Irrational Self-Interest
A Philosophical Case Study
I come across an occasional statement that our society runs on “enlightened self-interest”—I’ve noted it before in a conversation with Tom Nichols, and also in reading Stephen Pinker, and they’re not the only ones. But as I noted in response to Pinker, “It is an approach to morality that is widely accepted in practice, often acknowledged in passing, as Pinker does here, but is rarely taken with the seriousness it deserves or developed to its logical conclusions.”
This is important, because it is undoubtedly true that our society does run on some conception of “enlightened self-interest.” We recognize that it is natural for people to want to be prosperous and happy, to be able to find a nice place to live, to find work that is enjoyable and pays the bills, to be able to go out and enjoy all the good things that are available to us, particularly in wealthy, developed societies. So we’re not asking people to live in Altruria, an imagined altruist utopia in which no one looks to his own well-being and everyone works only for the good of others. And we’re definitely trying to avoid living in the actual, real-world versions of this ideal, in which the individual has no rights and exists only to serve the state.
But we rarely take much time to define what “enlightened self-interest” means, what are its rules, how it serves our self-interest, and what it is that “enlightens” it.
Enlightened Self-Interest
At various times, this idea has gotten a little more attention.
