Prof Ray Kinsella is director of the centre for insurance studies at UCD’s Smurfit School of Business writes in the Irish Times on Thursday.
Regulation a weak sibling of ethics and sin.

OPINION: Crimes against the moral order have fuelled the financial crisis. A philosopher talking in Dublin tomorrow will cast light on our lurking belief that regulation can prevent such crimes.

THIS WEEKEND one of the great moral philosophers of this century, Alasdair MacIntyre, visits Ireland to be feted by UCD’s school of philosophy on the occasion of his 80th birthday. His visit – and his public lecture tomorrow evening – provides a catalyst for a debate that could shape Ireland’s response to the economic crisis.

Unless – and until – the unfolding global crisis is seen as primarily the result of a seismic failure in the ethical order, it will neither be firewalled nor reversed. The scale of interventions by developed countries – aimed at stabilising banking institutions and markets, restoring confidence and trust and mitigating the economic consequences – are without precedent in peacetime.

They are not working. Contingent liabilities of enormous proportions now stretch into the future in the United States, the European Union and Ireland. At some stage this will, in itself, become a source of instability as the markets stall in the face of the cold reality that the “lender/capital-provider” of last resort is running out of balance-sheet and credibility.

Parallel to this process, it is now evident that what appeared initially to be an esoteric financial crisis has, in less than two years, metastasised into worldwide economic reversal that could neither be predicted nor modelled by the institutions it has devastated.

There are financial, economic and political factors that have exacerbated the crisis, giving it a fresh momentum. Ireland, like other countries, has its own self-inflicted wounds. But these are secondary to a deeper dynamic. This is about making wrong choices, misusing human freedom and a denial of the demands of a moral order that “modernity” had presumed to cast off. History – with the rise and fall of civilisations – provides support for this argument. One such example is Marxism.

Bernard Lonergan once observed that “a civilisation in decline digs its own grave with relentless consistency. It cannot be argued out of its destructive way.”

The West has subverted the very markets which, as a key utility, support the generation of wealth and its distribution, as well as international trade and welfare. It has become desensitised to any objective understanding of morality.

The sense of “right” and “wrong” at the heart of ethics, resonates the public’s perception of an intrinsic “unfairness” with various aspects of the economic crisis and its consequences.

Individuals, no less than corporates or countries, cannot be regulated to do the “right” or “moral” thing. Ethics is, by its nature “obedience to the unenforceable” and the ultimate guarantor of trust. This fact is at the heart of the seeming dichotomy. “It may be legal, but surely it can’t be right . . . ”

We are talking about “sin” here. A type of behaviour or mindset may not be a crime; it may not be prohibited by rules or regulation, but instinctively we recognise it for what it is – an offence against the moral order.

Ireland is inextricably bound up within a moral catharsis just as real as that which brought about the fall of Marxism, and of which the global financial crisis is the most immediate manifestation.

This is why Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of moral philosophy is of such importance. MacIntyre’s stature and the authority of his critique make this a very public and prophetic event.

OPINION: OUR CULTURE takes hope for granted. Since so much of what happens in the public square seems concerned with satisfying human desires for pleasure and happiness, this insight is not immediately available. But increasingly our culture seems to regard such satisfactions as add-on benefits to human existence, which is assumed to be automatic, writes John Waters

Embedded deep in our collective conversation is a delusional notion that human life continues in the manner of the machine, requiring only the correct physical conditions for maximum efficiency and the fuel to drive it. But human beings are delicate entities, depending for their survival and propulsion on some deep-set sense of meaning.

The great artists once understood this, but nowadays great art has been compartmentalised in our cultures, housed in an annex that is removed from the main thoroughfares and accessible only to an elite that insists on interpreting it as the creation of elevated human sophistication.

When someone kills himself, we respond with a strange duality of ostensibly contradictory thoughts. One the one hand, we are shocked at this deviation from what we think of as normal behaviour; on the other, we readily settle on a proffered explanation: he was depressed, he lost everything, his wife left him

The other day, the newspapers reported the death of the German billionaire Adolf Merckle, who threw himself in front of a train after the failure of talks with creditors designed to save his businesses from collapsing. He was said to have been “broken” by the collapse of his business empire. This makes sense. But should it?

It appears Merckle made some unwise investments in Volkswagen shares. But, before this, in common with many of us, he may have invested in something else: the idea that a life can be sustained by material conditions and considerations. This bogus idea is now rendered axiomatic as a result of the separation of public thought into discrete ideologies, leading to the promulgation of misplaced ideas about happiness and freedom.

Human life needs more to sustain it than what mankind is capable of imagining, proposing or generating. Ultimately, all we can create for ourselves are false hopes that sustain us for an instant and then dissolve, leaving us grasping for the next.

What gets us out of bed on any given morning may be identifiable as the promise of progress, the lure of money, the call of duty, the prospect of love, the imminence of spring, the sight of a new sunrise, the thought of a fix. But ultimately all these will lose their power.

Because we have dismantled the heavens and replaced them with a low-slung ceiling of our own clumsy construction, this disillusion is inevitable. No human life can fully blossom without a hope that is transcendent.

For related reasons, we see the present moment of economic disintegration as an aberration, when in truth it, too, is inevitable. All human systems are prone to failure, because man is flawed and doomed to misuse his freedom.

We are beginning to perceive that existing words, like “downturn” and “recession”, are inadequate in conveying the precise nature of present events.

For what is emerging seems not so much a periodic dip in economic fortunes as a self-inflicted wound arising from the fear and insecurity of human beings. Because we could not trust ourselves to the future, we have destroyed even the present. This, then, at its roots, is a human crisis rather than a merely economic one, and it flows directly from a collapse in our understanding of our own natures.

In a rather simplistic sense, this arises from the loss of what used to be conveyed, however clumsily and ineffectively, by religion. Because of the corruption of our public thought, the very phrase “return to God” conveys merely the idea of rushing to a spurious form of consolation because reality has started to collapse. What is collapsing, however, is not reality, but the flimsy construct that man engineered out of his own desire to replace God on the throne.

What we need, then, apart from fixing the broken systems, is to become conscious again of the essential nature of humanity: mortal, dependent and primed with desire that nothing on earth can satisfy.

Tonight, in the Kelly Theatre at the National College of Ireland, in the heart of the Financial Services Centre in Dublin, I will have the privilege of introducing a discussion on these very topics, in the company of the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, and Fr Julián Carrón, president of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. The title of the discussion, which begins at 6.30pm, is: Beyond Optimism, Hope.

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By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”
Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”
But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.
“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”
The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.
The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.
The identities of the bureau’s experts have not been made public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members said their organization had met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted on this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are academy members were involved.
The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.
A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”
Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”
The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.
Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been writing letters about their concerns to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler, they asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden titles? But the bureau did that last year, when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials by nine publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.
The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May when several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono. They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”
Mr. Zwiebel asked, “Since when does the government, even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of religious study and practice?”
The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was not a slam-dunk case.
“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”
The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists indicate their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.
Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”
“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.
“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”