Our society is welfare capitalist. Ownership of land, factories, labor, and most of life’s necessities, are commodities bought and sold in the market. Most of production is privately undertaken to sell on the market. A small class owners control investment, innovation, and savings. Owners ruthlessly compete for profit against other firms via price, product quality, etc., which encourages reinvestment and growth. Even monopolistic firms must compete for finite consumer spending. Workers, on the other hand, must compete in a labor market to purchase commodities to subsist. Competition in welfare capitalism is somewhat mitigated by trade barriers, immigration control, environmental and health protections, subsidies and incentives. ‘Losers’ in the market are also compensated by a ‘social safety net.’ For business, this includes bankruptcy laws, limited liability, etc., and for workers this includes workman’s compensation, food stamps, etc. A just society must include welfare programs for those who cannot work and do not own sufficient capital. Welfare capitalism, however, goes far beyond helping the severely disabled, elderly, among others who cannot fully cooperate in society since it relies on welfare programs to help workers who fully participate in social cooperation.

There is much discussion about the rightward turn in western politics, even in Scandinavian countries. Political commentators are often surprised, expressing the attitude, ‘how can someone with a social safety net complain?’ How can citizens in welfare capitalist societies feel angry or checked out and left behind? These feelings are not surprising at all once we see that the critic of progressivism and sympathy has their critique backwards. A just society can never be a welfare capitalist society. Such a society, even perfectly imagined, requires superhuman sympathy on behalf of the ‘losers’ in the market. They must be happy about the winner’s extra power, political influence, and ability to satisfy their every desire. In other words, to justify this arrangement, we need to care deeply about the general welfare of society.

The political philosopher John Rawls spent most of his life developing an alternative account of justice for liberal democracy because he could not accept the prevailing ‘utilitarian’ consensus—an account of justice focused on maximizing the general welfare of society. Much of his celebrated A Theory of Justice is spent offering comparative arguments to show us that an egalitarian view of justice better captures our democratic ideals than any utilitarian competitor. Among these ideals are that a just liberal democracy is comprised of free and equal citizens engaged in fair democratic cooperation. We find these ideals in democratic history, including our own Declaration of Independence and Preamble, France’s motto ‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ or the works of social critics like Fredrick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Rawls argued that utilitarianism poorly fits with these ideas. He also associated utilitarianism with welfare capitalism since it provides welfare capitalism with its best defense, one that is as close as possible to liberal democratic ideals. Rawls’s objections to welfare capitalism boil down to the claim that its best case is at odds with a society of cooperative, equal and free members.

Classical utilitarianism holds that the right social system satisfies as many interests as possible. Many early capitalist economists were ‘classical utilitarians’, like Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. And this is no surprise. Utilitarianism can provide a deeply intuitive defense of welfare capitalism. It goes like this. Maximizing your satisfaction of interests over your lifetime is rational. While you might prefer to snowboard than work, you work now in view of your long-term interests. This tradeoff is one of many. For the utilitarian, the right social system maximizes the satisfied interests of its members. It is then, simply the rationality of an individual applied to society. To defend this move, it helps to imagine an impartial sympathetic spectator organizing society. If this God-like figure is rational and impartial—considering all interests equally—it would maximize the total satisfaction of interests in society. These simple, impartial, and rational premises support the classical principle of utility. The next step is to connect total consumption with the satisfaction of interests. Capitalism produces the most goods and services. Thus, capitalism comes closest to maximizing desire satisfaction in society so long as losers in the market are compensated with welfare programs. The case is elegant, intuitive, and deserves closer examination.

There are many possible replies. But let us focus on those advanced by Rawls. He found welfare capitalism wanting at the level of the values that it realizes. He thought that the best defense of capitalism in terms of liberal democratic values was utilitarianism, but that the latter fit poorly with these values. Let us consider two of his arguments to support this claim. His main worry is that utilitarianism does not prioritize individual liberties in society. Justice comes second for utilitarianism. To maximize satisfaction, we can trade off individual liberties for economic welfare. If the oppressive ‘re-education’ of a religious minority will maximize total happiness in the long-term, utilitarianism supports it. Rawls responds, “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.” Utilitarianism poorly supports liberties because it is always willing to trade them off for additional welfare gains. To understand why utilitarianism fails in this way, we need to turn to another objection.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Rawls has a second knockdown objection. Utilitarianism ‘does not take seriously the separateness of persons.’ For him, the impartial spectator is not impartial reasoning but impersonal; it is a way of reasoning that conflates all persons into one. This kind of reasoning gets the subjects of justice in a liberal democracy wrong. It fails to capture the fact of what Rawls’s called ‘reasonable pluralism.’ In a free democratic society, citizens will disagree on the ultimate aims in life. They will disagree on religious and moral outlooks and consequently will put forward conflicting claims about rights and resources. Spectator reasoning treats diverse citizens as if we were all one person. It conflates the diverse desires and interests of separate persons into a single system. Recall that the principle of utility is the rationality of one person applied to an entire society. To defend the principle, we must treat separate people as if we are one homogeneous organism, the ‘spectator.’ But the history of democracies tells us otherwise. Reasoning as if Muslim citizens will celebrate restrictions on their freedom of conscience for the greater good of a majority made up of Atheists or Catholics misunderstands justice within free societies. Democratic cooperation is desirable, but it also produces burdens and benefits that must be justly distributed. The problem of justice is how to fairly adjudicate between claims that rest on very different outlooks. Consequently, to follow impersonal reasoning and the principle of utility based on it, we must greatly sympathize with the interests of others. We must be willing to treat our interests in snowboarding, our family, our religious outlook, as interchangeable with all other citizens’ interests. This is what justifies the tradeoffs of basic liberties.

