neither virtues nor vices. On this view, the sort of creatures that humans are informs the reasons for humans requiring virtues. For example, the reason that humans require courage while oak trees do not is that humans possess the capacity for conscious action, and sometimes the prudential course of action is obstructed by fear, requiring courage to overcome, while oak trees, having no emotions and ostensibly little volition, do not find themselves facing such taxing circumstances.
Thus, modern virtue ethics is a naturalist theory in the sense of proposing that moral facts depend on natural facts (Mizzoni 2017) and denying the Humean is-ought divide, i.e. that what ought to be the case cannot be inferred from what is the case (Hume 2025). Notions of human nature and human flourishing risk reductionism by claiming that all humans have the same or at least similar needs. The study of the veracity of such claims is a part of modern virtue ethics (Foot 2001). To mitigate such risk of reductionism, virtue ethicists have proposed that the goal of virtue ethics is not to present universally required character traits, but to claim that particular traits are conducive to flourishing for the majority of human individuals (Foot 2001), though not necessarily for every individual.
Modern virtue ethics has taken pains to properly define virtuous and vicious traits. In psychological parlance, personality traits may be considered collections of cognitive-affective traits (Mischel and Shoda 1995). Such cognitive-affective traits are composed of concepts, expectations, affects (e.g., emotions), goals, values, competencies and plans. Virtues and vices are then the collections of cognitive-affective traits which significantly benefit or hinder flourishing (Russell 2009). Therefore, virtues and vices are not only about how we behave, but also about how we feel and about how we make sense of the world.
Some traditional folklore virtues are justice, generosity and solidarity. An account of these virtues will allow for an argument for why greed is a vice. One way of accounting for these virtues is to claim
- An agent of justice is concerned with sharing goods and burdens according to merit.
- An agent of generosity is concerned with sharing goods independently of merit.
- An agent of solidarity is concerned with group unity and fellowship.
A major virtue ethical claim is that humans are rational social animals who flourish best in groups (Hursthouse 1999). For harmonious group living, humans must have a system for sharing goods and burdens; they must sometimes share goods for reasons unrelated to justice to retain group cohesion and membership, and they must have a sense of unity and fellowship. On these assumptions, the traits of justice, generosity and solidarity are virtues, because they are enablers of harmonious group living. The reasons for action arising from different virtues may pull the individual in different directions. In practice, therefore, virtuous individuals must weigh their reasons for action arising from distinct virtues against each other. The ability to successfully do so is known as the virtue of practical intelligence (Russell 2009).
Greed, then, is a vice because it hinders justice, generosity and solidarity. It hinders justice and generosity by excessively keeping goods for oneself, and it hinders solidarity by supporting an excessive sense of individual priority to the detriment of group priority. Virtue ethics conventionally proposes that ethical living is not codifiable, i.e. not reducible to a fixed set of rules (Hursthouse 1999). Therefore, there is no single expression of what might define “excessively keeping goods for oneself”. Rather, there are levels of keeping goods for oneself which are more or less plausibly excessive, and concrete judgements of this must be left to the virtuous agent. Nonetheless, the dimensions of greed may be studied, and judgments of what may plausibly be said to constitute wanting excessively for oneself may be set forth.
This virtue ethical conceptualisation of virtues and vices related to group living supports a variety of critiques against modern society. Here, in the context of environmental humanities, critiques of capitalist society and critiques of non-sustainable society will be considered with a view towards illuminating the nature of greed.
Capitalism is broadly supported by two major institutions: private ownership of the means of production and freedom of contract (Hoppe 1989). Therefore, capitalism is supported by variants of liberal philosophy arguing for the justice of such institutions. According to a libertarian conception of justice, justice is done when all exchanges of ownership, including partial or whole ownership of individual bodies, are contracted freely (Nozick 1974). According to a market liberal conception of justice, justice is done when all exchanges of ownership are carried out in free markets under certain optimality conditions (Mankiw 2010; Sandel 2020). Virtue ethicists may propose that both these conceptions of justice are unjust by applying three venues of argument, namely:
- demonstrating that neither conception tracks merit as conceived more broadly than merit in the sense of market valuation (Heath 2018).
- noting that neither conception of justice weighs the reasons of justice against other reasons, such as reasons of generosity and solidarity (Sandel 2020).
- noting that the liberal propositions about constitutive human psychology, in particular the notions of self and of autonomous will, buttressing the liberal concept of right-bearing free agents autonomously pursuing life plans by free contracting (Nozick 1974), are implausible (Sandel 1998).
