The Ethics of Capitalism

[merjet]

http://merjet46.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-ethics-of-capitalism.html

[Guyau]

Thanks, Merlin, for the peek into Henry Hazlitt’s The Foundations of Morality. I’ve had it on my shelf a while now, but the time is not yet right for me to dig in. For now I remain open to a possibility he evidently rejects: egoism and altruism might be mutually exclusive, yet not jointly exhaustive, depending on how one defines the two.

The site “What Ayn Rand Read” lists this book with a note: “This item was included in a 2005 auction of materials from Ayn Rand's personal library. The auction catalog describes it as being underlined and/or annotated, so it is clear that Rand actually read it.”

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PS - Marginalia of Rand's on another book of Hazlitt's is included in Ayn Rand's Marginalia. Clashes over altruism, self-regard, capitalism, creative intelligence, and rights appear on pp. 167-69. I surely concur with Rand that portrayals of free-market production and exchange as somehow really altruistic is a farce.

[merjet]

1 hour ago, Guyau said:

 For now I remain open to a possibility he evidently rejects: egoism and altruism might be mutually exclusive, yet not jointly exhaustive, depending on how one defines the two.

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PS - Marginalia of Rand's on another book of Hazlitt's is included in Ayn Rand's Marginalia. Clashes over altruism, self-regard, capitalism, creative intelligence, and rights appear on pp. 167-69. I surely concur with Rand that portrayals of free-market production and exchange as somehow really altruistic is a farce.

To your first point, I guess you allude to altruism as meant by Ayn Rand, which she equated with sacrificial. Ditto altruism and altruistic in your second point. 

Hazlitt used altruism in a much broader meaning. He devotes Chapter 14 to self-sacrifice. He doesn't condemn it to the degree Rand did, but calls it a folly.

"I have already cited the arguments of Bentham and Spencer against the folly of everybody's living and sacrificing for everybody else" (113).

On the other hand:

"I think we can reject without any further argument the contention of a few contemporary ethical writers that it is never the duty of an individual to sacrifice himself for others, or that it is even "immoral" for him to do so" (112). His counter-examples included policemen and soldiers. Hazlitt doesn't name any writers here, but my best guess is Ayn Rand, whose name appears only once in the book.

"But there are very few ethical Egoists (the only one I can think of is the contemporary Ayn Rand, if I rightly understand her), who hold that while men can and do act altruistically and self-sacrificially, they ought only to act selfishly" (92).

According to Wikipedia: "Even prior to her success with The Fountainhead, the novelist Ayn Rand was a friend of both Hazlitt and his wife, Frances, and it was Hazlitt who introduced Rand to Mises, bringing together the two figures who would become most associated with the defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism. The two became admirers of Hazlitt and of one another."

I haven't read and don't own Ayn Rand's Marginalia. Thanks for the tip.