Capitalism and the Evolution of Human Morality

Introduction

Many of the misconceptions that capitalism’s most vocal supporters have about this economic system paint it in a very favorably light.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-common-misconceptions-people-have-about-capitalism

In an attempt figure out the morality of capitalism I sought out the help of Quora’s community, where I posted a question on the moral inclinations of capitalism. I initially wanted to understand why some people believe capitalism is an amoral social system, but before I knew it, I ended up having a long-winded argument with a little-known Quora contributor called Jane Nutter in Quora’s comment section.

misconceptions about the economics of capitalism in American society and I thought it would be a good idea to post the whole conversion to a less popular, but more reader friendly site.

So here’s the full transcript of our argument for your viewing pleasure:

My Question

Is it possible to prove with logic or scientific evidence that capitalism is immoral rather than amoral?

Jane Nutter

You would need to prove that it inherently requires aggression/coercion/non defensive violence. Assuming we’re talking about the free market, it doesn’t.

Communists like to pretend that offering someone gainful employment is a threat because if you don’t do anything you’ll starve. But “if you don’t do anything productive, you’ll starve” is a fact of nature, not a threat, and you don’t only have one offer for employment ever. You can find more. Plus, capitalism does not exclude voluntary charity.

Marx Dagger

Thank you for answering my question, but I have to make a few points about your answer. Before I present my points I would like to mention that I have reworded my question so that it can appear more neutral.

1. As a matter of fact, there are almost no people living outside of capitalist societies (this includes agrarian societies in the definition of a capitalist society). Very few people in the world own their land and live self-sufficient lives on that land. The generational division of land and population growth will make a self-sufficient lifestyle even less likely in the future.
2. Modern technology has largely automated the process of food production and further advances in robotic technology could realistically make food production automated enough to ensure that no human being would ever need to work in order to acquire food from the natural world.
3. Most if not all countries in the world always have some amount of unemployment at any point in time. Full employment has never been achieved and employment when available does not guarantee that workers can afford to pay for both food and shelter. Many homeless people in the United States, for example, have full or part time employment.
4. Automation in some industries such as the self-driving car industry threatens to make millions of people unemployed. It’s a matter of time before companies such as Uber either create or buy millions of self-driving cars to replace their current workforce (I’m using the word “workforce” very loosely in this example).
5. All charitable efforts defy the principles of capitalism and doesn’t the fact charities exist prove that capitalism is a morally inadequate economic system? In other words, is charity just one of the many ways the modern world attempts to treat capitalism’s moral deficiencies?
6. Most if not all countries employ a hybrid economic system that is both capitalist and communist. Is there a country in the world that does not have some welfare state to deal with unemployment and other social ills that could be construed as the moral failings of capitalism?

I don’t believe the above points prove my question’s thesis, but I believe my points will help others think logically about economics and human beliefs about morality.

Jane Nutter

1. If you count Venezuela as capitalist, you’re probably letting your bias tell you every bad thing is caused by what you don’t like, like how I tend to call everything I don’t like communism, including those welfare systems that you so aptly pointed out that basically every modern country outside Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands have. I’m not sure what your point about the lack of totally self sufficient homesteads is. That’s not socialism any more than it is capitalism.
2. Yes, automation has largely eliminated the need for farmers, but not completely. That doesn’t mean we have an infinite amount of food, nor that it would be moral to confiscate it from those who produce it. That is a large part of why food is so cheap these days that obesity is a bigger problem than starvation in first world countries though.
3. There is always unemployment, but usually it’s not the same people for very long, and those who are unemployed can generally live off either their savings or their relatives (which would be even more true without the Fed constantly inflating the currency and thus making savings lose value). Oh, and most of the homelessness problem is a result of zoning laws and rent control.
4. Didn’t you just speak positively of automation in the agricultural industry? Historically we’ve needed 90%+ of people to be farmers and now it’s closer to 1%. If automation causes so much unemployment, why don’t we already have 89% unemployment? I’ll give you a hint: could a medieval farmer have imagined a programmer’s job?
5. Charity is another expression of capitalism, not defiance of it. It’s an investment in having a happier society. It’s buying a happier conscience. And it gives you better candidates for employment.
6. I kinda answered this in 1, but IIRC Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands don’t have welfare and people do fine because they also don’t have a bunch of red tape to keep people from getting productive enough to survive.

