Greg Smith did a very admirable thing when he published "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sacks" in the New York Times. Would you have the courage to quit your job and publicize your reasons, blacklisting yourself from the industry to which you have devoted your entire professional life?

Yet after his brave letter came a slew of satires. And some of them were very funny. They were funny because they illustrated the absurd contrast at the core of the letter – the contrast between, on the one hand, Smith’s moral indignity at Goldman’s taking slight advantage of its superrich clients, and on the other hand, his comparative indifference to Goldman’s taking gross advantage of all of the rest of us.

Why does Smith use such moral language to express his indignity? You’d think that if he were such a morally sensitive person, he would never have signed up with Goldman in the first place.

But we should think twice before dismissing Smith as a mere hypocrite. What he did took courage, probably more of it than you or I would have shown in his situation. And even more important than that, the sort of hypocrisy he displays is not some mere byproduct of the twisted thinking that the cognitive dissonance of working for the Death Star perpetuates. Instead, it is an expression of one of the most deep-seated and commonplace features of moral discourse in our secular age. We all tend to reason the way Smith does. And it is important that we recognize this, because we are never going to be able to understand how so many people could commit their professional lives to a system that helps so few and hurts so many – we are never going to understand the 1% – unless we recognize that its members are for the most part no less morally conscientious than you or me.

In his great work After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asks us to imagine a future society in which all that remains of our science and culture are the pyramids, a few fragments of Shakespeare, a paper or two of Einstein’s and some snippets of Mozart. This society might incorporate these fragments, but lacking the context in which they belong, might misunderstand them. The Pyramids might be taken to be stations for deep space research. Shakespeare might be mistaken for Holy Text, Einstein for poetry, Mozart for abstract mathematics. So it is, MacIntyre suggests, with our own moral reasoning, here and now. Our common conceptions of Good and Bad, Right and Wrong are artifacts of preceding eras whose ways of thinking frame our own, but whose belief systems we no longer accept. Two eras in particular: the Greco-Roman, which bequeathed us the idea that a thing’s virtue lies in how well it fulfills its function, and the Christian era, which bequeathed us the idea that virtue means conforming with the mandates of God.

Most of us do not assign teleology the central role in cosmology that it played for the Greeks, and many of us no longer think of morality as conformity to the will of some all-powerful God. Yet we persist in framing our moral discourse in the terms laid down by these previous cultures on whose intellectual ruins our own is built.

Why does this mean that Greg Smith’s morality is our morality? We all tend to identify with our jobs. And just as being a good apple means excelling at those things apples excel at, so too being a good investment banker means excelling at those things that investment bankers excel at. We might ask whether it is not better to try to be a good person, rather than to be a good investment banker. But it is very hard to say what it is to be a good person, and clear enough what it is to be a good investment banker. Both the teleological worldview of the ancient Mediterranean and the theological worldview of medieval Europe instill in us the value of good hard work. But they also tell us, each system in its own way, how to situate this virtue in a hierarchy of more important virtues – how to figure out whether what we do is good, and not just whether we are good at what we do. We have all held on to the belief in good hard work. But those of us who do not accept teleology or theology are left with no decisive way to situate this value in a hierarchy of more important ones. We have all inherited the forms of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought, but we no longer believe in the substance that originally went along with them.

We live, as MacIntyre says, in an Instrumentalist age, an age where discourse about ends is awkward and confusing, but discourse about means is straightforward and accessible. It is very hard to keep your eyes on the intangible goal of being a good person, and very easy to focus instead on the more concrete goal of being good at the job you have undertaken to do, and very easy to conflate the two. If we want to move forward we must understand Greg Smith’s moral confusion as our own moral confusion. Who among us can point to a coherent, rationally justified theory of what exactly it is to be a good person, and why being a good person is the most important thing to be? I do not say the task is hopeless. Many philosophers and theorists are hard at work trying to answer this question – and thankfully, many of them are very good at what they do.

But we must understand that these are difficult and subtle questions. And we must understand that the defining conflict of our times is not fundamentally a conflict of values between the 1% and the 99%. We are all of us, the 99% and the 1%, adrift when it comes to finding truly workable, liveable answers to the most basic questions about value. We are all prone to mistake being good at our jobs for being good, and it is (at least partly) because of this that so many of us wind up entrenched in organizations that really don’t do very much good. We all need to work together to figure out how to move forward.