On the Wrongfulness of Bank Contributions to Financial Crises

This chapter discusses the virtue ethical, consequentialist, and contractualist perspectives on bank contributions to financial crises. It begins from the observation that a central wrong-making feature of bank contributions is simply that they constitute causal contributions to a collective harm. Both the virtue ethical and the consequentialist perspective can capture this wrong-making feature, but each perspective comes with significant drawbacks. The virtue ethical perspective is likely to consider too few bank contributions as wrong, while the consequentialist perspective considers bank contributions permissible insofar as the costs imposed on to victims of financial crises are offset via benefits that accrue to some other party. By avoiding the issues of both the virtue ethical and the consequentialist perspective, the contractualist perspective is able to capture the central wrong-making feature of bank contributions in a much more satisfying manner than its rivals.