The fourth lent talk starts this way:
Christ has laboured on our behalf: he is the provider of mankind’s only free lunch. We may provide for one another as we receive and distribute what he has provided for us. God has acted generously to us, and invites and enables us to be generous and active on one another’s behalf. From him we may receive the abilities by which we can act and trade on our own account, for we are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it. We may discover that labour can be its own reward, for we may take pride in those whom we have served and lift and present them to God in thankfulness, and then we will no longer be alienated from the product of our labour. God is the one who is able to tell the true worth of our labour and our lives.
It continues:
But others came after Smith who were convinced that the entire existing tradition of deliberation about what is good, of Plato and Aristotle, and Augustine and Aquinas and their heirs, had become hopelessly tangled. They decided to give up on it, and cut moral language loose from all previous discussion of what is good or true. This new generation of political philosophers were the Utilitarians, best known of whom is Jeremy Bentham. The utilitarians wanted us to give up talking about right or wrong, or good or bad, even in the sense of ‘good for some purpose’, as when we say ‘this will not look good to other people’. Any good is good to the extent that enough people want to raise its price to the point at which its present owner is prepared to sell it. They have encouraged us to think only in terms of good as this is established by the satisfaction of the person who employs enough money to outbid all others and so claim it. It is the price mechanism that decides on the value of a thing, so the utility or usefulness of a thing is decided by the price that reflects the preferences of all agents in the market. Within this Utilitarian account, all our acts are seen as ‘preferences’, that is, as private.
And ends like this:
When the entertainment industries have opened up the family by driving a torrent of new desires through it. If they cannot resist, family members cease to sacrifice individual desires for family cohesion and are not able to work for one another or welcome one another’s service. As the family starts to break up, the state is there to provide for each of the individual pieces that have been created. We no longer need of one another because the state follows the private sector in to provide each ‘need’ so that it never becomes articulated as the need of one person for another. The result is not that each single parent is that each single parent is married to the state. The state has become the universal mediator, driven to smooth out all inequalities and with them all the complementarities, by which we need one another. The state cannot love. But it may exhaust our national economic resources in compensating for the love that we no longer give.
