Monetary Ethics Research

Currency has been widely acknowledged as a core concept in modern economics; however, it turns out to be a category in ethics as well due to its nature of being the integral of all social relations. The medium of credit helps to build up a logic connection between currency and ethics, which makes more evident the identity of currency in the field of economic ethics. Currency not only takes on the positive ethic meaning, but also generates alienation in its evolution. Hence, ethics means more than revealing morality to currency. It also makes currency moralized by rectifying its alienation. Monetary ethics aims at dealing with the connection between the phenomenon of currency and its morality by investigating the reasonable relationships in monetary economic activities, and the ethical principles and moral norms to follow when establishing these relationships.Being credit economy and monetary economy at the same time, market economy has its innate ethic connotation. On the one hand, the supply and demand of currency have their internal ethical dimension as they are both monetary economic phenomena. Ethics is involved in the concept and theory of currency supply. Besides, it can be seen from consideration for interests in the macroscopic governmental monetary policies, de-moralization chosen by established enterprises for the pursuit of profit, and monetary illusion from the mental demand of microscopic individual. The currency supply needs the ethical introspection and further ethical control. On the other hand, as monetary behaviors in a general sense, the obtainment and use of currency should be conducted on the basis of ethics. The theoretical and practical ethical control and guidance are highly required in the alienation to obtain and use currency, be it the unscrupulous pursuit, or unfair distribution, or power-for-money deal, or over-consumption in reality.The eruption of financial crisis provokes people’s thinking of ethical issues in the international monetary system, which should operate orderly and play its role on the value basis of interest, competition and cooperation. From the perspective of economic ethics, the turbulence of the system and the emergence of international financial crisis can be attributed to the various internal weaknesses in the system, including the natural pursuit for profit of capital, the dilemma in collective action of global public goods, the instability of credit monetary system, the inequality of different currencies, and the lack of fulfillment for the due responsibility from the international Monetary Fund. Therefore, the reconstruction of the system should be carried out by strengthening the supervision of morality, building up a cooperative and harmonious monetary ethical environment, and establishing a balanced and healthy new international economic order.When the modern society ushers into the era of electronic currency, the form of currency has experienced an unprecedented change. The new form not only reassumes the original basic function of currency and improves the efficiency of monetary economy, but brings great impact to the ethic relationships. Moral hazard appears more secretly and frequently with the cover of electronic monetary system. The harm to privacy and credit crisis after negative interpersonal relation are brought about by network externalities. Thus people in the era of electronic currency are obliged to make respond to new challenges in a comprehensive way by exploiting the technical, legal and ethical means due to the greater deviation of the development of technology from ethics.