Selfishness is a trait often ascribed to those who endorse capitalistic economics, with capitalism itself receiving criticisms for the actions of negligent corporations and egoistic businesspeople. A crucial distinction must be made between ideology and follower, however. Just as there is a blatant difference between Christianity and the claims of many self-proclaimed Christians or between feminism and the claims of many self-proclaimed feminists, there is an obvious distinction between capitalism itself and some of the people who claim to represent it.
It must be clarified early on that selfishness is a largely misunderstood concept even apart from economic or business contexts. Caring deeply about oneself and one's own immediate needs or desires--for businesspeople, this includes the financial success of their business--is not a sign of selfishness. Rather than being the emphasis on or concern for the self, selfishness is a distortion of personal priorities that drives one to neglect moral obligations to other people. Though it may be surprising even to some Christians, even self-love is not contrary to Biblical ethics, but is in fact a component of it (Leviticus 19:18).
Self-interest never has to evolve into actual selfishness because they are not inseparably linked. It follows that there is nothing about capitalism or even about the objective of profits that has an inherent connection with selfishness. It is not logically impossible for someone to gravitate towards the maximization of returns without neglecting moral obligations to other people. However, there are some who would rather draw erroneous conclusions from the moral failures of certain companies than acknowledge that there is nothing inherently negative about a deep concern for the monetary success of one's firm.
Of course, it is far from rare to find people who claim allegiance to a worldview who also do not understand it, live it out, or both. This means that there are people who might identify with a philosophical system without genuinely comprehending the actual nature of that system. Capitalism has its share of such "adherents," who intentionally exploit or neglect others, but this only reveals the selfishness of the businesspeople in question--it does not tell anyone about the tenets of capitalism as an ideology.
Self-interest never has to evolve into actual selfishness because they are not inseparably linked. It follows that there is nothing about capitalism or even about the objective of profits that has an inherent connection with selfishness. It is not logically impossible for someone to gravitate towards the maximization of returns without neglecting moral obligations to other people. However, there are some who would rather draw erroneous conclusions from the moral failures of certain companies than acknowledge that there is nothing inherently negative about a deep concern for the monetary success of one's firm.
Of course, it is far from rare to find people who claim allegiance to a worldview who also do not understand it, live it out, or both. This means that there are people who might identify with a philosophical system without genuinely comprehending the actual nature of that system. Capitalism has its share of such "adherents," who intentionally exploit or neglect others, but this only reveals the selfishness of the businesspeople in question--it does not tell anyone about the tenets of capitalism as an ideology.
Some individual capitalists might harbor extraordinarily selfish motives, while others might genuinely care about the wellbeing of society as a whole. There is nothing about professing to have a capitalistic worldview when it comes to the intersection ot economics and politics which means that a person is either selfish or concerned with others. Selfishness is a trait of people, and it is only rarely an actual tenet of a worldview (though it is naturally associated with egoism). There is no validity to the charge that capitalism itself encourages or requires selfishness.
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