I found this helpful. It make clear an implicit distinction I think I'd held but hadn't made explicit. It certainly explains the motivations of many people I know who argue against capitalism when/because they are really against selfishness.

I don't way to be too harsh, but this is the apotheosis of obtuse Oxford-style analytic philosophy. You can make whatever conceptual distinctions you like, but you should really be starting from the historical and sociological reality of capitalism. The case for why capitalism generates selfish motivations is not obscure.

Capitalism is a set of property relations that emerged in early modern England because its weak feudal aristocracy had no centralised apparatus by which to extract value from peasants, and so turned to renting out land to the unusually large number of tenants in the country - generating (a) competitive market pressures to maximise productivity; (b) landless peasants that were suddenly deprived of the means of subsistence farming. The peasants were forced to sell their labour - the labour they had heretofore been performing for themselves, on their own terms - to the emerging class of agrarian capitalists, who extracted a portion of their product to re-invest in their holdings.

The capitalists have to maximise productivity through technological innovation, wage repression, and so forth, or they are run into the ground and bankrupted by market competition. There is, as such, a set of self-interested motivations which one acquires if one wants to be a successful and lasting capitalist. It is a condition of the role within the structure of the market. The worker has to, on the other hand, sell themselves to those with a monopoly of the means of subsistence or face starvation. To do so they have to acquire the skills, comport and obedience to be attractive to the capitalist class. Again, one has to acquire certain self-interested motivations as a condition of the role within the market. Finally, capitalism requires a sufficiently self-interested culture such that it can sustain compounding capital accumulation through the sale of ever-greater commodities.

In general, I think this is correct and a very useful distinction. I hear people make sloppy arguments on this all the time. It's clear that capitalism and socialism do not at least obviously or superficially entail selfishness or selflessness on a conceptual level.

I do think that on a deeper conceptual level, though, there may be more connections. I took a socialist philosophy class in college taught by an "analytic Marxist" (John Roemer) who used the tools of neoclassical economics to model a more reasonable and precise version of Marxist theory. He was best friends with G.A. Cohen, one of the greatest analytic political philosophers of the 20th century (in my opinion the greatest). Both of them held the view that understandings of selfishness and selflessness were pretty key to the conceptual cases for capitalism and socialism: capitalists took selfish motives for granted, both underestimating the extent of selflessness and utterly neglecting the possibility of changing the extent of selflessness and selfishness in human beings. Socialists, in contrast, recognized that it is possible to foster different ethics and that the ethic of socialism, being more selfless than the ethic of capitalism, would feed on itself.

Interestingly, G.A. Cohen argued that socialists should abide by very similar principles to EAs in his book "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?"

Good that you write this document, but in my opinion we're dismissing the important question, which you clarify your post doesn't address:

"I am not arguing for or against the proposition that capitalism creates incentives for people to be selfish, or makes people more selfish than the socialist alternative. This is a distinct empirical question."

Gathering empirical data for this topic is difficult, but I would like to see a discussion on how people's selfishness are transformed in either communism or capitalism -- and most importantly, whether it's possible to expect these selfish agents to eventually make benevolent actions despite their previous (or still present) selfish actions.

In general, I like the conceptual distinction you make here. Few comments:

"Capitalism = The private ownership of the means of production. Socialism = The collective ownership of the means of production." I find this still a bit problematic. One could argue companies and other possible legal entities are collective means of ownership. Alternative definition that socialism = State ownership of the means of production?

I like the the way you phrase the relationship between system of ownership and ethos of selfishness/benevolence as an empirical question. My question is though: what is the relevance of ethos of selfishness - isn't that a process goal? Should we focus on individual well-being instead which is a outcome goal (i.e. ethos of benevolence is valuable because it is seen to cause well-being).

I'm having trouble seeing how an individual benevolent person would hold ownership of a company (unless they were the only benevolent person). It would require the owner to think that they knew the best about how to distribute the fruits of the company.

This seems unlikely, as they are trying to help lots of people they need lots of data about what people need to meet their interests. This data collection seems like it would be best be done in a collective manner (as getting more data from more people about what is needed should give a more accurate view of the needs, and this data should be shared for efficiency).

So why wouldn't the benevolent individual give their share of the company to whatever collective system that determined the needs of the world? They could still be ceo, so that they could manage the company better (as they have good data about that). It seems like the capitalist system would morph into either socialism or charity-sector owned means of production, if everyone were benevolent.

I do however agree that socialism is not inherently selfless (nor is the system where charities own the means of production).

There are lots of other potential systems as well apart from the charity-ism I described above. I'm interested in what happens when sufficiently advanced micro-manufacturing enables everyone to own the means of production (this is also not inherently self-less or selfish). You could look at systems where people only rent the means of production from the state.

"This does not mean that capitalism is bad because capitalism is not conceptually tied to selfishness. The question of which system of economic ownership we ought to have is entirely separate to the question of which ethos we ought to follow."

This is almost solipsistic - it sounds like you're denying that a complex social world exists out there with powerful and entrenched system of causation. Only for the most remote, cerebral idealist are these two things possibly separate. What's the point of this kind of philosophy?