I helgen har jag gjort lite research inför en artikel. Det innebar, för mina syften, att jag blev tvungen att läsa lite Herbert Spencer. Jag läste igenom nästan hela The Principles of Ethics Vol 2.

Jag visste sedan tidigare att Spencer var en förespråkare av laissez-faire kapitalism och att han motiverade det på utilitaristiska grunder (med främjandet av mänskligheten som standarden). Detta innebar att man kunde förutse att han inte skulle vara helt konsekvent i sin argumentation för kapitalismen. Men jag hade ändå inte förväntat mig det här:

Beyond those limits to the actions of individuals which it is the business of the state to maintain, individuals have to impose on themselves further limits, prompted by sympathetic consideration for their struggling fellow citizens. For the battle of life as carried on by competition, even within the bounds set by law, may have a mercilessness akin to the battle of life as carried on by violence. And each citizen, while in respect of this competition not to be restrained externally, ought to be restrained internally.

Lite längre ned:

Not many years since there lived in New York a man named Stewart, who, carrying on a wholesale and retail business on a vast scale, acquired a colossal fortune. A common practice of his was suddenly to lower his prices for a certain class of goods to an unremunerative rate, seriously damaging, if nothing more, numerous small traders, and greatly hampering, if he did not ruin, sundry large ones. Another practice was to encourage and aid some manufacturer in apparently a friendly spirit, and then, when he was largely indebted, come down upon him for immediate payment; selling him up and often buying his stock when he could not at once pay.

Competitive warfare carried on in this style, might not unfitly be called commercial murder; and were its flagitiousness to be measured by the pain inflicted, it might be held worse than murder, originally so called: the amount of suffering eventually caused among the ruined men and their families, being greater than that which many an assassin visits on his victims and others. (Min kursivering.)

Så att göra sitt bästa på att konkurrera ut andra på en fri marknad är, moraliskt sett, att betrakta som värre än mord?!

Sedan i nästa stycke kommer pricken över i:et: ”Such utter lack of negative beneficence [vilket betyder att avstå från att främja sitt egenintresse även om det inte innebär att man kränker andras rättigheter; detta håller Spencer som en form av altruism eftersom det handlar om att främja andra genom att avstå från att handla egoistiskt] is to be condemned not only because of the intense evils thus directly inflicted, but is also to be condemned in the interests of society”.

Detta uttalande kommer alltså ifrån ”one of the leading 19th century English radical individualists”.