The other day I read and then enthusiastically shared Branko Milanovic's thoughts on the lessons of “Succession”. I found the broad philosophical framing he employed in his analysis provocative and thought others, particularly the philosophers I know, would as well. “What “Succession” serves us is the end of the illusion of ethical capitalism,” Milanovic declares. He continues:
The issues are the same as they appeared in the beginnings of the commercial society, and were discussed by Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. The question was the following: can the unchecked use of what are conventionally considered vices, namely passions for power and wealth, be reconciled with the existence of an ethical society? Can a society that places the acquisition of wealth on the pedestal, considers it the most desirable social attribute, and regards the rich as worthy of emulation, be ethical?
The answer, Milanovic assures us, is unequivocally ‘no’:
The incompatibility of a fully commercialized society with an ethical society is a problem for those who, evidence to the contrary, believe that capitalism can be successful and at the same time ethical and who deceive themselves by inventing “stakeholder capitalism”, “responsible business”, “ethically-produced coffee or textiles”, and the like. “Succession” disabuses them of these notions. Rather cruelly.
Whether “Succession” does disabuse viewers of these notions, whether Milanovic gets the show “right,” I can only judge after I’ve seen it, and I haven’t. My interest here is with his broader argument that informs his analysis of the show. Here there are big claims being made. It explicitly challenges those who “believe capitalism can be successful and at the same time ethical”—and does so in some philosophically interesting and noteworthy ways—yet it can, and I think should, be challenged at various points itself, and so Milanovic’s larger thesis merits attention of its own.
The essay in fact offers two distinct, and not obviously related, routes to its main contention that an ethically capitalist society is an impossibility. The first is that in “really existing capitalism” power has been permitted to be distributed so unequally that there is a widespread loss of agency, not only for individuals but for society more broadly (one might think here of Lindblom’s thesis of “the market as prison”), a cost that ultimately undermines any claims to greater efficiency and material wealth that capitalist societies routinely make. Perhaps, under conditions closer to what Milanovic refers to as Adam Smith’s “capitalistic ideal” of relatively small companies who prize employee '“voice” and compete with similar companies on a level playing field, we might enjoy a considerably more equal—materially and politically—society than the one we are currently mired in. Unfortunately, Smith’s ideal is not our reality.
Our world, on the contrary, is a world of large corporations, monopolies, cutthroat competition among such corporations as well as within the corporations themselves, where workers have no right to make any decisions and influence the process of production, and are thus alienated from it. It is the world of extreme commodification and hierarchical relations. Hierarchical relations within companies and hierarchical differences in power between the companies enable the richest to assume a political role which makes the society resemble a plutocracy.
The second line of argument in the essay also uses Smith for its framing but is rather different. Smith, we are reminded, as with others of the British Sentimentalist school, saw the need for something like a normative division of labor to adequately account for the significant differences in our ethical relations between two distinct groups of people: those whom we know relatively intimately and so have natural sympathy with, such as our friends and family, and those we do not and for whom impersonal principles tend to structure and govern our interactions. Smith’s two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations, were addressed, respectively, to these different spheres of our lives.
But in the world of “Succession,” which Milanovic takes to be an honest and clear-eyed representation of our world, the difference between the spheres has disappeared. He considers the family members of the show to have fully internalized the capitalist ethos, and view everyone they interact with, be it a family member, employee, or stranger, through the lens of pure self-interest; all engagement is transactional. Again, whether the characters of the show do indeed act in this way is not the point; rather, this is clearly the kind of behavior and outlook that Milanovic sees as the logical result of a commercialized society “that places the acquisition of wealth on the pedestal”: a pervasive “amorality” that collapses the distinction between private and professional life. Everything—and everyone—is for sale.
