Communitarian Morality

A local small business is one form of private enterprise. With some degree of community oversight, that paradigm can be fine — profitable for its owner, socially benign.

Capitalism as we know it — dominated by remote, impersonal corporate institutions within the context of mass society — is anti-social and fosters blatantly immoral behavior.

This can be understood with a simple typical example:

A food manufacturer has a team dedicated to determining how to induce cravings. This enterprise produces potato chips. The team’s objective is to find the optimal blend of salts, fats, sugars, etc. as to foster the maximal degree of consumer craving.

The food product is not particularly healthy, so over-consumption by an individual is a bad thing. The potato chip tastes good. A socially advisable scenario would be if consumers were fully informed of the trade-off between health and taste . . . and then have encouragement to eat a reasonable number of the chips. Fine.

Modern capitalism tends to work the opposite way: induce consumptive cravings (of all kinds) in order to maximize profits for firms.

In a community where people are familiar and known to each other, a person who tried to profit from conning another person into engaging in unhealthy behavior would be criticized. Such behavior would be recognized as anti-social.

In our society, when a capitalist firm behaves that way it tends to be viewed as market-savvy. But it’s immoral. Egregious examples, such as the behavior of the cigarette companies for decades after the link to cancer was discovered, are chastised and even penalized, but the rarely acknowledged truth is that most impersonal large corporations do what they can along those lines: promote consumption and over-consumption. And they’re prone to ignore “externalities” (such as ecological consequences) for the sake of the bottom line — as a matter of course. It’s business.

A socialist context would be better. But the problem has more to do with scale than with property relations. It’s true that public enterprises have less economic incentive to behave immorally, but to the extent that they’re remote and bureaucratic they’re subject to distortions related to political considerations. Such has been the case with every attempt to implement full socialism over the last hundred years.

Communitarian interdependence is most conducive to respectful interaction among people, social responsibility, and fundamental morality.