 |
|
Title of the publication by André Comte-Sponville and his lecture at ESSCA Paris on February 18, 2010 ("Le Capitalisme est-il moral?")
This is the difficult question which the philosopher André Comte-Sponville invited the students to reflect on, first through an introduction to the concept of "corporate ethics" imported from the United States and a source of perplexity for the philosopher. Ethics, he says, is "high performance" and sells. Why perplexity? Because it would certainly be the first time virtue earns money. |
| Using amusing anecdotes, André Comte-Sponville demonstrated that moral actions, compliant with morality but conducted in self-interest, have no moral value, as the very premise for morality is disinterestedness. |
|
 |
The audience was enthralled. "Imagine the reaction of a physicist who explains Einstein's e=mc2 equation to you; one of you says it isn't very moral because it makes atomic bombs blow up. He would say that you are not talking about the same thing." André Comte-Sponville's basic premise is that our society is governed according to four "orders", which can be easily, ineptly and dangerously confused.
1. The technical/economic/scientific order: biology can tell us which genetic manipulations are technically possible, but it is not up to biology to say whether they are allowed. The same reasoning applies to market economics. Left to its own spontaneity, the principle is that everything possible will be done. And, today, "everything possible" is very frightening. This technical/scientific order therefore has to be restrained. And this needs to happen from the outside, as it cannot restrain itself from the inside. This order is not moral in and of itself; that's not its purpose.
2. The political/legal order: that of law and justice, structured internally by the opposition between legality and illegality. André Comte-Sponville caustically demonstrated that an individual who scrupulously complies with the laws of the country in which he lives could also be self-satisfied with his behaviour, and even lie, be selfish and mean - a legalistic "bad guy", who might also be scientifically competent. The political/legal order is not moral in and of itself.
To stimulate thought, André Comte-Sponville told us that when he was a professor at La Sorbonne, he proposed a political philosophy dissertation on "Do the people have every right?" Almost all students replied that, in a democracy, the people are sovereign and therefore have every right, as the people make the law. The logicial conclusion that flows from this position is that the people can adopt anti-democratic measures.
3. The moral order: the one that limits the political and legal order, structured internally by the opposition between right and wrong, duty and prohibited acts. It seems that morality need not be limited: how could one be too moral? But morality must be completed by something else, as it is not sufficent in and of itself. An individual who always fulfils his duty and only his duty would resemble a Pharisee, lacking an essential quality: love.
4. The order based on love: the one that does not limit the moral order but completes it. What order comes before love? A believer might say the divine order, one that ensures cohesion between the other orders. In any event, nothing is to be feared of infinite love. To argue that capitalism is moral would therefore mean accepting that the first order is subject to the third, which seems impossible because of the internal structuring of each of these orders: the possible and impossible are not interested in "right and wrong". Therefore, capitalism is neither moral nor immoral. It is radically and definitively amoral. If we are looking for morality in a capitalistic society, this morality will not come from the market, but from elsewhere.
This lecture obviously raised many questions and reactions. Whether you agree or not, these thoughts run against many preconceived notions.