We can now see something quite unintuitive about the utilitarian case for welfare capitalism: it relies on a superhuman ability to sympathize with one another’s interests when addressing conflicts in cooperation. To accept utilitarianism and welfare capitalism is to accept the greater good even when we are the sacrificial lambs. We must congratulate Jeff Bezos because he can easily satisfy all his desires. We must dispassionately weigh the suffering caused by capitalism—the domination, exploitation, environmental destruction, and inequality—against the total desire satisfaction it produces. Moreover, these criticisms reveal the incompatibility of utility with democratic values. Self-respecting free citizens are willing to justly cooperate; they are not willing to become cogs in a machine for other walks of life. The utilitarian basis for capitalism fails to secure our freedom and equality by reasoning as if we are one person. It even fails to realize the basic reciprocity required for democratic cooperation. The masses are expected to work for the benefit of others, or total happiness.

Rawls’s famous ‘original position’ argument is meant to accurately represent citizens as separate free equals facing democratic cooperation. It is his remedy to the ills of utilitarianism. Rawls’s hypothetical agreement on principles of justice occurs between representatives of citizens with conflicting views of the good life. The parties are ‘mutually disinterested’ to represent diversity. Separate parties, with distinct ways of life, must agree on principles for their society, but each party only aims to advance one citizen’s interests. To make the reasoning impartial, he stipulates that it would take place behind a ‘veil of ignorance,’ where the parties do not know which race, class, gender, etc., to favor. Rawls argues that such parties would agree to two egalitarian principles: 1) Equal basic liberties, including freedom of conscience and the ‘fair value of political liberty’ (each citizen should have roughly equal chance to influence democratic processes and deliberation), and 2) socioeconomic inequalities are only justified under conditions of fair equality of opportunity and if they are mutually beneficial compared to equality. For instance, socioeconomic inequalities could be just only if society had equal schooling, universal healthcare, high inheritance taxes, among other policies to maintain roughly equal life chances. And although a society may allow inequalities in wealth and income, for instance, to encourage citizens to train in medicine, these are only justified if they are deeply reciprocal, that is, only if they maximally benefit the worst-off workers compared with equal pay. The principles also reject the distinct classes of capitalism. We are not free and equal in democratic cooperation with a dominating capitalist class who owns and controls the means of production. Rawls’s principles can only be fully realized in either a ‘property-owning democracy’ or ‘liberal socialism’, both of which require strong worker powers and a classless society in Marx’s sense. Ownership of the means of production must be socialized or equalized and control of productive means must be widely spread throughout society.

Rawls rarely mentions classical utility in his later works. As intuitive as it is, he believed that the above arguments were damning. Instead, he focused on mixed utilitarian accounts that might be defended in a social contract like his original position since these cases would more closely match the ideals of freedom and equality. These ‘mixed conceptions’ would prioritize liberty and equal opportunity but then maximize average desire satisfaction. This seems to provide the best case for a strong welfare state capitalism that is as close as possible to our democratic ideals. Rawls argues, however, that his egalitarian anti-capitalist conception of justice dominates utility and welfare capitalism on every relevant count. These include that his conception realizes reciprocity in cooperation, his principles publicly express reciprocity and provide the social bases of self-respect for every citizen, and as such his egalitarian principles generate their own stability. For instance, Rawls shows that welfare capitalism/utility will ‘strain the commitment’ of the worst-off citizens since it relies on great sympathy. It asks much more of the least advantaged in society since they are to accept fewer advantages for the sake of greater advantages to the better off. Not only does welfare capitalism require great sympathy for the better off, it also treats the worst-off workers as subjects of charity rather than fully cooperative citizens. The worst-off workers in society then, are economically and politically marginalized. Indeed, rather than empowering democratic citizens, capitalism creates a persistent resentful underclass who regard themselves as non-cooperative outsiders. Alternatively, Rawls’s egalitarian conception requires that every worker, from doctors to garbage collectors, are all treated as fully cooperative citizens in mutually beneficial cooperation. Garbage collectors are doing their fair share in cooperation. They are not objects of charity or pity. Nor should they be encouraged to sympathize with Elon Musk’s great wealth and power. They are owed reciprocity as our fellow free and equal citizens. Left politics demands deeply cooperative virtues, like reciprocity, not bleeding hearts. We should follow Daniel Chandler’s call; the U.S. left, and the Democratic party should take up Rawls’s principles.