Marx Dagger

1. It would be disingenuous to say that Venezuela is a pure communist society and not a quasi-capitalist state. Singapore, Cayman Islands, and Hong Kong have welfare services of some kind and all of them have charities that support the poor in the way that some of their citizens would hope that their governments would:

The definition of what a “welfare state” is seems to be under contention in Western countries observing the political developments of non-Western countries. You should be careful not to spread factually incorrect information on the internet.

2. If the food production process were fully automated and completely nationalized then there would be no need to confiscate food from food producers in order to redistribute said food to the rest of society. But for the sake of supporting my current argument let me address the current reality: is it really unethical to confiscate food from food producers who are threatening starve whole swathes of their nation’s population for the sake of personal profit?

3. The vast majority of monetary inflation in most if not in every every country in the world comes from private banks not governments. Again, you’re spreading factually incorrect information. The United States also gets most of its monetary inflation from banks in spite of the US Federal governments quantitative easing policy. Yes, the US government prints money, but private US banks print more money than the US government and are much more responsible for monetary inflation than the US Federal government.

You could make the argument that the Fed should set a low fractional reserve ratio for private banks to prevent said banks from printing too much digital money in the form of loans. Often times, governments can fail to properly regulate certain industries due to the lobbying efforts from rich lobbyists such as the US Koch family. Poorly regulated capitalism is largely responsible for the global occurrence of monetary inflation. Here is a video from the Bank of England explaining the origin of most of the money in the world:

Bank of England had explained why most of the money supply comes from the issuing of private bank loans

4. Is the fact that unemployed individuals are forced to rely on their relatives for financial support not an example of one of capitalism’s moral failings?

5. I spoke positively of automation, but I won’t shy away from saying that automation poses a serious threat to capitalism as a whole even though it is making individual capitalists richer.

6. Even programmers can be unemployed. There’s no guarantee that every single programmer, lawyer, or doctor will be employed in a capitalist economy. And anyway, automation through artificial intelligence threatens to make many programmers, lawyers and doctors unemployed. AI software can replace many programmers, lawyers, doctors, and even engineers.

7. Are you implying that the moral worth or moral essence of capitalism is dependent on its long-term stability as an economic system? My argument is that capitalism creates poverty and the creation of poverty, not capitalism’s treatment of poverty, is what makes capitalism an immoral economic system. Capitalism, with any amount of regulation, is unstable and likely to create poverty. But I don’t think the creation of poverty through economic instability is immoral. I think incentivizing the creation of poverty is immoral and that’s the crux of my argument. But I was looking for counterarguments, not an opportunity to defend my own argument.

8. Charity cannot be an expression of capitalism, because that’s not how the English language or any other language works. Try as you might you cannot singlehandedly redefine the words “capitalism” and “investment” to make them more compatible with the concept of charity. The creation of words in a language is a democratic process, whether anyone alive likes it or not. And anyway, the “profit motive” lies at the heart of any capitalist economy. Charity defies capitalism’s profit motive. The whole point of moving capital (in whatever form) in a capitalist system is to earn a profit on the movement of said capital. And profit, strictly speaking, has to be an increase in material wealth. Capitalism does not incentivize charitable activities, but it does incentivize the exploitation of those who are charitable by nature.

9. Is it ethical to make charity the responsibility of individuals rather than society as a whole? Secondly, capitalism dis-incentivizes charity by turning it into a cost for each and every individual. In other words, capitalism introduces a cost to charity.

