The Myth of Enlightened Self Interest, Part One

Before I dive back into the ethical position discussion on the topic of abortion, I've decided to jump the gun on something slightly more wide-reaching in scope (in fact, it is an important pattern occurring in ethics and human behavior).

As a disclaimer, this post may be likely to generate the most amount of noise, if for no other reason that my viewpoint differs from a number of my peers--or at least it may appear to on the surface.  If so, I hope that the noise it generates is constructive.  If it does not generate noise, I will at least consider that it is a success in that either a) nobody cares strongly enough about any differences in opinion, b) I've articulated my point of view well enough that it appears "self-evident" without reaching tautology (i.e., has something useful to say), or c) nobody actually really reads this blog, in which case I've successfully articulated my viewpoint to myself (hi there!).

Over the course of my life, I've either said some of the following statements or encountered them said by others:

• "I'm an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist."
• "I'm a libertarian."
• "I believe in small government."
• "I believe in deregulation."
• "I'm pro-capitalism. (or free market, laissez faire, etc.)"
• "I believe in individual rights, or privacy."
• "I'm an objectivist (or I read lots of Ayn Rand)."

One thing that these statements have in common is a specific aspect I will call individual self interest.  To best articulate or define this concept, I will distill it into the following statement:

• "Society works best as a whole when individuals are acting entirely within their own self interest."

For the sake of abbreviation, I will call this the statement the hypothesis of individual self interest.

Once established, lots of things logically fall from this premise.  The free market, for instance, in theory touts the benefit of creating better products through competition.  We can conclude that things only get better when individuals are free to do what they would like, that things have either 1) only gotten better over time, or 2) that the only reasons things have gotten worse is due to government regulation or intervention.

I can't deny the appeal of the premise.  It is easy (and in my own self-interest, natural) to conclude that individual self interest is where it's at.  It's especially easy to make fun of ideologies such as communism (the collapse Soviet Communism as an often cited example), that demonstrate (or at least appear to demonstrate) how impractical ideas are that are not based on individual self interest.  Communism, in particular, falls into demagoguery, in which individual self interest is at the root of its own power structure!  The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once famously stated "Under capitalism, man exploits man.  Under communism, it's just the opposite."

The hypothesis of individual self interest is no mere straw man.  It is at the heart of so many ideologies, the influences of which can be seen and felt all around us.  Apologists of a particular ideology may amend the hypothesis to be restated as:

• "Society works best as a whole when individuals are acting entirely within their own enlightened self interest."

The definition of the word in bold, however, is severely lacking.  By stretching the hypothesis to include things outside of the scope of self interest, it is no longer representative of self interest, and has rendered the hypothesis itself meaningless.  Why draw attention to self interest, if it requires some form of enlightenment in order to be ethically valid?  Wouldn't the enlightenment part be the relevant bit?  If one is to say, "self interest is one variable in helping society," that isn't a bad statement to make, but that's a bit like saying "I like oxygen because it enables us to breathe," or "food is good."  It is an admission of its own lack of specificity.  If you didn't want us to pay attention to the self interest part, then it should, by Occam's razor, not mentioned in the hypothesis at all.

No, I think we have no choice but to take the hypothesis of self interest on face value.  Now, here comes the devilish part: in my next post, I am going to disprove the hypothesis of self interest by counterexample, using game theory.