The Ethics of Banking: Conclusions from the Financial Crisis (Issues ...

Banking Secrecy, the Right to Privacy, and the State 115
elimination of the private sphere, there is no distinction between public and private
and no safeguard against political power. 15
It seems as though Plato accepted some of these points of criticism. In the retraction
of his political philosophy in his Laws, he gives up the idea of communal
property and of the elimination of the difference between polis and oikos.
Christianity in its infancy tended to heighten the distinction between private and
public into the distinction between the public sphere and the sphere of religious
inwardness. Latin Christianity’s differentiation of state and church did its utmost to
separate the sphere of politics from that of religion, and to distinguish the sphere
of the private and of religious inwardness from the sphere of the public, including
public religion.
Michael Oakshott has shown that civil society is a sphere in its own right, which
is not constituted by the state. It is a sphere in which people pursue their own ends,
whatever these may be, without being under any obligation – and free to reject any
obligation – to pursue collective ends.
Protection of the Distinction Between Private and Public
as a Consequence of Skepticism About Humans
as Political Beings
The differentiation of public and private is a constant that is closely associated with
Western skepticism about human nature, particularly toward man as a zoon politikon,
a political animal. Associations with the theory of original sin spring to mind
here. If even the individual is constantly tempted to do wrong, and often does wrong,
how much more is that to be feared from people united in collective action? The
demand for the differentiation of public and private arises from the insight that the
collective potentiates badness, if the majority or a strong minority desires what is
evil or bad. This badness can range from a trivial malaise like simple envy, through
raging jealousy, to full-scale criminalization of the public sphere through forms of
enslavement and genocide. The power of the unified forces of the state and the private
sphere can tip over into evil, and magnify and potentiate it to far beyond the
capacity of the individual act of evil. A tiny modification of the content of the word
“good”, if it is adopted publicly and universally, can tilt the public sphere into the
realm of evil.
A key example is envy. Envy is the essential reason for protecting the private
sphere. Envy is also the central argument for banking secrecy and the strictures of
confidentiality in financial affairs. The impacts of envy and jealousy go far beyond
those of individual envy if they are combined with political power and take on the
shape of political resentment against individuals, groups or nations.
15 Cf. PETER KOSLOWSKI: Zum Verhältnis von Polis und Oikos bei Aristoteles. Politik und
Ökonomie bei Aristoteles 1976, 3rd edn. under the title Politik und Ökonomie bei Aristoteles
[Politics and economics in Aristotle], Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 1993, andKOSLOWSKI (1982).