The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

Ethics, Capitalism
and the Managerial
Aristocracy
Alexis Brassey
Managing Director
of Cramer Pelmont
Solicitors, Senior
Partner of The Schools
Enterprise Partnership
and Managing
Director of Liverpool
Residential Ltd
WE ARE ALL capitalists, in the
sense that we may point to
one thing or another and call
it ‘mine’. The Marxist notion that ‘private
property is theft’ is all but dead
outside of the most extreme and chronically
naive positions.
It is often said that communitarian
or communist ideology which
espoused the principle of ‘common
ownership’ was great in theory but
ineffective in practice. This sentiment,
however is self-evidently false. Any
political ideology which does not work
in practice is de facto a poor theory.
Having established that we are all
capitalists in this particular sense, this
article argues that in order to maximise
ethical value within the macro-economy
the private sector and its chief
operating principle, the market mechanism,
must be encouraged within a
well regulated framework.
This article initially considers what
it is we mean when we talk about
‘ethics’, followed by a discussion setting
out how the democratic and legal
‘In a modern liberal capitalist
economy, private enterprise,
despite the more recent marketing
phenomenon of alleged
‘social concerns’, has one
simple goal: profit’
system in effect puts our sense of ethical
values into a practical set of laws.
This is followed by a positive assessment
of utilitarianism explaining how
capitalism is the only effective mechanism
to achieve the optimum level of
efficiency within any given economic
paradigm.
Finally I offer a critique of the emergent
managerial aristocracy which
appears to be strangling private sector
progress. I argue that this class of economic
agent presents the greatest danger
to the efficient progress of the
macro-economy.
What are ‘Ethics’
Attend a course of moral philosophy or
ethics at a University in the developed
world and it would be explained there
are three central theories. Firstly the
school of deontology, led principally by
Kant which suggests ethics are about
duty and obligations. In order to be
ethical one should ‘love thy neighbour’,
for example.
The second major school of
ethics is that of utilitarianism led by
Bentham and Mill in the late 19th
century. The crucial maxim here,
being that ethics are simply about the
maximisation of happiness for the
greatest number.
The final system, if one can call it
that, is described as ‘virtue ethics’.
This more vague construal, dates back
to Aristotle’s ‘Nichmachean Ethics’
and offers the idea that in order to
determine what is ‘ethical’ or ‘good’
one has to do the right thing at the
23 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009