CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

tarianism, operating through tenets of maximizing and ends rationalizing
means and selective sacrifice, is in part responsible for the results. Having
contributed to the problem, utilitarianism is not simultaneously the way out
of the problem.
The political scientist John Plamenatz recently wrote that theorists “today
no longer speak, as Bentham and his disciples did, of ‘maximising happiness,’
but they still speak of ‘maximising’ . . .” 36 Milton Friedman, a Nobel
Prize winner in economics, finds anything other than maximizing to be irresponsible:
“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations
of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility
other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible....
If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making
maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is?” 37 Take
that sort of reasoning, slowly feed it into business school curricula, wait a
couple of decades, and you will get the Enrons and WorldComs and hundreds
of other outrages that have damaged the market’s reputation and performance
in recent years.
As we move further into the twenty-first century, moderation of global
income gaps is necessary, and utilitarianism, inevitably misdirected to one’s
own maximizing, lacks the capacity to be a moderating influence. At the
same time, substantially curtailing illegal activities is required, and utilitarianism,
with ends forgiving means, lacks the capacity to be self-correcting of
the excesses it has helped create.
Today’s capitalism, sustained by eighteenth and nineteenth century
utilitarianism, sees little need for correction or moderation. The philosophical
system backing capitalism has to change. Justice has the ability to be
self-correcting, and it is in the direction of greater justice that capitalism
must move.
DISUTILITY
Philosophy Becomes Culture 327
In the Prologue I wrote about sitting on my patio next to Five Cowrie
Creek, in the Ikoyi residential section of Lagos, looking across the half-mile
of water at the American and Soviet embassies. With one representing capitalism
and the other representing socialism, I asked myself repeatedly why
neither was working satisfactorily in the poorer countries of the world. And