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Resnicoff on Religion and Unethical Business Practices

Steven H. Resnicoff (DePaul University College of Law) has posted The Causes and Cures of Unethical Business Practices – A Jewish Perspective. The abstract follows.

The workplace seems increasingly characterized by unethical practices between and among employers, employees, customers, competitors and others, despite the fact that most leading religious traditions proscribe such conduct and many of the actors self-identify as religious. This paper examines this phenomenon through the prism of Jewish tradition. It identifies specific Jewish teachings that explain many types of misconduct and, where appropriate, it cites modern secular experiments that confirm these Judaic insights. Based on these teachings, the paper prescribes a series of steps that, if implemented, could enhance the integrity of business and financial actors. This is a working paper in connection with the Henry Kaufman Forum on Religious Traditions and Business Behavior sponsored by the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ihssen, “They Who Give from Evil”

A while back on PrawfsBlawg, my colleague Marc DeGirolami wrote a very interesting post on usury. Although Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all condemn the practice, capitalism depends on lending money at interest. Christians, at least, draw a line between lending money at interest, which is acceptable, and charging an unreasonably high rate of interest, which is a kind of avarice. Christians used to take this very seriously, indeed. The famous Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, for example, executed by Giotto at the start of the Renaissance, was built to atone for the donor’s sin of usury.

Religion scholar Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen (Pacific Lutheran) has published a monograph, They Who Give from Evil: The Response of the Eastern Church to Moneylending in the Early Christian Era (Pickwick 2012), which discusses the treatment of usury in the Early Church. The publisher’s description:

They Who Give from Evil: The Response of the Eastern Church to Moneylending in the Early Christian Era considers St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century sermons against usury. Both brothers were concerned with the economic and theological implications of destructive and corrosive practices of lending at high rates of interest and implications for both on the community and the individual soul of lender and debtor. Analysis of their sermons is placed within the context of early Greek Christian responses to lending and borrowing, which were informed by Jewish, Greek, and Roman attitudes toward debt.

And here is an interesting interview in which the author discusses what the  Church Fathers would make of the current subprime mortgage crisis. The Fathers, it seems, would have admonished lenders and borrowers both.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Coming Economic Crisis in Egypt?

Here at CLR Forum, we’ve been thinking about the role of Islamic law in Egypt’s new constitution, which voters approved last month. The new constitution represents a significant victory for Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. But, as Walter Russell Mead points out on his blog today, the Brotherhood still faces major problems. Egypt is on the brink of an economic crisis that the Morsi government seems unable to handle.

Since the Arab Spring, foreign investors and tourists have fled Egypt and the country’s currency has plummeted. Regional allies like Turkey and Qatar have lent Egypt billions of dollars, but the IMF, which has the real money, is refusing to advance roughly $5 billion until the Morsi government implements an austerity package. This would mean political disaster for Morsi, since many Egyptians depend on government food subsidies to survive. So things are in a holding pattern. Meanwhile, the bad economy is creating a security crisis. Egyptians complain about a lack of basic safety.

It’s hard to know what will come next. Perhaps frustrated Egyptians will decide that the problem is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamist enough and turn to the even more radical Salafis. I can’t imagine the Salafis would have a better relationship with the IMF, though. Or perhaps a military strongman who mouths the correct pieties will take charge. Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which Egyptians turn to the secular liberals whom the West hoped would run Egypt after the fall of Mubarak.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Shopping on Sunday

Every year, it seems, Christmas becomes more commercialized. In NYC this year, we started seeing Christmas decorations in stores in October. In October. Christmas is starting to lap Halloween.

I was thinking about this when I read that the Catholic Church in Italy is working to repeal that country’s new Sunday shopping law. Earlier this year, in an effort to stimulate the Italian economy, the Monti government enacted a law allowing shops across the country to open on Sundays. The new law is opposed by a coalition including the Vatican, small shop owners, and some secularists who argue that a nationwide day of rest is in everyone’s interest. The Italian campaign is part of a larger movement called the European Sunday Alliance, a network of “trade unions, civil society organizations and religious communities committed to raise awareness of the unique value of synchronized free time for our European societies.”

The Sunday Alliance is not at heart religious . Sure, some Christians argue that Sunday shopping violates the Sabbath, but mostly the movement has secular goals, such as working less, putting a brake on commercialism, and spending time with family and friends. To be sure, small shop owners have an economic interest in ending Sunday shopping, since the practice disproportionately favors big-box retailers. But it’s not like the big-box retailers who favor Sunday shopping are being altruistic. They’re only advancing their economic interests.

The arguments for allowing Sunday shopping are pretty straightforward. Increased commercial activity means more wealth and greater tax revenues. More people will be able to find employment. And there is the matter of consumer choice. If Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

If Only the Aztecs Had Known

Here’s something you don’t see every day, even if you follow the law reviews. On SSRN, George Mason University economist Peter Leeson has posted an abstract for a new paper that explains human sacrifice in terms of property rights (Human Sacrifice). Although economists typically dismiss the practice as irrational, he argues, human sacrifice is actually a rational social strategy that allows a group to signal to outsiders that it’s poor and therefore not worth plundering. Religious commandments are useful in creating incentives — to get people comfortable with the idea of ritual immolation — but really are only secondary. Leeson hasn’t posted his paper on SSRN, but you can find it on his website. Here’s the abstract:

This paper develops a theory of rational human sacrifice: the purchase and ritual slaughter of innocent persons to appease divinities. I argue that human sacrifice is a technology for protecting property rights. It improves property protection by destroying part of sacrificing communities’ wealth, which depresses the expected payoff of plundering them. Human sacrifice is a highly effective vehicle for destroying wealth to protect property rights because it’s an excellent public meter of wealth destruction. Human sacrifice is spectacular, publicly communicating a sacrificer’s destruction far and wide. And immolating a live person is nearly impossible to fake, verifying the amount of wealth a sacrificer has destroyed. To incentivize community members to contribute wealth for destruction, human sacrifice is presented as a religious obligation. To test my theory I investigate human sacrifice as practiced by the most significant and well-known society of ritual immolators in the modern era: the Konds of Orissa, India. Evidence from the Konds supports my theory’s predictions.