As I said above, these two critiques of capitalist society seem unconnected. We can easily imagine a considerably more equal society than our own wherein the people routinely act out of self-interest. Indeed, one might argue that in such a society there would be less need for the sort of care and compassion that the plight of the grossly disadvantaged would be expected (and certainly hoped) to invoke. Each of us, we might think if we were in such society, can profitably take care of ourselves. Of course we don’t live under the egalitarian conditions of this “capitalistic ideal,” but then we might ask to what extent we treat our loved ones merely as means to furthering our own ends. Have we collapsed the private/professional distinction in our own lives? I suspect that most of us, certainly those of us with families, frequently engage in transactional market behavior to further the interests of the people we care about. Moreover, much of the parental labor undertaken in the home—and often the most valued—is directed at teaching our children not to be exclusively self-interested and to recognize the intrinsic worth of others. But why should we do that? Wouldn’t this, by the unrelenting logic of the market, amount to a wasteful misvaluation of our time and energy? Could it be that the current state of our society isn’t capitalistic enough?
Admittedly, we could offer a more charitable reading. There certainly are coldly self-interested people, too many, we might add, and for such people the unequal distribution of wealth and power is a desired outcome. The greater their means and the greater their control of the levers of power the more of their interests they can satisfy. But it would seem that some portion of their success should be attributed to the fact that the majority of people are not cut from this supposedly capitalist cloth. I suggested above that an unequal society might be expected to generate feelings of compassion and other-regarding behavior; but we should likewise think that it is in part due to the prevalence (albeit unequally distributed) of concern for others that it becomes possible for the more self-regarding among us to secure a greater share of the spoils of competitively structured social cooperation.
So I don’t believe that these two strands of Milanovic’s argument are mutually supportive of his conclusion. Nor do I think either one on their own should lead us to reject the idea of “ethical capitalism” as fools gold. In fact I think that overall argument is somewhat muddled, but in such an interesting way that the attempt to untangle it is well worth the effort.
Let’s consider the worry that in the “commodified world” the two spheres of our lives—the personal and the professional—will dissolve into an undifferentiated existence where “the same rules of amorality hold whether we are talking of families and friends or people whom we have met once in our life.” Now as I have suggested above, I think this is empirically false: most of us do not live this way, and maintain a number of significant relationships with others that provide our lives with much of their meaning and our actions with much of their purpose. Much of our time and energy is indeed consumed by the pursuit of money because the accumulating money is essential. But that should not be confused with pursuing money for its own sake, as a goal to which all other goals and relations are to be subordinated. None of this, of course, is to deny that there are some people for whom Milanovic’s account appears accurate, but we find such people remarkable, and usually quite unlikeable, for that very reason.
Milanovic’s worry about the dissolution of the division between the two spheres of life is, however, a legitimate one. There are important normative differences between them and it is philosophy’s business to make accurate sense of them, as Milanovic notes Smith tried to do. What we can say broadly is that governing the personal sphere is that fundamental and “organic” normativity that is originally manifested in the relationship between an infant and a care-giver in the “mothering” role (overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, the biological mother). Infants can have their physical needs (food, warmth, hygienic conditions) met, but unless they are extended some sort of emotional lifeline that connects them to another their psychological development and future wellbeing will be endangered. Through this relationship and others like it (the other care-givers in our early development, siblings, etc.) our very identities start to take shape. We become the unique individuals that we are through our interconnectedness with others, a process of development that continues with every emotionally intimate relationship we forge throughout our lives; to be emotionally open to another is to allow oneself to be to some degree changed by them. Each such relationship amounts to its own unique normative space where certain behaviors and conduct are encouraged and others discouraged, expectations are formed and boundaries drawn. What is appreciated by one family member, friend, or lover, might not fly with another. Every loving relationship is inescapably unrepeatable.
The result of these relationships is the unique and irreplaceable individual. There is no greater achievement. And yet it also creates an extraordinary problem. We do not, and certainly cannot, become emotionally entangled with everyone, so how can all these singular people get along? How do we avoid chaos and dissension? How do we encourage cooperation? The normative structure that governs interactions among the emotionally un-connected must be of a fundamentally different order. The intuitive idea is to reach for something more abstract, principled, and rational. Familiar philosophical debates between advocates of a utilitarian calculus that directs us to always act in ways to maximize welfare and minimize harm, on the one hand, and of a deontological demand to always respect the autonomy of every individual, treating each as an end in themselves and never as a mere means to the greater good, on the other, are best understood as attempts to provide normative order at scale. Likely the most well-known and well-cited such principle is the so-called “golden rule” to treat others as you would want them to treat you.
