[From my blog]. As effective altruists make increasing forays into politics, I thought it would be good to share what I have found to be one of the most useful conceptual distinctions in recent political philosophy. Many people think if you’re in favour of capitalism you have to be in favour of ruthless selfishness. But this isn’t so. As the philosopher Jason Brennan has argued,[1] we ought to distinguish capitalism – a system of ownership from selfishness – a social ethos.
Capitalism = The private ownership of the means of production.
Socialism = The collective ownership of the means of production.
People have an ethos of selfishness insofar as they pursue their own self-interest.
People have an ethos of benevolence insofar as they pursue the interests of others.
Why accept these definitions? Firstly, they align with the commonsense and dictionary definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’. The elision between capitalism and an ethos of selfishness tends only to happen in an informal or unstated way. People unfairly compare capitalism + selfishness with socialism + universal benevolence and conclude that socialism is the superior system, when in fact universal benevolence is doing a lot of the work. Secondly, if we conceptually tie capitalism and an ethos of selfishness, then we will be left with no term for a system in which the means of production are privately owned and everyone is perfectly benevolent. On the other side of the coin, if we conceptually tie socialism and benevolence, then we will be left with no term for a system in which the means of production are collectively owned, but people are extensively motivated by selfishness.
With these definitions in tow, we can infer the following important point:
The stance one takes on the correct social ethos implies no obvious stance on the justifiability of capitalism or socialism.
Many effective altruists are strongly critical of the ethos of selfishness: Peter Singer believes that you should give up on all luxury spending in order to help others. However, this does not mean that capitalism is bad because capitalism is not conceptually tied to selfishness.
The question of which system of economic ownership we ought to have is entirely separate to the question of which ethos we ought to follow. Effective altruists and others have made a strong case for an ethos of benevolence, but finding out whether capitalism or socialism is better involves completely different empirical questions.
Update: To pre-empt a criticism that I don't think it hits the mark, note that I am saying that capitalism is not, as a conceptual matter, defined as a system in which people are selfish. I am not arguing for or against the proposition that capitalism creates incentives for people to be selfish, or makes people more selfish than the socialist alternative. This is a distinct empirical question.
Thanks to Stefan Schubert for advice.
I expect all benevolent companies to fulfil the needs of others with their profits (if they are not reinvesting them in expansion). For that is the definition of benevolence right? People have an ethos of benevolence insofar as they pursue the interests of others.
There are two aspects of ownership of the means of production
I would expect that a benevolent person/company would give away the control of the profit to an external entity. Why? Comparative advantage, it is unlikely that the person who specialises in control over operations of a company will be better than some group that specializes in getting the maximum charitable return (as long as the external groups is also benevolent). So you'd expect all the profits to go to something like open phil, directly so as to reduce costs from friction.
So who owns the company in this case? The people that controls operations or the group that controls profits?
I can't see a benevolent person arguing for needing private control over the profits (this might not mean public control, it might mean charitable control).
So I was trying to break down the concept of ownership some more and arguing that in a benevolent world private ownership might only mean keeping control over operations.
We don't live in a world of complete benevolence, so it is almost irrelevant. But it struck me as interesting as thought about how benevolence and capitalism would interact and look a lot different.
I think I have now a better understanding of what you meant.
I think there are at least three optimization problems here: 1) what to produce? (investment decision) 2) how to produce? (organization of operations) and 3) how to use the returns , for EA-minded, how to donate?
Company traditionally optimizes 2) and 1) in a more restricted manner (within their field of business or local opportunities)
I think there might be some problems with a hypothetical "benevolent" company that also commits to donate all the profits to an charity or portfolio of ch... (read more)