I don’t know enough about the Konds or economics to evaluate Professor Leeson’s paper, but it does suggest a strategy for religious communities that seek to influence public debate. Don’t make sectarian arguments that might be inaccessible and off-putting to non-believers. Find an economist.

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Kuran, “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East”

This November, Princeton University Press will publish The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East by Timur Kuran (Duke University). The publisher’s description follows.

In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind–in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world’s leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions.

Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life–including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies–all characteristic of the region’s economies today and all legacies of its economic history–will take generations to overcome.

The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

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Leeson on The Law and Economics of Monastic Malediction

Peter T. Leeson (George Mason U.) has posted “God Damn”: The Law and Economics of Monastic Malediction. The abstract follows.

Today monks are known for turning the other cheek, honoring saints, and blessing humanity with brotherly love. But for centuries they were known equally for fulminating their foes, humiliating saints, and casting calamitous curses at persons who crossed them. Clerics called these curses “maledictions.” This article argues that medieval communities of monks and canons used maledictions to protect their property against predators where government and physical self-help were unavailable to them. To explain how they did this I develop a theory of cursing with rational agents. I show that curses capable of improving property protection when cursors and their targets are rational must satisfy three conditions. They must be grounded in targets’ existing beliefs, monopolized by cursors, and unfalsifiable. Malediction satisfied these conditions, making it an effective institutional substitute for conventional institutions of clerical property protection.

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Bell, “The Economy of Desire”

This November, Baker Publishing Group will publish The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World by Daniel M. Bell (Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary). The publisher’s description follows.

In this addition to the award-winning Church and Postmodern Culture series, Daniel Bell compares and contrasts capitalism and Christianity, showing how Christianity provides resources for faithfully navigating the postmodern global economy. He approaches capitalism and Christianity as alternative visions of humanity, God, and the good life. Considering faith and economics in terms of how desire is shaped, he casts the conflict as one between different disciplines of desire.

Bell engages the work of two important postmodern philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to illuminate the nature of the postmodern world that the church currently inhabits. He considers how the global economy deforms desire in a manner that distorts human relations with God and one another. In contrast, he presents Christianity and the tradition of the works of mercy as a way beyond capitalism and socialism, beyond philanthropy and welfare. Christianity heals desire, renewing human relations and enabling communion with God. This book will work well for courses in theology and ethics, philosophical theology, discipleship, and Christianity and culture. Pastors and church leaders will also find it enlightening.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Dagan and Fisher on Commodification

It doesn’t address religion as such, but a new piece on SSRN, The State and the Market–A Parable: On the State’s Commodifying Effects, raises issues that law and religion scholars may find interesting. Over the last generation, more and more aspects of life have become matters of the market. People can make contracts about lots of things that once were off limits. Some scholars argue that this trend has gone too far, that certain subjects, like family relationships, relate so closely to human personality that their commodifcation does violence to something essential. The authors of this new piece, Tsilly Dagan (Bar-Ilan) and Talia Fisher (Tel Aviv) are skeptical of the anti-commodification position, arguing that state regulation may have commodifying effects as well. Their paper is entirely secular, but religious jurisprudence traditionally opposes commodification as well, and scholars who work in that field may find the discussion of commodification suggestive. The abstract follows.

Commodification has become the central parameter in delineating the contours of the market and in the division of labor between the market and the state. The commodification critique has become a ‘buzz word’ against the market and thus in support of State intervention. In what has been termed “taboo trades” – human organs, reproductive capacities, sexuality and the like – market-based orders have been condemned on the basis of commodification, thus leaving the floor open for state-intervention by regulation. The central argument of this article is that the commodificatory effects, often associated with monetary transactions, are not exclusive to monetized exchanges nor to the market arena. Rather, State intervention, as such, involves similar reductive effects, in light of its inherent itemizing, categorizing and ranking nature. This understanding has a significant implication for the structuring of the market-state debate: In light of the fact that upon closer scrutiny state ordering shares similar commodificatory effects with the market – we argue that it is not enough to raise the commodification banner in order to justify state intervention. Put differently, an implicit premise in the prevailing commodification discourse is that where the market commodifies, the state is necessarily neutral. However, state intervention – we will show – suffers from similar flaws. Another purpose of viewing commodification through the prism of State intervention is to expose the multi-faceted nature of the anti-commodificatory sentiment. Expanding the horizons of the commodification discourse beyond the traditional contexts of taboo markets to the unexplored terrain of state regulation exposes the fact that money is but one instance of a whole family of cases where thick social interactions are translated into a uni-dimensional currency that has a reductive effect on them.