The-Morality-of-Capitalism-PDF

A worker is hired because of the anticipated difference his effortswill make to the final product. This fact is acknowledgedby the egalitarians themselves when they allow that inequalitiesare acceptable if they are an incentive for the more productive toincrease the total wealth of a society. To ensure that the incentivesare going to the right people, as Robert Nozick has observed,even the egalitarian must assume that we can identify the role ofindividual contributions. In short, there is no basis for applyingthe concept of justice to the statistical distributions of income orwealth across an entire economy. We must abandon the pictureof a large pie that is being divided up by a benevolent parent whowishes to be fair to all the children at the table.Once we abandon this picture, what becomes of the principleespoused by Tawney, Rawls, and others: the principle that inequalitiesare acceptable only if they serve the interests of all? Ifthis cannot be grounded in justice, then it must be regarded asa matter of the obligations we bear to each other as individuals.When we consider it in this light, we can see that it is the sameprinciple we identified as the basis of welfare rights. The principleis that the productive may enjoy the fruits of their efforts onlyon condition that their efforts benefit others as well. There is noobligation to produce, to create, to earn an income. But if youdo, the needs of others arise as a constraint on your actions. Yourability, your initiative, your intelligence, your dedication to yourgoals, and all the other qualities that make success possible, arepersonal assets that put you under an obligation to those withless ability, initiative, intelligence, or dedication.In other words, every form of social justice rests on the assumptionthat individual ability is a social asset. The assumption is notmerely that the individual may not use his talents to trample onthe rights of the less able. Nor does the assumption say merelythat kindness or generosity are virtues. It says that the individualmust regard himself, in part at least, as a means to the good ofothers. And here we come to the crux of the matter. In respectingthe rights of other people, I recognize that they are ends inthemselves, that I may not treat them merely as means to mysatisfaction, in the way that I treat inanimate objects. Why thenis it not equally moral to regard myself as an end? Why should77