10. Capitalism introduces inefficiencies to charitable activities by necessitating the funding of organizations called “NGOs” and not-for profit “foundations”. In fact, the middle men of charity — those work for NGOs and foundations — are profiting greatly from capitalism’s failings. Some people who work for NGOs and foundations drive range rovers, but the recipients of charity never become this wealthy. The middle men of charity also have a financial incentive to ensure that they earn as much money as possible and give the recipients of charity as little money and resources as possible. The middle men of charity are trapped in capitalism’s zero-sum game of wealth distribution.

11. By investing in another person’s happiness through charity you are effectively making yourself less well-off or, dare I say, making yourself “poorer”. The time and money people spend improving the lives of the less fortunate is time and money they could have spent making themselves richer. There is an opportunity cost to be charitable and that cost only exists because of capitalism. Capitalism also turns charity into a zero-sum game in which there are winners (the recipients of charity) and losers (the providers of charity): all you have to do to see this zero-sum game play out is to describe all charitable activities in purely monetary terms.

Furthermore, economists are paid money by for-profit educational institutions to describe charitable activities in purely monetary terms. Capitalism incentivizes a profit-seeking worldview and dis-incentivizes a more charitable outlook on life. You can say that there is more to life than making money, but capitalism incentivizes a transactional worldview.

Jane Nutter

1. It would be disingenuous to say that Venezuela is more capitalist than communist, or that its even close. And “the more you work, the more welfare you get?” That’s like saying the founders liked gun control because they made everyone register their guns even though it was a requirement that people have guns. Of course, even if you’re right that every country has welfare, that doesn’t mean its a good thing. Every country has suicide and murder too. I should have made that point first, sorry for wasting your time.
2. The government does not create value. It gets money by taking it from someone else. Even if it “nationalized” food production, that’s just another way to say “steal the means of production.” (Incidentally, has it ever occurred to you that the means of production are also the fruits of someone’s labor?) And food producers are threatening to starve people for profit? You do realize that’s the opposite of how they make money, right? Judging by history, what’s really a threat of starving large swathes of the nation’s population is giving the government a monopoly on food production a la USSR.
3. Private banks like the Federal Reserve is “private?” If private banks printed more money than the government, that would be called counterfeit. Oh wait, you mean loans are “printing money” when that’s not anywhere near literal. A better term would be making money, as in generating value. Oh, and fractional reserve banking is a product of government and corporate welfare. The way loans work without government permission to lend more than they have is that you give an individual money to invest in their house, car, business etc. then expect them to make enough money to pay it back with interest.
4. No. How is asking your relatives to take care of you (like they presumably did for the first 18 years of your life) less moral than forcibly taking what one person earned to give it to someone who won’t appreciate it because they didn’t earn it (in your mind)?
5. Innovation is a threat to capitalism like fertilizer is a threat to farmers.
6. Did I say programmers are never unemployed? That would be awfully silly as my fiance is a programmer and has been unemployed before. My point was that people generally find more productive things to do when they are unemployed. A layoff is the market’s message that this position is not a productive one for you, find a better option.
7. “Capitalism creates poverty”? 😆😆😆 I thought even you communists understood it was the opposite! Isn’t the stereotypical wording of the complaint that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”? (Which incidentally isn’t true, I’ll get to that.) Capitalism is about the creation of wealth. Now if you mean relative poverty instead of absolute deprivation, yes, when the top gets higher, they’re relatively higher than you are. But when a mountain grows, so do its foothills. So too do the poor get richer, more comfortable lives under capitalism. Strip mining the top of the mountain and throwing the material in the ocean doesn’t increase altitude. Free markets reward you for giving people something they want more than what they have to give you in return. It rewards enriching your customers’ lives. Politics, on the other hand, rewards politicians for creating problems by making people clamor for more powerful authorities who can “solve” their problems. That’s incentivizing poverty creation.
8. Profit has to be material by definition? You have a different definition of profit then. When someone has more money than he could possibly spend on himself, what does he want? Social capital. Friends. Admiration. He would gladly trade for this with some of his material wealth that he has in surplus. If charity goes against capitalism, was Andrew Carnegie not a capitalist? 9. “Is it ethical to make charity the responsibility of individuals rather than society as a whole?” Let me swap in some synonyms so you can see how ludicrous this sounds to me. Should we really make caring for people the responsibility of people who’ve made a lot of profit by helping people rather than governments (who get all their money by extortion)? “Capitalism introduces a cost to charity” do you think the State has magical powers to help people without costing anyone anything? All the state does is spend other people’s money for them. It’s not a God you can pray to for blessings. Everything has a cost under any system because of two things: we don’t have time travel, and this universe has the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Capitalism just makes people wealthy enough that the cost of charity is insignificant compared to its benefit.
9. “Is it ethical to make charity the responsibility of individuals rather than society as a whole?” Let me swap in some synonyms so you can see how ludicrous this sounds to me. Should we really make caring for people the responsibility of people who’ve made a lot of profit by helping people rather than governments (who get all their money by extortion)? “Capitalism introduces a cost to charity” do you think the State has magical powers to help people without costing anyone anything? All the state does is spend other people’s money for them. It’s not a God you can pray to for blessings. Everything has a cost under any system because of two things: we don’t have time travel, and this universe has the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Capitalism just makes people wealthy enough that the cost of charity is insignificant compared to its benefit.
10. “The middle men of charities” judging by what you’re arguing for, do you mean politicians? They certainly get big paychecks for sitting around. Or maybe you mean bureaucrats? Social Security and Medicare spend more on administration than on actual recipients of state “charity.” The world isn’t perfect or fair, and that can’t change (everything has a cost). Also, capitalism is a zero sum game? Projection much? Voluntary trade makes both people better off or they wouldn’t consent to it. Authoritarian involuntary extortion is the zero sum game; what the government gives to one person it must first take from somebody else. Actually I think it’s more of a negative sum game since you don’t generally appreciate things as much when you haven’t earned them.
11. The opportunity cost to be charitable only exists because of capitalism? Again, no time travel and conservation of mass and energy. The government can’t create anything out of thin air. Literal printing of money doesn’t create value, it just redistributes value from those who already had currency to those who control the currency because of the law of supply and demand (which, as one of the laws of society, is as incontrovertible as the laws of physics).
    A transactional worldview (let’s make a deal) would be better than a robbery worldview (give us what we want or armed enforcers will end your career, possibly your life). Voluntary charity isn’t transactional though. It’s “I want to help you continue to be a good person.”

