Is frugality a virtue? If not an end in itself, frugality can lead to a better quality of life

Does frugality have some sort of ethical status? Or is it just an optional "lifestyle" - admirable in its way, perhaps, but admirable as lavish life-styles can be too? Is frugality any more firmly rooted in values than luxury is?

Or is it, perhaps, valuable only in special circumstances, when food or clothes or other goods are in short supply and sparing consumption is only good sense? Is it a virtue in the Third World but not in the First? Is it appropriate in some settings and wildly inappropriate in others?

Well, let us see where frugality might fit into ethics. It is not a virtue, at least in the sense that philosophers use that word. It may be a virtue in a popular, everyday sense: that is, generally a good thing, a thing to be admired or praised. I shall come back to that possibility in a moment. By a "virtue" philosophers mean a disposition that will carry one through typical trying circumstances in life, when, without the virtue, one's spirit would be either deficient or in excess.

Temperance is the classic virtue closest to frugality. A temperate person does not react to testing circumstances with either too much heat or too little, too much desire or too little. Temperance is defined as striking a certain sort of desirable balance. But what is suspicious about frugality is, precisely, that it stands resolutely at one extreme: sparing use. But why is that the right balance? And balance between what vices? On one side of sparing use we might see waste. But what is on the other side ? On the other side we might see hurtful underconsumption. But why should we regard frugality as the ideal balance between these two evils? One could go well beyond frugality into a fairly liberal use of goods without crossing over into waste. Why is this greater liberality not the more desirable balance?

Nor, I think, is frugality intrinsically valuable. Imagine, first, a frugal life: I am careful and sparing in all that I use; I consume enough for health but no more than is required for me to meet simple, basic needs. Now imagine a non-frugal life: I am less vigilant about and more liberal in what I use; I consume more than is strictly needed for my basic needs but I do not waste anything. Now, if one sees each of these lives simply as the lives I have just described and apart from any consequences that they might have, is there any reason to say that one is better than the other? I at least can see no reason to think so.

So if a frugal life is in some way valuable, it must be because of the things that it leads to. It must be, not intrinsically valuable, but instrumentally valuable.

And here, it seems to me, there is an interesting case. Frugality strikes most modern people as out of date - and that no doubt for different reasons. It seems appropriate to a life of scarcity and as the world grows richer, frugality grows irrelevant. And Freud will have had something to do with it: we suspect that behind a frugal exterior there is an unattractive, anal-retentive interior. But, most of all, our modern value system seems to have gone over to a form of consumerism. We are dominated by an economic model of the quality of life. A human is seen as a complex of desires. The quality of a human life is seen as in direct proportion to the satisfaction of these desires. The social sciences, and through them the popular consciousness, are dominated by this desire-satisfaction model of value.

But its dominance is now, fortunately, weakening. The theory is poor. One cannot equate what makes a person's life good with what satisfies that person's desires. It is possible - in fact, all too common - for a person's desires to be satisfied and the person be no better off. For example, I may desire revenge on someone - indeed it may be the strongest desire in my life - yet find that when I have it I am no better off, even possibly worse off.

An instrument for good

Nothing becomes valuable just by being desired. Some things in life just are valuable and others not. That is a strong claim, and a much disputed one in philosophy, but it seems to me right. I think that, with experience, we can compile a list of the valuable things in life - the things that may not make absolutely any life better (people are too various for that) but that make normal human lives better. My list would contain at least these unsurprising things: enjoyment, deep personal relations, accomplishing something in the course of one's life, understanding certain basic metaphysical and moral matters, autonomy, and liberty.

Consumerism is not just weak in theory. It does not work out happily in practice either. One all too common feature of the life of a modern consumer is that one set of desires is satisfied only to be succeeded by a new set, with no advance in quality of life. These consumerist desires often form a treadmill. One runs but makes no real advance. When that happens, it is clear that one has lost sight of values. What are really valuable are the things on the list that I just mentioned. And other things are valuable, valuable in a secondary, instrumental way, if they lead to the values on the list.

This, it seems to me, is where frugality comes in. It is valuable if, and only if, a frugal style of life is generally conducive to some of the values on the list. There is much to be said for that. A frugal life avoids the more value-destroying forms of consumerism. A frugal life tends to be a simple life, and, though simplicity in life is not guaranteed to put one in touch with real values, it substantially increases the chances that one will be. Many of us, from time to time, have had the experience of living more simply than we usually do and finding ourselves, as a result, more in harmony with what matters in life. Of course, we return to our everyday life and lose this precious insight. That is another reason why a frugal life-style can be valuable. One's style of life not only can embody values; it can also be the best way to open one's eyes to values that one would otherwise be blind to.

That is to say that frugality can, in this instrumental way, be a personal good. It can also be a community good. A frugal community can save and invest for a better future. Frugality can also be a global good - indeed, a little more frugality may be necessary simply to avoid global disaster. We consume fossil fuels without serious constraint. We justify ourselves with the thought that advancing technology will be sure to come up with substitutes for them. But just as good? Without undesirable side-effects? We do not really know. And our consumerism pollutes the atmosphere, producing global warming. We certainly do not know all the consequences in store for us from that.

But I must not end with praise of frugality. My life is better for my living simply on holidays, consuming much less than I normally do. But then I live in the prosperous part of the world. I choose simplicity. But millions of people are forced to consume sparingly. They are destitute. Their lives are not better for it. The big killer in the world is not war or periodic famine. It is something undramatic and unreported: chronic malnutrition. Chronic hunger, some claim, kills eighteen to twenty million people annually, which is over twice the number that died annually in the Second World War. Their sparing consumption is nothing but evil.

JAMES GRIFFIN, of the United States, is White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University (U.K.). He recently published Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism (1997, Thoemmes Press).

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