Phil Cafaro on Greed from "Gluttony, Arrogance, Greed, and Apathy: An Exploration of Environmental Vice"

Greed is “an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves,

especially with respect to material wealth.”55 It is natural to enjoy material possessions;

it is necessary, in modern society, to deal with money. But the desire for

wealth may prove excessive for several reasons. It may leave us perpetually unsatisfied;

as one philosopher puts it, greed is “an insatiable longing” that actual possession cannot

slake.56 The greedy person is often portrayed as rich. He has more than most people,

more, perhaps, than he knows what to do with. Still, it is not enough. Greed may

also lead us to neglect other, more important aspects of life. Another picture of greed

is the miser counting gold pieces, alone in a windowless room, without friends, without

interest in the world outside. The clink, clink, clink of each coin as it hits the pile

echoes hollowly down the empty halls.

     These are just images, of course, proving nothing. To show greed’s viciousness, we

must explore how too great an emphasis on money or possessions leads to harm. We

must show, too, that there are limits to what we need, deserve, or really can use here.

Greed is perhaps the most selfish-making vice; in its grip we become incapable of

generosity and immune to the demands of justice. When Andrew Carnegie and Henry

Clay Frick broke the Homestead steelworkers strike in 1892, they were among the

wealthiest men in America, but they had no intention of sharing any more of that

wealth with their workers than they could possibly avoid. No claims of justice, no consideration

of the good uses their workers could put that money to or the sheer pointlessness

of them amassing any more wealth, made any impression.

                  Cases such as Homestead or the oil companies’ injustices in Nigeria show how

greed can lead to great injustice. But even everyday, small-scale greed can lead to important

harms, accentuating differences in wealth, fueling envy in the poor and vanity

in the rich, and undermining the social bonds necessary for a happy society. Christians

have criticized avarice above all for these social harms. “Now shall you understand that

the relief for avarice is mercy and pity in large doses,” Chaucer’s Parson says: “Certainly,

the avaricious man shows no pity nor any mercy to the needy man; for he delights

in keeping his treasure and not in the rescuing or relieving of his fellow Christian.”

57 Aquinas condemned the hoarding of unnecessary possessions in clear terms,

stating that “whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the

poor for their sustenance.”58 To grasp possessions beyond this limit is unjust and idolatrous:

the worship of Mammon.


     Bible: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle ...

...than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.