CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

326 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
greatest good for my number—me, my family, my community, my company,
my country. Utilitarianism leads to abuse, rarely to adherence. It
cannot, in fact, be followed, let alone perfected. Infidelity is built into its
interpretation.
Utilitarian precepts of “make sacrifice” and “greatest good” can only realistically
be deployed into the global community in terms of your sacrifice
and my good. Utilitarianism’s operational failure rests within its unavoidable
misapplication. While the goal of the greatest good is well-intentioned, the
utility calculation necessary for getting to such a point cannot be performed,
and therefore failure in utilization of utilitarian guidelines is inescapable.
I have known many bankers and businesspeople who believed they were
doing the right thing, serving the greatest good, when they helped Mobutu,
Suharto, Abacha, Marcos, Montesinos, Pinochet, or other tyrants, as well as
countless corporate and individual tax evaders, move money out of poor
countries into rich countries. I am not suggesting for a moment that every
one of these people knew that what they were doing was hurting others. On
the contrary, many instinctively felt that protecting wealth, providing stable
return on investment, was the right thing to do. Hardly ever was a passing
thought given to how many people might be injured by such a process. Utilitarianism
contributes to condoning both the conduct and the consequence.
It cannot constrain its appetite for summing results and cannot constrain its
localization of the greatest good.
Utilitarianism says to the business community that maximizing is the
first order of business. Capitalists take this as justification for an overriding
concentration on profit maximization, prior to other considerations. This is
my most basic criticism of utilitarianism. The focus on maximizing prior to
other concerns is inevitably taken to excess. To those lingering utilitarians
who think their philosophy is basically sound, just misapplied, my answer is,
there is no way to prevent it from being misapplied, and that is why it is basically
unsound. Misapplication is inescapable; therein is its downfall.
Is Not Self-Correcting
A maximizing philosophy lacks the capacity to be a moderating philosophy.
Look back at Figure 5.1, illustrating the separation between rich and poor
over a span of 160 years. By following Adam Smith, this would not be the
historical reality. By following Jeremy Bentham, this is the reality, and utili-