The Modern Testament: On Society and Individuals

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A clear implication of this teaching is that all obligations, including debt obligations, would be forgiven in the process. The jubilee year is a moral and religious issue concept, not an economic one, and was not practised in actual fact. However, it has been an inspiration to the modern debt jubilee movement , which drops the religious context but makes political and economic and to a degree moral arguments for extinguishing all or at least some of the debts the world is currently drowning in.

The Modern Testament : On Society and Individuals

The main economic justification for a modern debt jubilee is simple. With debts forgiven, governments, households and individuals could spend the money currently devoted to interest and principal repayments on consumption which would, in turn, increase economic demand and encourage economic growth, and eventually take the world economy out of constant crisis.

This would also be an ethical policy, which lifts debts incurred through financial manipulation such as unscrupulous mortgage bankers and undue political influence such as taxpayer bailouts of banks that caused the crisis in the first place. It would be fairer than the current arrangement, in which current debt largely burdens poor people with repayments falling to rich and culpable individuals and institutions.

There is some precedent for debt relief as a solution to economic crisis. Perhaps the most famous example was the campaign launched by U2 rock star Bono to provide debt relief to developing countries. The idea has similar foundations to the current debt jubilee movement, except it is much more narrow in focus.

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Private markets also deal regularly with situations where a debtor can no longer repay debt, technically referred to as a default. In those cases, a debt workout may be instituted which may include a stretching out of payments, forgiveness of parts or all of the debt by lenders, or even an outside infusion of capital to the indebted party to help them keep current with payments the major way in which the European Union EU is dealing with public debt crises in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

So private lenders often forgive debt but, unlike a jubilee, this is not out of goodwill. The intent is to get as much of the loan repaid as possible, even if this might be injurious to the borrower or the larger economy. So there is a precedent for debt forgiveness. But would the widespread and broad application of such forgiveness as called for by the modern debt jubilee movement actually work? The experience of developing country debt forgiveness suggests that forgiveness there did have the desired effect of freeing up resources in low-income countries which could then go to more pressing development needs.

However, some resources thus freed up got wasted anyway and an argument was also made that forgiving loans frittered away by government merely encourages such recklessness in the future. This certainly could be a risk for a modern debt jubilee.

Also, a blanket debt jubilee within the developed world would be much bigger, touching the greater part of the world economic, financial and monetary system. While a debt jubilee would cancel the burden to the borrower, it also would eliminate the value of the debt as source of wealth to the lender. Imagine if all Greek government debt was cancelled. The Greek economy would be better off, but all the banks who made the loans could well be wiped out.

This is the main reason why the EU is going to such great lengths to bail out Greece, rather than eliminate or allow a debt default there. There are ways to avoid this problem, especially if central banks printed special money to give to debtors specifically to pay back debt, a form of cancelling the debt without actually eliminating it as an asset to the lender. Everyone is created equal at birth. Everything has equal right to exist and develop by its nature. Another standard of equality is equality of opportunity, "the idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak, are the same for everyone".

This means that, for any social equality issue dealing with wealth, social prestige, power, or any of that sort, the equality of opportunity standard can defend the idea that everyone had the same start. This views society almost as a game and any of the differences in equality are due to luck and playing the "game" to one's best ability.

Conley gives an example of this standard of equality by using a game of Monopoly to describe society. He claims that "Monopoly follows the rules of equality of opportunity" by explaining that everyone had an equal chance when starting the game and any differences were a result of the luck of the dice roll and the skill of the player to make choices to benefit their wealth.

Comparing this example to society, the standard of equality of opportunity eliminates inequality because the rules of the games in society are still fair and the same for all; therefore making any existing inequalities in society fair. Jacobs, the author of Pursuing Equal Opportunities: The Theory and Practice of Egalitarian Justice , talks about equality of opportunity and its importance relating to egalitarian justice.

This concept points out factors like race , gender , class etc. Conley also mentions that this standard of equality is at the heart of a bourgeois society , such as a modern capitalist society, or "a society of commerce in which the maximization of profit is the primary business incentive".

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This ideology was used by them to argue that Jim Crow laws were incompatible with the standard of equality of opportunity. Another notion of equality introduced by Conley is equality of condition. Through this framework is the idea that everyone should have an equal starting point. Conley goes back to his example of a game of Monopoly to explain this standard.

Here is where social engineering comes into play where we change society in order to give an equality of condition to everyone based on race, gender, class, religion etc. Kahn, author of Academic Freedom and the Inclusive University , talks about equality of condition in their work as well and how it correlates to freedom of individuals. They claim that in order to have individual freedom there needs to be equality of condition "which requires much more than the elimination of legal barriers: A fourth standard of equality is equality of outcome, which is "a position that argues each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness".

In this standard of equality, the idea is that "everyone contributes to society and to the economy according to what they do best.

When defining equality of outcome in education , "the goals should not be the liberal one of equality of access but equality of outcome for the median number of each identifiable non-educationally defined group, i. The equality of outcome in Hewitt's point of view is supposed to result in "a comparable range of achievements between a specific disadvantaged group — such as an ethnic minority , women, lone parents and the disabled — and society as a whole".

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This article includes a list of references , but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. October Learn how and when to remove this template message. Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. You May Ask Yourself 3rd ed. A Very Short Introduction. Academic Freedom and the Inclusive University.

Social Equality; The Challenge of Today.

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