Because these abstract principles are intended to apply anyone and everyone indiscriminately they potentially, and frequently actually, threaten to appropriate all normative labor to themselves, dissolving the distinction between the bonds of love and sympathy and those of impartial moral principle. Again, I think that the facts on the ground are that most of us successfully resist any attempts at a hostile takeover by morality, maintaining the integrity of our personal relationships from the reach of impersonal normative demands. Yet there are those, perhaps especially in philosophy, who are particularly zealous about requiring that we provide justifications for our behavior that can be accepted by one and all, a requirement that Bernard Williams famously argued would, in certain circumstances at least, saddle us with “one thought too many,” as in the case of the man who faced with the tragic situation of only being able to save one of two drowning people, chooses to save his wife. As Williams put the point, in such a situation “it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife.”1
Needless to say that it is not such circumstances as saving one’s wife that Milanovic has in mind when he worries about a capitalist-induced collapse of personal/impersonal divide. I’ve included it here to draw attention to the fact that it is a general feature of impersonal normative principles to potentially intrude on and possibly consume the personal sphere. And we see how this connects to Milanovic’s specific target when we acknowledge just how much of the work of restricting harm and inducing cooperation among masses of people is outsourced not to the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility or some other clearly “moral” principle—not even the Golden Rule—but to quid pro quo, the rule of giving something in order to get something. Charles Lindblom captured the normative significance of this rule particularly well:
It is here useful to think of the market system as though it were a political process—not governmental yet nevertheless fundamentally political. Societies are poised at the rim of disorder because of ever-changing conflicting aspirations for countless scarce objects and performances. To this explosive situation the market system brings a solution. It limits every person’s claims to a sum of money obtainable by that person’s offer of something of value on the market: a rule—look at it as a political rule—of quid pro quo. Up to the limit of that sum, each person can then make whatever specific claims—for shoes, travel, or fame—for which the funds are sufficient. A potential for war of all against all is converted into a peaceful process—a political accomplishment of extraordinary sweep and efficacy.
The procedure is supported both by law and popular acquiescence. Even when they protest it as inequitable, most participants continue by and large to live by it. They do not push their individual claims much beyond what the rule of quid pro quo permits, thereby avoiding injuries that would otherwise be inflicted in a violent struggle.2
Now as I have indicated above, I agree with Milanovic that to treat our loved ones according to the rule of quid pro quo would indeed offend our normative sensibilities: one shouldn’t be running one’s family or friendships and though they were a business; the worth of those we supposedly love cannot be measured in terms of their exchange value. Those who do so are not good friends, fathers, or siblings. My reaction to this worry above was to argue that, though it is legitimate, it is overblown, since (so I would claim) so few of us do deal with our loved ones in that way. But what I want to emphasize now is that quid pro quo—and so too the wider capitalist system for which it serves as the primary operating principle—is inherently normative, a fact that Milanovic’s repeated claims about the “amorality” capitalist actors and the putative impossibility of the system itself to be “ethical” tends to obscure.
That it is not entirely clear what Milanovic actually means by “ethical” and “moral” should be obvious from the different arguments for his conclusion that were rehearsed above. (That he uses the terms, as I am here, as essentially synonymous, is not an issue.) Do the emotion-based connections of family and friends constitute the ethical sphere that the creeping “amorality” of capitalism threatens? Or is the idea rather that ethics is fundamentally an egalitarian matter, and that the seemingly inevitable inequality that results from capitalism thereby renders it unethical? My remarks about how abstract moral principles can also encroach on our personal relations in unwelcome ways was meant to forestall thinking we should embrace the former view. Quid pro quo (and the capitalist system) and those moral principles together belong on the same side of the personal/impersonal divide. Neither become unethical (or even merely amoral) for breaching it.
