In the latest issue of Locus Magazine (December 2007), Graham Sleight reviews Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2001). (I haven’t read the book, so I can really only comment on Sleight’s remarks.)
Here is the passage he is commenting on:
“I was young and stupid,” [Kovacs] said simply. “I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learnt better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now, I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.
“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a spitting sound. “You can always get some more people, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable?”
Then Sleight remarks:
That’s all very well as a portrait of capitalism: a particular kind of capitalism, extrapolated far beyond the level it’s at presently.
Sleight may be a left-libertarian who favors free markets and uses the term capitalism to refer to the current statist-corporatist system we are burdened with today. He’s right that it could certainly be worse. But it’s not laissez-faire capitalism, a.k.a. the free market. If he’s not a left-libertarian, and I have no reason to expect he is, then his characterization of capitalism is economically ignorant, for that was not an accurate portrait of the free market.
Sleight then goes on to say tangentially:
(I should add that of all the books I’m looking at, it’s the one with the most obvious detail that will date it: people smoke cigarettes, and sometimes they don’t even feel guilty about it. Wherever you stand on the public health versus individual liberties argument on smoking, it’s hard to imagine this particular noir emblem will persist five centuries from now.
Why do I get the feeling he comes down on the statist side of that argument?
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the