“Your right to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.” This common aphorism—often used to illustrate the limits of personal freedom—integrates two bedrock moral principles: reciprocity and harm. You can’t get more universal than “Do unto others” and “Do no harm,” the first moral principles widely taught to young children.
In practice, of course, the meanings of rights, reciprocity, and harm are always subject to interpretation. And that’s where natural humanism has something fundamentally important to say about the unconstrained freedom of private investors to pursue profits. I contend that legitimate, principled limits to the private pursuit of profits can be derived by specifying the relevant analogs of “where my nose begins” and what constitutes the harmful “punch.”
In today’s political economy, private investors have the legal right to seek profits without directly accounting for “externalities” such as pollution, or even destruction, of our common physical and social environments. In the worldview of natural humanism, by contrast, we understand that humans cannot survive without healthy physical and social environments. Moreover, Earth’s biosphere and humanity’s social fabric are the collective birthright of our species: our environmental commons. From this perspective “my nose begins,” and private investor’s rights end, at the boundary of our vital common resources. Everyone is harmed when our commons are depleted.
The most fundamental costs borne by the public are (a) the destructive climate effects of burning fossil fuels and (b) the denial of social justice from the domination of political power by private capital. Continual harm to and ultimate destruction of air, water, soil, and whole ecosystems, as well as harm to local communities, health care, journalism, privacy, and civil discourse, are just a few more examples of common goods and resources at the mercy of private investors, corporations, and speculators lawfully seeking greater (and usually short-term) profits from the exploitation of public resources.
From the perspective of natural humanism, an unconstrained profit-seeking political economy is immoral and illegitimate. Instead, private investors should always bear the burden of proof to justify depleting common resources without prior negotiated restitution and appropriate limits. Instead of the conventional archetype of the individual “economic man,” natural humanism embeds and interconnects all humans within the environmental and social commons that sustain and nourish us. A replacement archetype might be along the lines of “ecological people” committed to the health and well-being of each and every person on the planet.
3 Responses
Your logic is sound, but it’s devilishly hard to come up with practical mechanisms for constraining the destructive activities of corporations and other for-profit entities. Government is rarely the answer; indeed in many societies, government seems to exist for the benefit of business.
I certainly agree with the view that the pursuit of profit by private enterprise should be more fully regulated in the public interest. As Which Future makes clear, however, that’s not likely to occur if the default—the starting point—is always “no regulation” and the burden of change is on the public interest. Deficiencies in the political process alone are enough to make that burden too difficult in so many cases. And don’t most Americans, consciously or unconsciously, rather fully accept the present default, at least unless they are negatively affected personally and directly by the damaging activity pursued by the profit seeker? Is anti-government, anti-collectivist thinking now too much a part of American culture, especially in the Post-Reagan era, to expect a change? It seems to me that the default is not inevitable in democratic societies. In many situations it is reversed in the EU where the question is more often “what’s good for people?” in contrast to the American question, “what’s good for business?” How can we restore more of the former in American education and thinking? And more confidence in collective thinking and solutions? That occurred to a meaningful degree in the Progressive Era (around 1900) and in the 1930’s. So it can happen.
Thanks, Sally and Jeremy, for kicking off comments on this post. It is surely hard to imagine a change from “what’s good for business?” to “what’s good for people?” under the present neoliberal regime. Congress is largely funded by business and the media are profit-driven, so both are barriers to progressive change.
I don’t think anything in my book speaks directly to these facts. My emphasis is on how interconnected the barriers are, all rooted in the same ways of viewing the world, hence the same values. As Jeremy says, America in the past has asked “what’s good for people?” and some E.U. countries still do today. There is that source of hope.
If anyone else reading this post or these comments has another thought about them, feel free to chime in.