Ethics do underpin financial decisions. So where’s the justice of trickle-down economics?

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According to panellists at a Religion Media Centre online briefing held on 11 October, the ethics underpinning the current financial chaos in the UK are transparent — lack of justice, less love for the neighbour, personal independence at the expense of communities, decisions without evidence and a democratic deficit. All of which points to even more fundamental questions of what kind of society do we want to live in?

Trickle-down economics was deeply problematic for Rachel Muers, a professor specialising in modern Christian doctrine and ethics at Edinburgh University.

The presumption that everybody’s aim was to become powerful, strong, independent and invulnerable was a fantasy and a “denial of one of the most fundamental commonalities of humanity, that we’re vulnerable, interdependent, we rely on one another and on the natural environment”.