In the first paragraph you suggest that I have argued that it is not the case that capitalism generates selfish motives. I have not argued for this or against it. I have just argued that capitalism is not defined as a system in which people are selfish. This is entirely separate to the question of whether capitalism causally produces more selfishness than socialism. If you accept that it is an empirical question whether capitalism or socialism causally produces more selfishness, then you agree with my argument since you don’t need to do empirical work to find out whether a conceptual claim is true.
General point: conceptual distinctions are very useful. It is difficult to have debates about things when the concepts are not clearly defined. And conceptual distinctions are not, nor did they pretend to be in my piece, to the exclusion of history and sociology. Actually, they make historical and sociological arguments better because more precise.
I’m not sure whether capitalism causally produces more selfishness than socialism. In ‘Why Not Capitalism?’ and in the blog I linked to, Brennan argues that market societies actually produce more virtuous people than socialist societies, though I haven’t looked into this very deeply. Studies of traditional (hunter gatherer and other societies) show that people in market societies are nicer in ultimatum games and that kind of thing, though I’m not sure how much weight to put on this.
You have presented an abstract argument showing that capitalism creates incentives for selfishness. But we really want to know whether capitalism creates greater incentives for virtuous conduct than socialism. To answer that question, we’d need to look at actual socialist societies and compare them to how people are in actual capitalist ones. e.g. You could look at how nice people are in capitalist countries and compare that to how nice people are/were in Venezuela now, during the Cultural Revolution, in communist Russia or Cambodia etc.
Thanks for the comment.
In the first paragraph you suggest that I have argued that it is not the case that capitalism generates selfish motives. I have not argued for this or against it. I have just argued that capitalism is not defined as a system in which people are selfish. This is entirely separate to the question of whether capitalism causally produces more selfishness than socialism. If you accept that it is an empirical question whether capitalism or socialism causally produces more selfishness, then you agree with my argument since you don’t need to do empirical work to find out whether a conceptual claim is true.
General point: conceptual distinctions are very useful. It is difficult to have debates about things when the concepts are not clearly defined. And conceptual distinctions are not, nor did they pretend to be in my piece, to the exclusion of history and sociology. Actually, they make historical and sociological arguments better because more precise.
I’m not sure whether capitalism causally produces more selfishness than socialism. In ‘Why Not Capitalism?’ and in the blog I linked to, Brennan argues that market societies actually produce more virtuous people than socialist societies, though I haven’t looked into this very deeply. Studies of traditional (hunter gatherer and other societies) show that people in market societies are nicer in ultimatum games and that kind of thing, though I’m not sure how much weight to put on this.
You have presented an abstract argument showing that capitalism creates incentives for selfishness. But we really want to know whether capitalism creates greater incentives for virtuous conduct than socialism. To answer that question, we’d need to look at actual socialist societies and compare them to how people are in actual capitalist ones. e.g. You could look at how nice people are in capitalist countries and compare that to how nice people are/were in Venezuela now, during the Cultural Revolution, in communist Russia or Cambodia etc.