Marx Dagger

We have to settle on the definition of words based on English dictionaries and online encyclopedias. Neither of us speak a different version of English from the rest of the world. You cannot make me speak your personal version of the English language by selectively changing the meaning of certain words for the sake of winning an online argument. In fact, no one can do that on the internet.

For the sake of finishing this argument let me provide the following definitions:

(1) Objective morality: the instinctual feelings humans evolved toward each other and other species that have a similar phenotype to our own (i.e. look like humans): Empathy — Wikipedia

(2) Subjective morality: each person’s personal set of standards for what constitutes morally acceptable behavior: Ethics — Wikipedia

(3) Morality: behavior associated with the treatment of other living creatures. Morality — Wikipedia

(4) Profit: a material benefit from engaging in physical activities including digital activities that manipulate electronic devices such as computers and the latter’s networks. Profit — Wikipedia Downloading a movie is a physical benefit i.e. a profitable exercise.

Anyway, capitalists have no financial incentive to engage in charitable activities and investing several times more in marketing a charitable activity than the charitable activity itself is not what most people would describe as charitable behavior. That’s just marketing or “virtue signalling” in the corporate world for the sake of branding. Now onto the more important points:

1. Whether or not Venezuela is more communist than capitalist or vice versa is irrelevant to this discussion. And the extent to which countries in the world are capitalist or communist does not prove or disprove capitalism’s inherent morality or lack thereof. It is illogical and irrational to attempt to prove capitalism’s moral worth by measuring or proving its economic stability.

