What is Reddit's opinion of The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age (Moral Traditions)?

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There's an interesting discussion of related problems to this in the virtue ethics work The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age, which reviews the ethics behind luxury, beginning with the ancient Greeks, and moving up through Aquinas to the modern age. While not directly about the antiwork movement, it does deal directly with a fundamental error that's perceived through the lens of virtue ethics in modern society (interestingly, this can be true for non-capitalist societies as well): a vice of luxurious consumption to the detriment of public order and the social good.

There is a vice of luxury, which Aristotle considers as very problematic. You can see that shown in this little segment from the SEP article on Aristotle's Ethics:

>Such people Aristotle calls evil (kakos, phaulos). He assumes that evil people are driven by desires for domination and luxury, and although they are single-minded in their pursuit of these goals, he portrays them as deeply divided, because their pleonexia—their desire for more and more—leaves them dissatisfied and full of self-hatred.

Naturally, one can see where pleonexia and luxury have their place in modern society. There's a book that investigates this further (The Vice of Luxury), but from a general Christian virtue ethicist perspective instead of solely Aristotelian thought. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to find Plato or Aristotle in favor of such, as luxury and pleonexia in modern society can certainly be vicious.

There's a tradition in virtue ethics, beginning with the ancient Greeks, which considers luxury as a vice. There's a discussion of this in broader detail in David Cloutier's work The Vice of Luxury, which reviews the history of this question and how we approach it in the modern day.

To roughly summarize some of Cloutier's points, luxury can be considered as a vice when one's surplus spending is directed to material goods in excess, instead of towards goods which contribute to public goods, the goods of others, and one's personal good, such as for personal enrichment and growth in virtue. In short, it is a desire for more and more material satisfaction, which cannot be satisfied, as the ancient Greeks first noted.

Plato, for example, is very distrustful of luxury (I believe he writes of this in some detail in the Republic), and Aristotle calls some people evil who are driven by desires for luxury in what he calls "pleonexia", a desire for more and more, which cannot be satisfied and leaves them with greater dissatisfaction with life and with self-hatred.

The answer that these Greeks and which virtue ethics in general gives is that while material goods are not evil - indeed, they are good in themselves - their enjoyment must be balanced; to fall into excess is a vice because one forgets for what end we enjoy material goods and what the "good life" is. The good life is one of virtue lived according to right reason, one of human fulfillment, eudaimonia; luxury is one of many vices which direct man instead to the satisfaction of some desire which, because it does not attain the proper telos of the act, will never be satisfied and draws man away from his happiness. And in the case of monetary spending, that act's telos is likely something closer to spending for both the public and private good, of one's own self along with the goods of others. To focus that on one's never ending desire for material good instead would leave one eternally unfulfilled.