Capitalism’s Moral Dilemma

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of “market morality”: In our market system, we believe that money grants value and meaning to the moral and social questions of life. It doesn’t. Nevertheless, we’re under its spell.

Market morality interprets life in economic terms. For instance, many corporations do not believe they have a moral duty to vulnerable communities affected by their business practices. Instead, they assert that their primary duty is their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and other stakeholders in the company. In this case, the moral domain of corporate practice is about securing profit returns to the exclusion of broader social and communal practices of care.

We have witnessed, repeatedly, poor communities and their environments polluted by toxins associated with corporate practices. This is readily seen in the Flint, Mich. water crisis, which persists. These companies offer no apologies, because their moral obligations are defined in economic terms, shaped by the bottom line of profit.

Market morality and its logic of profit disfigure how we understand and evaluate the moral content of social problems. For example, certain arguments for immigration employ a kind of market morality. The 2018 PRRI study “Do Americans Think Too Many Immigrants Are Coming to the U.S.? It Depends on Their Country of Origin” showed that Christian and European immigrants are embraced more than Muslim and Mexican immigrants, due to assumptions that Europeans are more hardworking and industrious (and less criminal). This argument reduces immigrants to having worth and dignity insofar as they generate economic value.

But what about immigrants crossing the border who may have nothing to add to the economy? Must their human dignity and worth be measured solely in economic terms? Norms of market morality such as individual achievement and the quid pro quo do not allow for these deeper questions on the kinds of values we need, values that cannot be reduced to economic utilitarianism.

Objects of the state

Market morality also conceals deeper Machiavellian processes at work that disenfranchise and devastate vulnerable communities. For instance, international trade agreements are often seen as positive contributions to the United States and other nations because they can generate greater wealth. However, this wealth is often concentrated in the hands of an elite few. These trade agreements often exacerbate dislocation, poverty, and despair.

Consider the 1996 NAFTA pact. There has been little discussion on how NAFTA allowed corporations to bring Mexican workers to America to “cheapen” the labor pool. Even more deceptive, few talk about the number one cause of job erosion and impoverishment of small farmers in Mexico, which led many of them to the U.S. in the first place: NAFTA itself, which opened the door for U.S. and transnational corporations to take over almost all Mexican corn production. Small farmers could not compete with these corporations and thus met economic devastation and dislocation.

Market morality praises international trade agreements and the enormous wealth these treaties create. It hides how such agreements are profoundly immoral, undermining entire Indigenous economies and ways of life for the sake of profit.

Immigration is not the only issue that is reduced to its economic utility. Policies surrounding mass incarceration tend to operate on a market calculus. President Trump recently signed into law a criminal justice reform bill that reduces the number of people in our nation’s prisons by decreasing sentences. Yet this “sweeping reform” does not address the ongoing logic of the prison industrial complex, which conceptualizes prisoners in market terms. Prisoners are often treated as if they were objects of the state rather than human beings deserving of basic dignity and respect. U.S. prisons are extremely profitable because they use inmates as free or cheap labor. This hypercapitalist treatment of prisoners undermines the goal of rehabilitating and integrating them back into society.

When we are unable to see the humanity in certain populations, it legitimates a variety of exploitative practices. The prison industry is based on crude pursuit of profit and a devaluation of the basic humanity of prisoners, an obvious violation of Christian principles.

Sweatshop morality

Market morality is operative around the globe. For example, economists such as Benjamin Powell have defended the economic utility of sweatshops on what they consider “moral” grounds. They argue that sweatshops offer higher wages and a higher standard of living than other options available to global workers within their own domestic contexts.

Even liberal journalists such as Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof reject the idea that sweatshops are always and intrinsically ethically wrong. They assert that sweatshops generate positive effects in extremely poor contexts around the globe, lifting millions of workers from abject poverty to something still awful but qualitatively better. They are clear that they are not for sweatshops that simply exploit workers, but instead support factories that adhere to basic human rights and provide options for workers who can choose to work for $23 a month in a sweatshop rather than work for $8 a month or less in their informal domestic sector. Even a sweatshop job, they argue, is better than scavenging for survival on a garbage dump.

Others turn to a market morality in their defense of sweatshops—the moral domain, for them, is reduced to a kind of consequentialism: An action, even activism, is ethical insofar as it enables profit for corporations. In this view, the profitability of corporations provides the conditions under which poor workers can be treated with dignity. However, even when sweatshops provide fairly safe working conditions, they often do not take seriously other forms of oppression, such as sexual harassment that women endure on the job and the refusal to help workers with health care and child care expenses. What is considered moral in relation to sweatshop economics is measured by how profitable a company can be.

Using economics as the litmus test for human value is deeply problematic and undermines core Christian commitments that human beings have intrinsic value that can never be reduced to how one participates in society or economy. How can we move away from the commodification of human beings in which human worth is defined by economic terms?

I think often about my childhood Pentecostal tradition and what it taught me about my own human worth and dignity. In my black church, many members experienced forms of economic deprivation, often not having adequate shelter, food, or clothing. The church also had members who were in better financial states.

What I remember clearly is how the entire congregation forged community. We valued communal norms of equality and interdependence. We visited each other’s homes, laughing and growing together and learning and loving each other with each passing year. It didn’t matter who had what. We did not measure each other by attainments or achievements. We realized that God existed in the faces and hearts of each person. That was enough.

We possessed a theological worldview that measured human worth through the lens of love. We were worthy and endowed with human dignity because we were created in the image of the Creator. Yet, we knew that view could only breathe and live through our actions, through how we embodied togetherness in community. Hurt people often came to the doors of our church looking for care and compassion. We did not judge them based on what they could immediately contribute to the community or their economic value to broader society. Instead, we embraced their worth and dignity as a human being who deserves the love and care of Christ.

My church taught me a lot about the value of human life and exploded the norms of market morality. We must have a vision of human life that’s not controlled by the unholy whims of profit worship.

Human flourishing

What word of hope should we offer the immigrant mother at the border who has lost a child? What message of life should we extend to prisoners who desire second chances as they serve out their time in prisons? How should they be treated in these institutions: as commodified labor, or as humans in need of opportunities to rehabilitate and reintegrate? How should we respond to poor workers who are often treated as mere cogs in multinational machines of unending profit? I believe that the life, message, and ministry of Jesus rejects market morality.

As Christians, we should also embrace human-centered approaches to our market activities. On a micro level, we might re-envision the importance of markets to people’s lives, particularly those who are vulnerable. Markets do not have to be antithetical to our deeper values; we can make markets serve human flourishing.

For example, how can our consumer activities support businesses oriented toward rehabilitating ex-offenders? There are programs such as the Texas Offenders Re-entry Initiative that financially empower ex-offenders to help them reintegrate into society. Organizations such as Thistle Farms support women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction by making it possible for the public to purchase products handmade by the women. How might our churches fashion programs that respond to the widespread poverty that often afflicts the places where we live?

We might also work to address massive student debt, in which Wall Street profits from people seeking the “American Dream.” Students are vulnerable in a market morality context that treats them as if they’re merely part of the bottom line instead of as human beings.

We can also think on macro levels about markets. Working for public policy such as living wages and adequate health care reflects our commitment to prioritizing humans over profit, even within our market context.

This nation must rethink its basic moral terms when it comes to who we are as humans. We have been seduced by the market and its insidious moral utilitarianism. Christian communities have an opportunity to intervene and demonstrate that every human life has worth and dignity, because each life reflects the image of a loving, compassionate, and just God. As Jesus reminds his disciples in Matthew 6:24: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”