2. Governments create value by employing people. All organizations, corporate or otherwise, create value by employing people. Value comes from human labour and technological output e.g. automated car production. Banks can be nationalized and loans can be issued by a national bank. The benefits and disadvantages of nationalization are not relevant to this discussion, but I just want to make it clear that private banks and private businesses do not hold a monopoly on value creation. Again, the effectiveness of capitalism is not what my question is about and I replied to your answer because you were making factually inaccurate claims.

3. I said private banks print more digital money through loans than the federal reserve does through quantitative easing. Again, the failure of capitalism through monetary inflation or through any other means in no way proves that capitalism is immoral. Capitalism can greatly enrich society as a whole and still be a deeply immoral system simply because it incentivizes unethical behavior (objectively immoral behavior — see neuroscience studies of somatic empathy). My argument is that capitalism’s moral failings such as forced labor (labor is never optional in capitalism) proves that capitalism is an inherently immoral system.

4. I’m making a different argument from the one you are proposing: food producers’ horde food to ensure that everyone pays for the food they produce. They would rather let the food they produce rot than give it away to the needy for free. There is no financial incentive for food producers to create a tiered system for their customers: there is no financial reason why they should give some people food for free and charge other people for the food they make. This is a fact no one can deny in any country. Food production can be nationalized to make food free for everyone and governments can employ people to work on national farms: doing this would eliminate the moral dilemma of forcibly taking food from private food producers. But once again, I have to state whether or not capitalism works as economic system does not in any way demonstrate or negate its moral worth as a social system.

5. I think you’re using the word “innovation” to refer to automation. For a capitalist economy to work money must always be in circulation: Velocity of money — Wikipedia

If millions of people become unemployed due to automation then there will be less money in circulation and the economy will grind to a halt. Employed people buy goods and services, but unemployed people who have no money and therefore cannot buy goods and services. E.g. the employees of a super market are also the customers of said super market. If the super market fires all of its employees to adopt a fully automated system then they will have less customers (assuming that the relatives of the supermarket’s former employees run out of money to financial support them or are also laid of by their employers).

6. There is no such thing as a free market. All markets have barriers to entry including non-governmental barriers to entry: Barriers to entry — Wikipedia Perfect competition is a hypothetical idea that does not exist in reality: Perfect competition — Wikipedia

7. (a) Politicians can be made less powerful through different government structures such as direct democracy (use your imagination).

(b) Capitalism creates scarcity by incentivizing the hoarding of natural and technological resources. People are poor because they cannot afford proper food and housing and they cannot afford these basic amenities because private corporations such resources to expensive for them to acquire.

Governments, unlike private corporations, are not primarily driven by a profit incentive and are therefore far more likely to provide capable food and shelter to the poor for free. Again, this depends on the structure of the governments in question. Political engineering has already created welfare states throughout the world with varying degrees of efficiency and/or success. You are free to compare welfare systems from across the world, but that is outside the scope of this discussion. The efficiency of government welfare is also not proof for or against the moral goodness or immorality of capitalism.

8. Capitalism has nothing to do with “social capital”. If you have to pay someone to be your friend then perhaps that person is not really your friend (just wait and see what happens when you stop paying them to be your friend).

And I’m not inventing my own definition of the word “profit” (see the related link above). Charity, by definition, has nothing to do with the incentive structure economists and most human beings would describe as “capitalism”. You’ve turned the concept of capitalism into a moving target by expanding its definition and scope.

