Socialism

3. Wellbeing and the human good

The replies to both the neoclassical and motivational arguments for the market involve claims about the nature of the human agent and of human wellbeing. In doing so they express a recurrent concern on the part of its socialist critics with the market’s failure to establish the necessary conditions for human flourishing, and its encouragement of attitudes, motivations and character traits damaging both to those who acquire these and to those affected by them. For example, it is claimed that the market issues in such vices as competitiveness, avarice, egoism, possessiveness and vanity, all at the expense of the proper virtues of character and the humanly beneficial social relationships of community; that the pleasures of private consumption are mistakenly privileged over the more fulfilling demands of public life; and that capitalist forms of production deny to workers the exercise both of their active and creative capacities in work and of their deliberative capacities in the democratic control of the productive process (see Work, philosophy of §2).

Marx’s critique of capitalism as a condition of ‘alienation’ is typical here (see Alienation), but similar arguments against capitalism for its development of particular kinds of human character and social relationships incompatible with human wellbeing are to be found amongst other socialist theorists, from Morris and Tawney in the British tradition to Fromm and Marcuse in the continental. In current philosophical terminology such criticism is ‘perfectionist’ in form: it claims that social and political institutions should be judged by reference to a specific conception of the human good (see Perfectionism). It is often broadly Aristotelian in content, seeing human wellbeing as consisting of the development and exercise of species powers and capacities. Hence it rejects, inter alia, the utilitarian, preference-based accounts of wellbeing that often underpin the neoclassical concept of efficiency: economic institutions are to be assessed not by their ability to satisfy given preferences, but in terms of the nature and value of the preferences they themselves encourage and make it possible to satisfy (see Welfare §1).

Two kinds of response may be made to such claims. The first, which is typical of much modern liberal thought, is to reject perfectionist arguments altogether. It is a mark of liberal institutions that they be neutral between different conceptions of the good (see Neutrality, political). Such neutrality is especially desirable given the pluralistic character of modern societies, in which diverse and irreconcilable conceptions of the good are espoused. In this situation, perfectionism must imply the imposition of a contested conception of the good by coercive means, and hence a political practice which is paternalistic or even authoritarian. By contrast, the market is consistent with liberal neutrality. It provides an economic framework in which individuals with quite different ends and beliefs about the good can pursue these through mutually beneficial free exchanges.

The second response accepts the legitimacy of perfectionist arguments but denies that markets are incompatible with the human good. This may be argued either by denying that the market necessarily has the ill effects that socialists attribute to it, or by attributing to the market effects deemed highly desirable in terms of some alternative conception of the good. In the latter case it may be claimed, for example, that the market has the great merit of fostering individual autonomy; although socialists may respond to this by arguing that the development of such autonomy in fact requires the existence of certain kinds of social relationships which the market tends to undermine.