November 20, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
As part of its effort to pose “big questions,” the John Templeton Foundation is asking scholars, politicians, and scientists a key concern during America’s financial crisis — does the “free market erode moral character”?
In videos and essays on its Web site, the foundation has collected a variety of answers from a broad swath of people.
For example, Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, argues that free markets require morals, but “free markets are no guarantor of moral character. As today’s cultural environment shows, the free market tends to heighten certain moral risks.”
And Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., writes, “Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so.”
This is the fourth in a series of questions Templeton, in West Conshohocken, Pa., has posed to experts.
Previous inquiries examined whether money will solve Africa’s development hurdles, does science make religious faith obsolete, and what is the purpose of the universe.
Big questions, indeed.
What do you think of Templeton’s effort? What questions would you like it to ask?
