Justice, Temperance, and Unearned Income

In Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, he details the roles of currency and exchange in the Greek commercial economy of his time, while exploring the virtues necessary to live a good life. He explores their intersections—how people’s financial responsibilities are rooted in virtues, and vice versa. One must keep in mind, however, that his analysis is contemporary to a commercial state with fundamentally different economic circumstances, when compared to the modern, complex, global, capitalist economy. Thus, his ideations are impacted by different constraints: Aristotle did not, for example, factor in the ethical ramifications of stock exchanges, as those just didn’t exist in the fourth century before Jesus Christ. So, the repercussions of his conclusions about wealth acquisition and usury may also be different when considering the modern economy. Thus, in today’s world, a reasonable, intensive planning of one’s own wealth acquisition may not necessarily be detestable, from an Aristotelian perspective. Indeed, saving and investing one’s excess income may lead to capital gains that would allow one more financial resources to effect positive social change. However, such behavior only works with a disciplined attempt at temperance and material satiability.

On the Democratic Value of a Supposedly Egalitarian Experience

To Daniel Boorstein, we face an era of advancement like no other, comparable only in name to the renaissance, featuring an updated epithet: Rather than the “Republic of Letters,” whose citizens shared knowledge, we wake up to creation’s next revelation, the “Republic of Technology” (3). Following from this change, he argues that such an epoch is “not only more democratic, but also more in the American mode” (3) touting universal opportunity for entrance and engagement as its most critical feature. And yet, to Boorstein, those two supposed values of early America are in absence of a third, crucial to the new Republic: a “shared experience,” the foremost enabler of total democracy (3). And yet, whereas Boorstein’s contention that the Republic of Technology will ultimately yield a wholly democratic experience for the United States—if not the whole world—based on the egalitarian nature of technological advances that often make imprints across the entire national community, he fails to acknowledge the potentially catastrophic repercussions of the social forces leveraging that very technology. In prizing universal knowledge, the real and dramatic possibility of manipulation by higher forces is left untouched. As such, while the Republic of Technology may lead to a future of similar, comparable lifestyles for people across the nation, their experiences might be trodden upon by a misuse of power on the side of the informants, who hold the value of communal democracy in their very hands.