What do they call moralizing Capitalism? Walking with Adam Smith

Abstract

In order to overcome the negative consequences of the last economic and financial world crisis, the whole International Community has argued in favor of the necessity of moralizing capitalism. We might think that the intention was good. However, the problem we can immediately spot in the intention of “moralizing capitalism” is that since the Scottish Enlightenment, capitalism has always been thought of as a moral theory. Nor the selfishness it promotes, neither the unlimited accumulation of wealth it encourages was presented as having immoral consequences. On the contrary, from the point of view of most of the theorists of Capitalism, they are both the conceptual foundations of the morality of the system. Thus, pretending to moralize capitalism is presented as a paradox: How can we moralize a system that is a moral theory? Reading once again the texts of Adam Smith, we try to demonstrate that the problem of capital- ism is not its immorality, but the incapacity of the International Community to create meta-moral norms in order to evaluate and criticize the capitalistic morality.