Ethics and Finance: A Derridean perspective on uncertainty, risk and finance.

Ethical landscape created by finance's interaction with uncertainty

As politicians, economists and social scientists have alluded to, the way finance deals with uncertainty raises important ethical issues. Finance tends to conflate risk and uncertainty. This conflation of risk and uncertainty has played a key in role in allowing finance to make huge sums of profit, whilst at the same time also playing a critical role in recent financial crashes. Using Jacques Derrida's concept of ethics and justice this research project explores the ethical landscape that is created by finance's interaction with uncertainty.

Why an anthropological approach to studying this ethical landscape?

The numerous discussions that have occurred between economists, governments, politicians, and financial regulatory authorities on ways to embed ethics within finance, have relied upon perspectives from mainstream economics. However, as DeMartino, a heterodox economist, argues, this perspective proves insufficient. DeMartino argues what is needed is an anthropological approach to examining the workings of finance, to complicate the rational economic actor, to take a social and cultural approach to understanding finance; to reveal the perspectives that mainstream economics suppresses. These suppressed perspectives are key to interacting with the ethical landscape of finance.

A more nuanced approach

Much of the ethical analyses of the recent financial crisis of 2008 have focused on the unethical behaviour and greed of individual bankers. These explanations obscure as much as they reveal and do little to illuminate or disrupt the social world of finance. This research project proposes a more nuanced approach to examining the ethical landscape of finance that goes beyond the eternal fractions of greed and arrogance. This project examines the ethical landscape of finance by looking at the daily inner-workings of finance and the decision-making process of finance. That is, rather than analysing ethics from the vantage point of structure, power and agency, this project focuses on what Michael Lambek calls the 'ordinary ethics': the ethics of the daily workings of the financial world and the production of ethical subjects (Lambek 2011).

Specifically, the ethics of finance is explored by addressing three main questions. 1) How is uncertainty conceptualised by bankers, banks and financial/economic theory? 2) How does this conceptualisation of uncertainty inform the decision- making process involved in finance? And 3) How ethical is this conceptualisation of uncertainty?

I will use a range of sources to gather data to address the first two questions. I will use financial journalistic sources, interviews with bankers working in the City of London conducted by National Life Stories - an oral history fieldwork charity, interviews that I will conduct with bankers and economists. The data gained from these approaches will be analysed using Derrida's concept of justice and ethics to address question 3. Derrida's concept of justice and ethics is chosen in this project as it aligns closely with anthropological interests, and his analytical techniques prove particularly useful for analysing finance's interaction with uncertainty.

Potential application and benefits

This research will be particularly beneficial for policy makers, financial regulators, economists, other anthropologists, that wish to understand the internal workings and decision-making process of finance, from a social and anthropological perspective that is commonly shunned by those who analyse the financial world.