An abstract medium of exchange. Money is an entity, but not a person. The reduction of personal relationships to monetary values is a form of instrumentalization.
Money and Dignity
The person has a dignity that is raised above any price — it can never be outweighed by money. Where human beings are traded as a commodity, where their worth is measured in money, a fundamental violation of the personalist norm is at hand. Surrogacy is one example of this: pregnancy becomes a paid service, the child the object of a contract — both turn the person into a commodity.
Money as a Technology of Depersonalization
Money can be understood as a technology in a broader sense: a system that converts personal relationships into abstract relations of exchange. This is not in itself bad — money makes possible the division of labor and cooperation. Yet where it becomes the sole measure, oblivion of the person threatens: the human being is judged according to “market value,” not according to personhood. In war the logic of money joins with power over life and death — the arms industry turns killing into a commodity, and economic interests drive the most radical form of oblivion of the person.
Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies are a new form of money that is based on technology and dispenses with personal mediation (banks, states). From the standpoint of a personalist ontology they intensify the tendency toward depersonalization: value is detached entirely from personal relationships and transferred into algorithmic processes. The connection of cryptocurrencies with transhumanist visions — for instance, of a decentralized economy independent of persons — shows how technology and money can together contribute to oblivion of the person.
Ontological classification:
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is a form of money based on technology that dispenses with personal mediation. It intensifies the tendency toward the depersonalization of economic relationships by replacing interpersonal exchange with algorithmic processes.
In the ontology, cryptocurrency is at once a subclass of money and of technology. This expresses its dual standing as a means of payment and as a technical artifact. From the standpoint of a personalist ontology, the danger lies in the person as the bearer of economic relationships becoming invisible. The personalist norm no longer finds application in the anonymized transaction space.
Ontological classification:
- Subclass of: Money, Technology
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Kant, Immanuel (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Academy edition vol. IV, p. 434 (distinction between dignity and price: what has a price can be replaced by something else; dignity is raised above all price).