Morality and Capitalism: Depletion of the Free Resource?
The article analyzes some aspects of the position of morality regarding political, philosophical, religious, and scientific discourses devoted to capitalism. The paradoxical situation of these discourses is that they describe moral values simultaneously as a commodity and a non-commodity. On the one hand, exclusion of morality from the market is one of the key conditions for the development of capitalism, and not only in the sense that it removes moral barriers in pursuit of profit. It also means the transfer of morality into the category of a free resource. This resource is actually present on the market as a cost factor, but is pronouncedly ignored, not considered. On the other hand, for the ideological and scientific discourses that analyze capitalist societies in a global historical context, the picture is completely different. Here we face the actual recognition of the enormous monetary value of certain moral values. The authors of these discourses almost openly describe morality, whose price is ignored at the level of ideology "for internal use", as a source of value. Overall, the authors recognize that morality is paid indirectly at the global level, being the source of a kind of a moral-imperialist rent. In conclusion, the author of the article raises the question: will a similar paradoxical attitude to morality continue in ideological discourses that legitimize capitalism? He suggests that in the foreseeable future most of the dominant political, economic, and scientific discourses will recognize moral marketability. One can see the consideration of some trends in the field of economics and ideology, testifying to the actual recognition of morality as a commodity, i.e. to the depletion of morality as a "free resource". Political consequences of this can be quite ambitious: if morality has not only value but also price, this implies a moral right of workers to demand payment "for everything".