'fraid that’s the nature of all philosophical text. one can never say enough and the product always remains open. what you can do, however, is use the tools of philosophy to sort through a text and separate statements that belong in the natural sciences, and statements that reflect fallacious (formally and informally), personal bias and erroneous reasoning. philosophy should be concerned with being critical of its own language rather than attempting to explain or even describe any ‘truth’. science takes care of that. philosophy just tags along. i’m reminded of that quip by stephen hawking; the philosopher is just a failed scientist.
in any case, i guess you could summarize the paragraph you found to be ‘unclear’ as a statement about the limits to any attempt to establish any kind of real altruism in actual practice rather than as just another philosophical concept. what the paragraph shows is that until economics resolves that unavoidable circumstance of ‘class conflict’ that exists in this specific capitalist mode of material relations, no amount of ethical philosophy can be used as a defending justification for it; not utilitarian consequentialism, not virtue deontology, and not normative ethics. instead, these philosophies are conveniently ‘tweaked’ to fit the expectations and advantages of the person who benefits from the system in place. so, for example, you’d find a capitalist putting forth a convincing argument that kant’s or mill’s theory of ethics supports, and leads logically to, a capitalistic free market. it does not, and cannot, by the sheer fact that under the conditions of conflicting class interests, people cannot be said to genuinely want to cooperate. they are forced to compete, and where there is competition, there is no real social contract of ethics with the ‘other’ class. this indicates stirner’s egoism as the default parameters of moral and ethical behavior inside such a system. on the other end of this spectrum is marxism, which symbolizes the resolution of that fundamental problem that so constitutes the conflict of interests between classes; that property should belong only to he who produces it if we wish to eliminate the circumstances that prevent any real social contract.
now we don’t have to, mind you. i’m only showing the limits of this problem and how one is forever approaching one end or the other, whether they know it or not. this means that any philosophical narrative that attempts to defend capitalism on ‘moral’ grounds will be farcical… merely the voice of someone to whom capitalism gives an advantage, and so therefore uses philosophical language to defend and excuse that advantage. simply put, man does not want to work, and will go to any lengths to justify his not wanting or needing to… provided he is kept alive by the fruits of other’s labor, to be able to make such a utterance. it’s an alarming thought, really; a thousand years of philosophical nonsense from the mouth of a parasite, all for the purpose of finding a reason for not having to work. he thought he was on to something, thought he had discovered how he was ‘different’, above and beyond the necessity of labor. despite his attempts, the history of philosophy didn’t end with a noble and aristocratic bang, but a pitiful fizzle, and that is something truly comical.
so yes, to TRULY solve the problem of ethics, we have to slay that great beast, max stirner. and one cannot do this with any ordinary sword. only marxcalibur can do it.
excellent example of what i explained above; that attempt to defend capitalism through any number of informal fallacies. pathetic fallacy; describing capitalism as an agency that is responsible for the products that come into existence in such a system. nay. what is to thank for such technological improvement is human productivity, not capitalism. this is to say that such productivity does not rely on capitalism, or even communism for that matter, to be realizable. it was only that such productivity happened to happen during such a period that we erroneously give credit to the particular system in place in which it happened. that same scale of productivity could have happened under different circumstances, as well.
here’s another example. we would not be able to say that either capitalism or communism, exclusively, are necessary for the improvement of education. why not? because we see this phenomena occur in both; in capitalism we see privatized educational institutions popping up everywhere… and yet during mao’s dictatorship, we watched the literacy rate of chinese people raise some 70 percent.
so we would be misGUIDEd to assume any degree of human productivity owes itself to something transcendent to human nature in general, some particular system that has to be in place for that productivity to become realized. the enormous growth that took place during the rise of industrialism and capitalism is only circumstantial, and defenders of capitalism do not hesitate to seize the opportunity to commit this pathetic fallacy in their attempt to defend it.
or so it appeared. certainly the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism marked a break from that paternalism characterized as the authority of the aristocratic class, but it took an alternative form of that same tyranny shortly thereafter. instead of the common man being a slave to the demands of his lord, he became a slave to the demands of his necessity to labor for a wage, or be ostracized, penalized, or even exiled from the land on which he dwelled. so then while capitalism certainly ‘made no promises’, it still transformed a previous system of tyranny into another, new form, and therefore did not avoid the essential problem it’s origins were thought to be a solution for; the problem of property relations.
the rest of your post was something i couldn’t make heads or tails of. i’m sure there’s something in there… i just missed it.