9. a) Yes, governments are in the business of extorting their citizens for tax money through military force: no rational person would deny this. Physical coercion is a necessary part of creating any social order be it democratic or authoritarian. All organized societies need institutional violence.

b) “All the state does is spend other people’s money for them.” More precisely, the state spends other people’s money in the hope of fulfilling the collective will of all tax payers.

c) But capitalism creates a financial incentive for politicians to steal from the government bureaucracies they are often elected to run. Money stolen from governments can be re-invested into legitimate (legal) and highly profitable businesses. And lobbying (legalized political bribery) for the de-regulation of all private industries is a financial incentive for politicians to mismanage national economies: Inside Job (2010 film) — Wikipedia. If national economies fail then the big businesses that lobbied to pass laws that would ensure the government’s failure will gain a larger foothold in the government’s market share in every industry.

d) Governments can represent the will of their people, or not — it just depends on the bureaucratic structure of said governments. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship and this played a big role if not the only role (I’m not an expert on Soviet history) in the creation of all the economic problems the plagued the countries it ruled over.

10. Why should anyone care if the people who receive welfare “appreciate” the aid they receive from governments? You’re making a highly subjective argument that can only be answered by stating one’s personal preference for explicit signs of “gratitude”. Most parents don’t throw their children out onto the streets, because the latter didn’t express enough gratitude even when their children are full grown working adults.

I also think feelings of “appreciation” or “gratitude” are completely irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not people need welfare. The request for gratitude from welfare recipients also implies that the recipient of welfare needs to be somehow “deserving” of said aid. Nobody deserves anything in life not even life itself, but everyone needs food, shelter, and clothing. By the way, nobody chooses to be alive or to be born into this world and one can only truly be grateful for being alive in a world plagued by war, famine, and disease; all three of which are often the product of capitalist economies competing for resources.

Facts are more important than feelings, unless you are a god capable of changing reality with nothing but the feelings inside your head: this is called Reality Warping in fiction.

Moving on…why does everyone have to be forced to earn basic necessities such as food and shelter? Or anything at all, for that matter? If technology can make work obsolete and work is not an essential aspect of modern human life then why should anyone work? Your argument about work and the appreciation of money received in exchange for work sounds like the “Cult of Work” argument:

Your argument also sounds fatalistic: Fatalism — Wikipedia

Your inability to imagine a fairer world, perhaps one in which everyone has an equal amount of natural resources, is not proof that a fairer world is impossible. And the current existence of an unfair world is not proof of a future unfair world. In fact, the existence of any past event is not proof nor is it a guarantee that a given future event will occur. The belief in destiny and the belief in fate are both examples of magical thinking: Magical thinking — Wikipedia

Capitalism’s inherent morality or lack thereof cannot be justified or refuted by a fatalistic worldview because fatalism does not address the question of whether or not capitalism incentivizes or dis-incentivizes social evils. We are back to the argument of whether or not capitalism’s morality is determined by how effectively it can sustain humanity’s existence. Or put differently, is capitalism morally good because it works? This is fallacious reasoning that implies that the end (humanity’s survival) justifies the means (capitalism).

A fatalistic mindset assumes that capitalism is the only social system that can keep humanity alive in a world with limited resources — this viewpoint is not only fallacious, but also irrelevant to our discussion.

Anyway, beliefs often become self-fulfilling prophesies: if everyone believes that a fair world cannot exist then a fair world will almost certainly not exist.

10. No, the middle men of charities are the employees of NGOs and not-for-profit foundations. Yes, those organizations actually have salaried employees who act as middle men between the donors of financial aid and the recipients of financial aid from said charities. And no, governments are not charities and welfare services are fundamentally different from charitable donations (taxes are not optional but donations are).

Whether governments use “Authoritarian involuntary extortion”, depends on their structure.

Governments allocate labor and resources and therefore any structure of government cannot produce a negative sum game between the citizens of a government and the government itself, because the mere act of “organization” requires human labor and therefore has some value. You could make the argument that some governments are so inefficient and poorly managed that they create “negative” value through their organizational work and therefore actively hurt the economies they run. Or maybe some governments produce a net value of 0 due to the organizational gains and losses. Private businesses also provide organizational value through “management” and again not all forms of “management” are worthless and produce a negative value or value of 0: some companies are more effective than others.

