Don’t Let the Best Be the Enemy of the Good: A Stoic Defense of the Market

Abstract

conclusion- 83-84 Is the market just? Not in the sense that it meets some discrete idealof political good. The market, not being an ideal, simply cannot mea-sure up to such standards. If we are to dismiss it as amoral, we are left without guidance when it comes to how we should act in the market.Far better is to determine that the market has a peculiar status of “just enough.” It is not glorious. It is never how we would prefer itto be and never as good as it could be. But humans thrive in market-based systems and can do so without the cost of horrific violations of human dignity. Higher standards cannot be imposed on a social sys-tem until the possibility of meeting these higher standards exist. Weare not to expect too much, or to confuse political ideals for actualsocial good. Political systems, the Stoics approach I am describing would insist, are the wrong place to idealize. They are simply theconditions in which we live.But just because it could be that we have happened upon a justenough political or economic system does not mean there is noth-ing else to live up to. How moral a society can we be? The sky is the limit. We could refuse to tolerate or participate in any sys-tem that seems to us inconsistent with what we hold to be valuableabout humans. We could open our borders and begin to share our wealth with the very poor instead of with our local shopping malls.Stoicism would encourage this type of imagination. We have had along run of imagining better political organizations. What if we juststart imagining better personal ethics rather than better systems of justice? What if we just felt confident we had the vocabulary of suchethics?If so, I imagine that CEOs would be afraid to trot out lines aboutdoing “God’s work” when so much of their reward comes fromhelping to set policy. Like the choice before the ship owner bring-ing grain to a famine-torn island, we can recognize the options.