Stoic versus Capitalist Conceptions of Cooperation

Today (2 May) is the two-year anniversary of the death of my father, Don Francisco Guerra. Although he did not live to see a free Cuba, my wife Sydjia and I will continue to honor his legacy by devoting our time and treasure to this Quixotic cause as long as we remain alive. Another moral dimension where Stoicism and capitalism overlap in part is that both systems embody a mixture of cooperation and competition. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “We were born for cooperation ….” (Meditations, ii.1) From a Stoic perspective competition can also play a positive role in our moral development: competition is what allows us to hone our skills and develop our talents to the best of our abilities. Likewise, competition in economics is the lifeblood of capitalist system, for as Adam Smith showed long ago, competition is what lowers prices, keeps our selfish tendencies in check, and fuels innovation. At the same time, cooperation is just as much a “capitalist virtue,” so to speak, as it is a…