Is Capitalism a Belief System - Anglican Theological Review.pdfVIP

ATR/92:4 Is Capitalism a Belief System? Kathryn Tanner* Are capitalist markets shaped by beliefs about the fundamental character of human life and its moral values and ideals? If the answer is “yes,” one can make a normative evaluation of such markets. One can ask whether the principled beliefs—beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad—that purportedly inform capitalist markets are correct and, if they are, about the degree to which capitalist markets actually manage to conform to them. In particular, theological beliefs about human nature and about how humans should live become pertinent to the normative evaluation of capitalist markets. Religious people on theological grounds can assess the respects in which they are good or bad and suggest ways to make them better—more ethical, humane, and conducive to the common good. To answer “yes” is to assume that capitalist markets require moral justification, and that they are therefore, in principle at least, neither essentially amoral nor necessarily immoral. The current global domi- nance of capitalist markets—the simple fact that they blanket the globe—is, to begin with, no argument in their favor. Alternatives exist to capitalist markets. Not all societies have been or are presently orga- nized around the production of goods for sale in markets of a capitalist sort, where the supply of goods produced and the demand for them find their regulation by way of an impersonal pricing mechanism. For example, at other times and places and even now within cer- tain sectors of our society—notably in some impoverished urban areas1—economic well-being is determined in the main by whom one knows and can enlist to do unpaid favors. Those who help you expect, apart from any specifiable contract or overt calculation of possi- ble future profit, to be likewise helped for free, either by you or