Capitalism leads to tremendous amounts of poverty, economic inequality, and financial stress. It disempowers the vast majority of the working-age population, who have no realistic choice except to spend half of their waking hours at workplaces where they take orders from unelected bosses. Outside of the workplace, decisions with major impact on society as a whole are made by CEOs only accountable to shareholders. And wild divergences in wealth turn the idea that all citizens will exert the same level of influence on the political process into a bad joke.

Surely we can do better. Why can’t we collectively own society’s productive resources, meet everyone’s material needs, and create a more meaningful kind of democracy? In other words, as the late Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen once put it, “Why not socialism?”

A popular answer is that it would go against human nature. It’s so popular, in fact, that many people unthinkingly accept this idea as “common sense.” On closer inspection, though, the Human Nature Objection gets things exactly backward.