Virtue is not value. Value is not virtue. What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike. Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus. James Somers might find Hayek's…
I don't know. I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. (Virtue corresponding to filling human needs, value being economic value.) Is entertaining people virtuous at least potentially? if so, then there is nothing wrong with selling video games, movies, music, or whatever. If not, however then you have a problem because while the world make seem nice on paper (no money to Ho…
This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted.
Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book:
I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter.
We read this:
Dear friend, it is not possible for man to avert that
which God has decreed shall happen. No one believes
warnings, however true. Many of us Persians know our
danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do
as our leader bids us.
Verily 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in
knowledge and yet have no power over action.
I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek.
edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.