You are making an assumption that the government is run by a separate class of citizens — this need not be the case depending on the structure of the government such as the case of a direct democracy where citizens vote on the creation and adoption of laws and legal policies proposed by other citizens and/or politicians. It doesn’t matter if real world direct democracies are somewhat different because the point is that our bureaucratic imagination as a species has to be exhausted before we conclude that a world full of democratically run hybrid economies is the only possible way to run a functional global economy.

11. a) Yes, resources are finite and the laws of physics are not going to change. But capitalism is not the only way to create “wealth” or more resources if that’s what you mean. You have simply made the assumption that wealth only comes from capitalism or some system of economic coercion (i.e. forced or legally mandated trade or exchange of labor) and if you’re not a rich capitalist or wealthy landowner, who doesn’t have to do any work, then that assumption won’t work in your favor.

b) Technically speaking, a government can create value by printing money if the newly printed money is used in the same way that the money generated by the private bank loan would be used and that’s assuming no price inflation is caused by the sudden increase in the money supply. Governments can fund entrepreneurship through the printing of money in exactly the same way that private banks fund entrepreneurship by printing new money through loans. Governments can also use newly printed money to fund national welfare services, something that private business are obviously not willing to do.

You are creating a double standard for the practice of printing money by saying that private banks create value when the print money, but governments don’t create value when they print money. This double standard is illogical and downright irrational.

12. And lastly just because trade is a better moral alternative to war does not prove that capitalism, a specific type of system of trade, is a morally good economic system (at least not in any objective sense). Raping a person could be a more morally acceptable act than murdering said individual, but that does not prove that rape is a morally good let alone morally acceptable act.

My core argument is that capitalism is more likely to incentivize socially harmful behavior than socially beneficial behavior and that is what makes it a fundamentally immoral social system.

Governments supply welfare services because capitalism always produces poverty, which comes in the form of a class of people who cannot afford to pay for the natural resources that capitalists horde for personal profit.

There is also no situation in which the rich get poorer and the poor get richer without the application of a progressive tax system in which the rich are taxed to a greater extent than the poor. I would be shocked if you could provide evidence to the contrary.

And now for my my last point…

Comrade Jane, I don’t think you understand economics.

Jane Nutter

Wow that’s long. I don’t have the time or energy for this much anymore, so I’ll just address those definitions. I think I might be able to show you that even you don’t really accept every aspect of those.

1. Objective and feelings don’t go together. 1 + 1 = 2 doesn’t just feel right, it is right objectively. Objective morality is a matter of simple logical principles that build upon each other in the same way math does. Killing an innocent (productive) member of your own tribe (murder as opposed to war) is counterproductive. 8–1 tribe members means the tribe member to wooly mammoth ratio is lower. Hunting has a lower chance of success. Even if Glog was kinda a dick and no one’s really sad he’s dead, in other words no one feels like its a big deal, it is still bad to kill him.

2. This one we can probably agree on, but notice how similar it is to Wikipedia’s definition for objective morality? It’s just phrased differently and more individualistically.

3. Ambiguously worded. Is morality a behavior we engage in with other living creatures, or is it about how we behave with other living creatures? Besides, if it’s exclusively about how we behave with other living creatures, does that mean you don’t consider pollution or strip mining immoral?

4. Downloading a movie is profitable? Not by that definition. Its immaterial. It doesn’t manipulate electronic devices (it’s not a program). You know why downloading a movie is profitable? Because you value the movie; you can use it to make yourself happy, either by enjoying it alone, or by drawing other humans to spend time with you. A lot like charity; it feels good, and it makes people like you.

