The game theory on this is vicious, but not that complicated.
Standing on some sort of "customers shouldn't participate in bank runs" principle is a great way to end up in some sort of trouble or other.
It also isn't exactly clear to me how to stand "customers shouldn't participate in bank runs" on any sort of firm ethical basis that both stands up to theoretical scrutiny and also is an ethic that can be practically lived by. You put money in a bank. The bank counters with a promise that you can withdraw it whenever you like. Is it really somehow immoral for you to take it up on that promise when you become concerned they can't hold it up? Having already put your money in the bank, is it now somehow also your responsibility for them to be able to live up to their promise, let alone their promises to other people? Am I morally obligated to see that my bank has a reasonable chance to not fulfill their promise, but just live life as if it's not?
You might be able to work this into an ethic, but I would submit that at the very least it's going to be a long journey, not something that can be simply asserted as an unexamined premise. Taking a consequentialist point of view is superficially appealing, but it is unclear to me that across any time span other than a hyper-short one that a full accounting of the situation leads to an obligation to depositors to ignore threats to their deposit. You can easily simply end up destroying the bank system as a whole as you require people to incur risks they're not willing to incur in order to do some banking and other such things, so they choose not to bank at all. "You need to leave your money in even when it's at immediate risk and also you're not allowed to consider second and higher order consequences because that's immoral too and also you're not allowed to ask the banks to consider them either" gets to be rather untenable on a number of levels; even if you want to propose such an ethic theoretically it clearly fails the living-by-it-practically test.
But, again, I'm not saying you couldn't possibly work this into a coherent ethic, I'm just saying, it's pretty challenging. It's hard to avoid that you basically end up writing in that you should allow people to basically lie to your face about the promises they made to you and you're morally obligated to live by those lies.
Standing on some sort of "customers shouldn't participate in bank runs" principle is a great way to end up in some sort of trouble or other.
It also isn't exactly clear to me how to stand "customers shouldn't participate in bank runs" on any sort of firm ethical basis that both stands up to theoretical scrutiny and also is an ethic that can be practically lived by. You put money in a bank. The bank counters with a promise that you can withdraw it whenever you like. Is it really somehow immoral for you to take it up on that promise when you become concerned they can't hold it up? Having already put your money in the bank, is it now somehow also your responsibility for them to be able to live up to their promise, let alone their promises to other people? Am I morally obligated to see that my bank has a reasonable chance to not fulfill their promise, but just live life as if it's not?
You might be able to work this into an ethic, but I would submit that at the very least it's going to be a long journey, not something that can be simply asserted as an unexamined premise. Taking a consequentialist point of view is superficially appealing, but it is unclear to me that across any time span other than a hyper-short one that a full accounting of the situation leads to an obligation to depositors to ignore threats to their deposit. You can easily simply end up destroying the bank system as a whole as you require people to incur risks they're not willing to incur in order to do some banking and other such things, so they choose not to bank at all. "You need to leave your money in even when it's at immediate risk and also you're not allowed to consider second and higher order consequences because that's immoral too and also you're not allowed to ask the banks to consider them either" gets to be rather untenable on a number of levels; even if you want to propose such an ethic theoretically it clearly fails the living-by-it-practically test.
But, again, I'm not saying you couldn't possibly work this into a coherent ethic, I'm just saying, it's pretty challenging. It's hard to avoid that you basically end up writing in that you should allow people to basically lie to your face about the promises they made to you and you're morally obligated to live by those lies.