“The legal institutions of a democratic and capitalist society are not designed to give people what is good and prevent them from getting what is bad; they are designed to give people what they want and not give them what they don’t want.

Is it that institutions designed to give people what they want regardless of whether it’s good do a better job of giving people what’s good than systems actually designed to give them what’s good? Or do you have some other way of reconciling these positions?

You ask, “What justifies the system? Given a choice, why should we have a system that gives people what they want as opposed to some other system?”

Assuming you mean what justifies the system from a moral point of view, I would say that, the justification lies in the fact that, for a people like us in a society like ours (though not necessarily for people with a very different culture organized in a very different kind of society), democratic capitalism tends on balance and in the long run to promote the objective human good better than the known alternatives.

I base the moral justification for democratic capitalism on the objective human good because I am Aristotelian in morals; hence, I think that whenever anything is morally justified–an action, an institution, a policy, a law, whatever–its justification is ultimately founded on the objective human good.

This doesn’t mean that the things whose existence are so justified have promoting the human good as their function. What is the moral justification for reinforced concrete? Clearly, that in certain circumstances, making reinforced concrete promotes the objective human good; when this is the case, making reinforced concrete is morally justified. This tells you nothing about the nature or function of reinforced concrete. All it tells you is that, if you’re an Aristotelian, you justify everything you justify in terms of the human good.

But it is not necessarily so directed. Exchanging weapons for conflict diamonds is as much a species of commerce as any other

The end of medicine is healing, the end of agriculture is food production and so on. But the end of commerce is gain, which may be used well or ill

He notes that nothing prevents a merchant from ordering his profit to some other honest and necessary good, and so profit is licit. He qualifies this by says that when someone orders the moderate profit he seeks by business to the support of his household or to help the needy, or even when someone is in business for the benefit of the public, so that his country will not be lacking in the things necessary for life, he is not seeking profit for its own sake, but as the rightful fee for his labour..[ST II-II q 77]

The Ancients recognised the demoralising effects of commerce.. Plato wanted the laws to punish any citizen who engages in commerce and Aristotle believed it was only with the corruption of certain democracies that artisans attained the status of citizens. He maintains that a good republic will never grant them civil rights.

During the French Revolution, the young idealist, Saint-Just declared, “Trade ill becomes the true citizen. The hand of man was made only to till the soil and to bear arms.” It was to prevent anyone from debasing himself by practicing a trade that he wanted to distribute land to everyone.

Wouldn’t scenario A still be preferable to scenario B from a moral perspective?

Also, there is a ‘normalizing’ factor of having dirty movies sold by otherwise respectable businesses. Having hotels get out of the porn pimping business is probably a good thing for this reason alone.

However, if these are the kinds of “victories” we are hoping for, we are truly in deep trouble. In comparison to the scale of the problem, such accomplishments seems to be pretty pointless.

On the other hand, recall how the “broken windows” theory and crack down on vandalism in New York City ended up leading to very substantial crime reductions. Maybe the baby steps are more influential than they seem to be.

No, I understood your point. What I was suggesting is that any “victory” expunges porn from hotel flat screen televisions that depends on the porn migrating to a guest’s laptop or tablet is strictly pyrrhic.

@David Nickol,

I seriously doubt that you can find one “captialistic nation”. You surely won’t find it here. The US federal government spends close to $ 4 trillion per anum (out of a GDP of $14 trillion), has the most progressive tax system in the world, and will lavish some $100 trillion of entitlements to the poor and eldery through the next 40 years. By using the definition you posted above, the US is one of the most “moral” nations on earth.