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

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

>But this is all very shortsighted.
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>"Luxury" is arbitrary.
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>What I find Catholics often do is that they define luxury from their POV....and conveniently are never guilty of it themselves. It is always those other guys with the vice of luxury.

Your entire comment suggests that you are responding to some other claims you've seen and have conveniently assumed my claim must match whatever weak argumentation you're talking about. If you're actually interested in what the vice of luxury is according to virtue ethicists, take a read of The Vice of Luxury by David Cloutier; it speaks about the loss of virtue ethics in modern philosophy and how that plays into the problem of luxury.

You can read more of modern virtue ethics (derived from the long Aristotelian ethical tradition renewed and appropriated by the Church) beginning with G.E.M. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy, where she notes the problems that recent virtue-less philosophies have exhibited, followed by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, a seminal work for modern virtue ethics which notes problems with ethics from the Enlightenment onward stemming from a lack of language able to adequately address it due to their abandonment of teleology (and Aristotelian virtue ethics as a whole) from philosophical thought.

If you really believe that virtue ethics (and thus the vice of luxury understood according to virtue ethics) is "arbitrary," then you are incredibly out of touch with modern philosophy of ethics. The very language of virtue ethics is based on function, or teleology; the loss of teleology is precisely what MacIntyre accuses other modern ethical philosophies of.

You should seek to understand what I meant by 'the vice of luxury' first instead of assuming what my argument would be and lecturing me about the strawman you've set up in place of what argument I would have given. Your assumption and following rebuke is a prime example of the 'strawman fallacy'.