The more plausible ground for condemning capitalism as irredeemably unethical will require, therefore, that we make a further division of normative labor on the impersonal side, with abstract moral principles on the egalitarian—i.e., ethical— side of the production line. This, of course, raises the question of how to characterize the benefits that market system ideally provides, a question that has uniformly been answered as “efficiency,” and more precisely, “Pareto efficiency” in the allocation of goods and services. According to this ideal, if some allocative change “is able to make at least one person better off, by his or her own lights, and no one worse off, then from an impartial point of view (and ceteris paribus) the outcome of that transformation is normatively superior to the status quo.”3 But now notice two things about construing matters this way. First, to restrict “ethical” to the principles directing us toward the egalitarian ideal seems arbitrary (some philosophers have referred to efficiency as “the implicit morality” of the market), and so capitalism’s unethical status becomes an uninteresting consequence of terminological choices. And second, it would seem obvious that, prima facie at least, we should want capitalism to achieve its peculiar ideal; that is, we should want it to be successful.
So the real issue for Milanovic, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that the success of capitalism is incompatible with equality. And maybe he is correct. Whether he is, however, depends a lot on what counts as successful capitalism. I completely agree with him that it will not involve deceptions such as “stakeholder capitalism”. This is the essentially incoherent and unworkable idea that responsible business actors (“managers”) must balance the interests of all the relevant stakeholders in the success of the enterprise, which would include not only ownership and investors, but employees, customers, the community in which the enterprise is located, the environment (to the extent we can speak of the environment as having interests), and perhaps others groups as well. There is, needless to say, no non-arbitrary way for managers to resolve the inevitable conflicts that will arise among these varied interests, and so no non-arbitrary way to measure success. I suspect most business people know this well, which makes it hard to see the Business Roundtable’s 2019 “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” in anything other than a cynical light.
But is there a better measure of success? Perhaps we should follow the lead of those philosophers and economists who suggest that, instead of trying to shoehorn in the ideal of equality, we need to become much more seriously committed to the ideal of efficiency. Consider, for example, this list of “moral imperatives for managers” that the philosopher Joseph Heath has argued can be derived from the very purpose of the capitalist system itself:
Of course it goes without saying that most managers are not abiding by these imperatives, or are only doing so in a very limited sense. But if these requirements, or something very much like them, are in keeping with the normative logic of capitalism, then it follows that we are currently living is something that falls far short of a successful capitalist society. We might hope, therefore, that if we collectively (the state, consumers, and managers themselves) insist that these requirements be respected, the gross inequalities we are currently experience would be to some degree reduced (adhering to these requirements would not result in an equal society. As Heath, for example, argues, turning to the market system to increase efficiency necessarily involves a sacrifice with respect to equality. The issue, however, is how great that sacrifice needs to be. The hopeful prospect is that the greater the degree of efficiency that is achieved, the less equality will be lost in the bargain). Hopefully there is nothing intrinsic to the capitalist system, including its impact on our motivations, that necessarily prevents its success. For success, on these terms at least, sounds pretty good.
The particular passage comes from Williams’ “Persons, Character, and Morality,” Ch. 1 of his Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 (18):
For even if we leave behind thoughts of higher-order randomization, surely this is a justification on behalf of the rescuer, that the person he chose to rescue was his wife? It depends on how much weight is carried by 'justification': the consideration that it was his wife is certainly, for instance, an explanation which should silence comment. But something more ambitious than this is usually intended, essentially involving the idea that moral principle can legitimate his preference, yielding the conclusion that in situations of this kind it is at least all right (morally permissible) to save one's wife. (This could be combined with a variety of higher-order thoughts to give it a rationale; rule-Utilitarians might favour the idea that in matters of this kind it is best for each to look after his own, like house insurance.) But this construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife.
Perhaps others will have other feelings about this case. But the point is that somewhere (and if not in this case, where?) one reaches the necessity that such things as deep attachments to other persons will express themselves in the world in ways which cannot at the same time embody the impartial view, and that they also run the risk of offending against it.
Charles E. Lindblom, The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 (46-7).
Joseph Heath, “Efficiency as the Implicit Morality of the Market,” Ch. 7 in Morality, Competition, and the Firm: The Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2014 (174).