[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.
In general, I think this is correct and a very useful distinction. I hear people make sloppy arguments on this all the time. It's clear that capitalism and socialism do not at least obviously or superficially entail selfishness or selflessness on a conceptual level.
I do think that on a deeper conceptual level, though, there may be more connections. I took a socialist philosophy class in college taught by an "analytic Marxist" (John Roemer) who used the tools of neoclassical economics to model a more reasonable and precise version of Marxist theory. He was best friends with G.A. Cohen, one of the greatest analytic political philosophers of the 20th century (in my opinion the greatest). Both of them held the view that understandings of selfishness and selflessness were pretty key to the conceptual cases for capitalism and socialism: capitalists took selfish motives for granted, both underestimating the extent of selflessness and utterly neglecting the possibility of changing the extent of selflessness and selfishness in human beings. Socialists, in contrast, recognized that it is possible to foster different ethics and that the ethic of socialism, being more selfless than the ethic of capitalism, would feed on itself.
Interestingly, G.A. Cohen argued that socialists should abide by very similar principles to EAs in his book "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?"