CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Philosophy Becomes Culture 329
enough to accommodate the hugely successful global structure facilitating illegal
dealings and at the same time a concentration of global income at the top,
unimaginable to Adam Smith, and unparalleled in history.
Utilitarianism is exhausted. It is unable to address current problems. Marxists
believed their philosophy could promote incentive. It could not. Utilitarians
believe their philosophy can promote justice. It cannot. This is a spent
doctrine. It has no poetry, no stirring stanzas, no language to lift the soul.
But it still sits in the middle of capitalism, as the stuffed carcass of Jeremy
Bentham still sits in a glass case. It contributes to focusing the attention of
businesspeople and bankers first, foremost, and often exclusively on the bottom
line. The calculated good becomes the ethical good. Profits are more important
than how they are earned. A.C. Ewing put it well: “[U]tilitarian
principles, logically carried out, would result in far more cheating, lying and
unfair action than any good man would tolerate.” 38 Only it is not “would”
speculatively; it is actually happening in the real world. A fair proportion of
corporate and banking profits are generated by abusing rather than honoring
the way commercial and financial affairs are intended to operate.
With the failure of Marxism, the capitalism–utilitarianism combination
has triumphed. Most unfortunately, this has brought out over the past 15
years the worst excesses of this union, with more corporate scandal, more illicit
dealings, more crime, more trillions of dollars moving illegally across
borders than ever before. Capitalism’s conquest masks its ongoing problems.
All of a sudden, it finds itself ill-equipped in its most basic underpinnings to
face the demands for justice and fairness required by billions of people in the
twenty-first century.
I am not attempting to make an original contribution to philosophy,
but I am commenting on the application of philosophy. It may be arguable
that utilitarianism served capitalism in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.
Whether it was the best of philosophical options I leave to historians.
But the utilitarianism in practice today, retaining its maximizing presumption
first and relegating global justice to second, inadequately serves the 80
percent of the world who scrape by on 10 to 30 percent of global income.
The capitalism–utilitarianism joint venture that sustains widespread illegality
and massive inequality is poorly configured to meet the imperatives of
this century. Capitalism must embrace justice within its basic commitments.
Without overturning utilitarianism and prioritizing justice, capitalism will
be an underachieving economic arrangement in the years ahead.