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Capitalism and the 'Preferential Option'
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17892 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
6,398 Words |
| Author
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Stephen T. Worland
Stephen T. Worland is professor of economics emeritus,
University of Notre Dame. |
Any latter-day attempt to test the moral legitimacy of capitalism has to take account of a striking formula, one praised as reflecting profound moral insight by its adherents but denounced as demagoguery by its opponents. The formula is the "preferential option for the poor." As a principle of justice, the formula demands not distribution in proportion to merit as required by Aristotle, not scrupulous respect for the equal rights of each individual as required by the Enlightenment. Rather the formula demands that in the shaping of public policy, the needs, desires, and aspirations of the poor be granted priority over all other moral claims.
Emerging out of the cultural context that produced liberation theology and reinforced by the Marxist belief that capitalism systematically generates a form of "false consciousness," the preferential option principle has been use to underwrite the belief that capitalism must be replaced with a socialist alternative if true justice as demanded by Judeo-Christian morality is to obtain in the contemporary world. Capitalism, according to the perspective of liberation theology, establishes the profit motive as a "pagan deity." In the day-to-day worldwide functioning of such a system, the deity demands a daily sacrifice of exploited workers and evicted peasants, an underclass driven into the streets of the industrialized, metropolis. If capitalist man would allow sympathetic identification with such hapless victims to penetrate his conscience, he could be purged of the contamination of affluence, brought to realize that the mode of production that underwrites his bourgeois life-style rests on fundamental injustice. In the process of conversion, so the indictment concludes, he will eventually be led to accept the preferential option as a basic distributional principle.
Informed by careful reading of biblical sources and inspired by a commitment to the cause of the worlds’ poor, the preferential option presents a forceful challenge to bourgeois complacency. However, the conclusion that such a radical distributional principle requires the overthrow of capitalism is open to question.
The capitalistic mode of production thrives on inequalities, which provide the market signals and incentives to drive the system. But as the opposition to monopoly characteristic of capitalism show, the only inequalities granted moral approval are those that are functional. Unlike the symbolic social stratification encountered in traditional or romantic societies, capitalism tolerates only those income differentials that, by rewarding productive effort and inducing the required resource transfers, contribute to the
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