In summary, virtue ethicists may propose that capitalism is unjust because it requires support by implausible conceptions of justice, resulting in unjust distributions of goods while supporting greed in those individuals whose cognitive-affective traits underpin belief and action based on liberal conceptions of justice. Capitalism may obviously, with equal precision, be critiqued from other perspectives, e.g. perspectives accounting for ecological concerns. However, since arguments gain in force by requiring fewer assumptions, it is a strength of virtue ethics that it does not require the inclusion of independent ecological concerns to classify capitalism as unjust.
As most Western societies are capitalist, capitalist practices also underpin the current planetary crisis of sustainability. According to one definition, a practice is ‘sustainable’ when it proceeds in a manner that may be continued more or less indefinitely (Bassham 2020). By this definition, sustainability is required for the indefinite continuation of human flourishing, since humans require some level of consumption to flourish. Sustainability, defined in this manner, requires the absence of continual net depletion of natural resources and the absence of continual net degradation of the environment. Modern Western societies, therefore, are plainly unsustainable (Bassham 2020).
Most people do not require sophisticated ethical theories to identify unsustainability as bad, since the prevailing and empirically supported view is that our unsustainable practices will result in the destruction of much commonly seen as valuable, such as individual human lives, cultural heritage sites, natural land, species biodiversity, etc. (United Nations 2024). Nonetheless, ethical theories may contribute to understanding what precisely is lost when our planetary environment degrades and what each of us perhaps ought to do (Des Jardins 2001). Modern virtue ethics contributes to this by identifying in what sense current unsustainable practices are supported by vices such as greed and how such vices will curtail our ability to characteristically humanly flourish.
Unsustainability is caused by greed, because unsustainability is caused by excessive consumption and thus by the propensity to want excessively for oneself. For this claim to be valid, current consumption levels must hinder human flourishing. However, in the short term and on an individual basis, much consumption at least partially benefits human flourishing. Therefore, claims about excessive consumption must argue from the long term or from partial hindering of human flourishing.
One avenue of argument concerns our relationship to future generations. Long-term environmental degradation (e.g. degradation whose effects continue over the course of more than a hundred years) hinders not the flourishing of humans currently alive, but the flourishing of humans who are yet to be born. In general, ethical claims about future populations pose unique challenges (Parfit 1984), but ethical claims that we have no stake at all in the lives of future generations, even generations of the far future, are difficult to establish and will, by way of example, strike many people as counterintuitive and implausible (Roberts 2024). Future generations may not be as important to us as current generations, but they do possess some importance. Another avenue of argument concerns the independent value of the environment. Much of environmental ethics is concerned with analysing claims about such independent value and refuting the idea that all value is value embedded in human lives (Bassham 2020). This is the anthropocentric criticism, famously raised in a thought experiment by Richard Routley (Routley 1973), where Routley asks whether a hypothetical “last man” would do wrong by painlessly eliminating all life in the universe immediately before his own death. Certain parts of anthropocentric ethics must, on pain of inconsistency, declare that such elimination would not be wrong. To many, this seems mistaken.
Virtue ethics proceeds by way of a different method. Virtue ethics is anthropocentric but contains a broad concept of value – flourishing – and contains no categorical imperatives and few unconditional duties due to its claim about non-codifiability of ethics. Instead, virtue ethics proposes that certain goods, constitutive of human flourishing, uniquely obtain through certain virtues and corresponding beliefs, affects and actions. In particular, virtue ethics may contend that Routley’s hypothetical last man would indeed lose something constitutive of human flourishing by eliminating all life in the universe, namely, the ability to rationally see himself as a custodian of nature and as possessing a bond of care with other forms of life.
This method of argument illustrates the virtue ethical analysis of how current consumption levels negatively affect human flourishing and therefore constitute greed. Humans are rational social animals, and a substantial component of our flourishing consists of feelings of kinship with external parts of the world, supporting experiences of resonance (Rosa 2020). Realising such feelings of kinship in congruence with rationality necessitates certain affects and behaviour, namely caring affects and behaviour as proposed by ethical theories of care (Shafer-Landau 2001; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) and recognition of nonhuman parts of nature as ends in themselves as proposed by biocentric ethical theories (Singer 1975; Haraway 2007) and land ethics (Aldo 1949). Therefore, while ancient virtue ethics were comparatively oblivious to non-anthropocentric ethical concerns, modern virtue ethics is fully compatible with them. It may be noted that the same is also true of modern deontological ethics (i.e. right and duty-oriented ethics) and, to some degree, modern utilitarian ethics (i.e. utility-maximising ethics), even if concepts such as greed are secondary or absent in such theories.
Kinship may thus be claimed as necessary for full human flourishing. Contrariwise, levels of consumption risking wholesale environmental degradation and the well-being of future generations are constitutive of greed and preclude the rational conception of ourselves as possessing and honouring bonds of kinship with nature and humanity at large, plausibly resulting in crises of identity, an incapacity to feel at home in the world, and ultimately the abject loneliness of the kinless human.
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