It is all too easy to feel that the modern world is characterised by a wide, deep canyon separating money and morality. Some images suggest that on either cliff edge, facing each other, stand the preachers and apostles of either God or Mammon, each speaking with the vehemence of utter conviction in language their antagonists cannot understand.

Actually, that vision is not new. In the middle of the 16th century, the medieval principles still held sway, and even as society changed around them, and partly at least as a consequence of their actions, there was, in Tawney's words, “a constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality” (1926). A hundred years later all that had changed, and by the middle of the 17th century, up to and including the modern day, it was widely perceived that “the claim of religion to maintain good rules of conscience in economic affairs finally vanished”.

And that is not quite right either. Ever since the rise of a capitalbased society – driving and driven by the development and exploitation of technology – money and morality have lived uneasily together, not separated by a great divide, but sharing the same ground.

In many ways, that makes the discussion of the right uses of money more difficult. It was easier in the brief ill-conceived certainties of the 1980s when ‘greed was good’, to side with either the masters of the monetary universe or those who denounced them. The apparent separation, however, was unreal, as the subtleties of most other times show, including our own.

Each of us is at one and the same time a user of the economic, market, consumer society and the pilot of the morality guiding our own souls. If I shop for fruit, I am making an economic choice based on my appetite, my perception of value for money, and the wealth I can apply to that transaction.