Marx Dagger

1. First of all, even though “Objective and feelings don’t go together” there still exists an objective morality that humans share with other animals. Humans and other mammals that have to take care of their newly born offspring for an extended period of time evolved somatic empathy (a neurological response) to ensure that they have the “motivation” to prevent their children from dying, which in turn helped prevent their species from dying out, which in turn saved their genes from dying out. The selfish gene, as Richard Dawkins, explains in his book “The Selfish Gene” invented compassion and empathy in mammals to increase its chances of survival in each one of those mammalian species. Genes for compassion are more likely to survive because parents that save their children from starvation and physical danger increase the chances of said genes surviving into future generations. This can only explained with the laws of physics in topics such as quantum biology.
2. And secondly, any version of morality based on math and logic is inherently subjective. Your example of Glog and his tribe sounds like a mix of two philosophical perspectives: Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. All philosophical arguments are based on logic, but they are also all inherently subjective in the sense that they all begin with a subjective premise (a subjective assumption). You are making the assumption that the survival of the individual is best secured through the survival of the group as a whole: this is not always the case. If you are arguing that the survival of the group is dependent on cooperation among individual members of the group then you would be making yet another assumption: that the survival of the group is more important than the individual (this is an assumption not supported by any preceding logic or scientific evidence).
3. Humans are both selfish and compassionate and everyone varies to the degree to which they are compassionate or selfish: this fact can only be explained through biology and with real-world evidence. Logic alone cannot explain why human morality exists nor can it justify any proposed system of morality that could be considered “objective” in the sense that it is a singular source of objective truth.
4. Your example of Glog and his tribe cannot explain the morality of non-human species. Dolphins, according to some accounts, often save humans from drowning. This may be because dolphins have to give birth to their own babies i.e. birth giving in mammals may force the evolution of empathy and compassion in those species: Dolphins Rescuing Humans
5. Here is another example of inter-species morality:

Gorillas and dolphins obviously don’t expect to receive compliments from the humans they save and they obviously don’t expect to be praised by members of their species for their charitable because they can barely speak and communicate. And it’s also unlikely, if not outright impossible, that the gorilla in the above video saved the human child (by also cradling him for no apparent reason?) to please its human caretakers.

1. Math and logic are not the same thing — there are 2 different tools for conducting scientific research. And science is a different from both math and logic.
2. When you write the formula 1 + 1 = 2 you are writing a mathematical proposition that just so happens to agree with reality. It’s possible to write math formulas, that are consistent with the rules of mathematics, but that are inherently illogical and may also disagree with reality e.g. using the Markov Chain to explain the grandfather paradox of time travel: Minute Physics hasn’t solved the grandfather paradox Using the Markov chain to explain time travel into the past also contradicts the laws of physics such as the one you mentioned about the conservation of energy (the 1st law of thermodynamics).
3. By the way, assumptions are inherently illogical because believing in an idea (even an assumption) without evidence is illogical. And assumptions also happen to be irrational in the sense that they do not help one achieve one’s goals. Assuming a god/gods exist won’t help one achieve immortality, but doing medical science research certainly will.
4. It’s impossible to discuss morality without discussing people’s sense of compassion. And anyway, compassion is the primary reason why people like donating their time, money, and energy to charity. Feeling good about charity and receiving the compliments of those receiving financial aid may be a secondary reason as to why people act charitably in most cases.
5. Pollution is immoral because it hurts other living creatures and it can be assumed that humans feel empathy toward the non-human living creatures suffering from human pollution. Killing plants doesn’t count as immoral because humans feel no empathy towards or have no compassion for plants (you commit plant infanticide every time you eat a plant’s baby fruit).
6. At the risk of sounding pedantic I have to argue that both movies and software programs such as Microsoft Word take up data storage and they both, therefore, manipulate electronic devices.
7. But I will concede that there is such as thing as psychological profit such as the psychological benefits of charity. But there are also selfish psychological benefits that are also non-material in nature such as receiving talking therapy from a psychotherapist. Talking therapy is a selfish non-material benefit that can be described as “profitable”.
8. There are 2 reasons why charity cannot fit into the definition of capitalism:
9. 1) Capitalism creates the poverty and misery that can only be solved through the charity of others. Here is an example of poverty caused by capitalism working perfectly:

2) The majority of economic activity in a capitalist economy revolves around the “economic profit” motive — a motive that is inherently selfish and self-serving.