Who's the self in self-interest? Part 1

Complicating self-interest

A lot of people—and especially many of the mostly 18-year-olds who take my Philosophy of Human Nature course—think that people always act out of, or at least in,¹ their self-interest. It’s not hard to see where they get that assumption. It’s bedrock in a lot of fields, particularly economics, which of course dominates a lot of public discourse. It’s even defined as rational to act in our own interests.

But academia isn’t likely to be where kids get it. They just see it in everyday life: when faced with choices, how often does anyone choose something that’s not in their interests in some sense?

Things get question-y, though, when we wonder what that sense really is. Of course there’s the face-value sense of doing things that benefit you directly. But there are lots of actions that don’t have this face value. Students often want to put many acts that look like altruism on the surface into the self-interest bucket. A famous anecdote illustrates this nicely: a story from the Springfield, Illinois Monitor about Abraham Lincoln, quoted by James Rachels:²

Mr. Lincoln once remarked to a fellow-passenger on an old-time mud coach that all men were prompted by selfishness in doing good. His fellow-passenger was antagonizing this position when they were passing over a corduroy bridge that spanned a slough. As they crossed this bridge they espied an old razor-backed sow on the bank making a terrible noise because her pigs had got into the slough and were in danger of drowning. As the old coach began to climb the hill, Mr. Lincoln called out, “Driver, can’t you stop just a moment?” Then Mr. Lincoln jumped out, ran back, and lifted the little pigs out of the mud and water and placed them on the bank. When he returned, his companion remarked: “Now, Abe, where does selfishness come in on this little episode?” “Why, bless your soul, Ed, that was the very essence of selfishness. I should have had no peace of mind all day had I gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those pigs. I did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?”

One quick thing to note is that just because you feel good after doing something good doesn’t mean that was your motivation. Feeling good about connecting to positive value is an entirely appropriate response after the fact.

Suppose we take Lincoln’s claim at face value, though. As Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out,³ we admire folks whose self-interest directs them to act in altruistic-seeming ways. This is in tension with our sense that it’s bad to act selfishly, and it raises the question: what exactly is self-interest? To answer this, I suggest that we’re going to need to look at the self. But I want to take some time to set this up.

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

The problem

Tension is where philosophy gets going, so let’s look at the situation clearly. On the one hand, we have a basic sense, backed by everyday experience and reinforced by pervasive assumptions baked into Western culture, that people tend to act in their self-interest. On the other hand, we also think it’s bad to act selfishly. Failing to take other people into consideration consistently meets with censure on small and large scales, from parental disapproval for not sharing our toys to the social-political disapproval of benefitting at the expense of others that stands behind laws limiting how people and businesses get to behave. That is, history and ethics show that while we expect⁴ people to act in their interests, we also think rampant pursuit of self-interest is a destabilizing force that we need to control vigilantly with morality and law.

You might be forgiven for thinking that ethics and law are first and foremost a matter of “civilizing” ourselves by keeping our “natural” self-interest in check. As we’ll see next week, this is a foundational modern Western myth.

This suggests a generally negative view of humanity, one that puts us in constant and relentless tension with ourselves. I don’t think that this is really an accurate picture. You may be raising your eyebrows at this, given the clear evidence of nastiness that’s all over the news. That’s both understandable and justifiable. Nevertheless, I contend that it’s wrong—or at the very least, more complicated than it looks.

A tactic philosophers often take here is to argue against the truth of the empirical theory that humans always act in their interests—that is, against the what’s called psychological egoism. I’m persuaded by these arguments, though not everyone is. I think there’s something much more interesting going on here, however. If we understand the self in a relational way, then the tension defuses and the threat to civilization and morality posed by psychological egoism deflates.

Over the next couple of posts, I’ll explain.

A distinction, a definition, and some stuff about reasons

First of all, as we often do, let’s start with a distinction. Let’s reserve selfish as the always-negative version of self-interest, the kind where someone is acting for themselves at the expense of others. Then we can have self-interest as a neutral term that describes anything that’s in our interests in a broad sense. With this distinction in hand, we can say that Lincoln may have acted for the sake of his own interests,⁵ but he wasn’t being selfish. A lot of self-interest’s bad reputation, then, comes from how sadly often acting in our own interests comes at the expense of others.

Next, a definition: let’s look at what interests are. When we claim that something is in our interests, we’re saying that it’s good for us in some way: it adds to our pleasure, well-being, happiness, etc., or it diminishes their opposites. Our motivating reasons for our choices frequently include the belief that the action is in our interests.

But notice that we can be mistaken about our interests: we can think something is good for us when it actually isn’t.⁶ A subset of such cases includes the times when we sacrifice long-term interests for short-term ones—smoking is a classic case of this. Notice that the possibility of being mistaken about our interests means that at least some of our interests aren’t entirely subjective. They depend on objective facts about us.

Some interests, however, are (also or at least partially) subjective: they depend on our internal states, such as what we want or like or what happens to entertain or engage us. It’s in my interests to wear jeans to work most of the time because that’s what I’m most comfortable in. Preferences like this, however, seem to weigh in as reasons only when the objective factors don’t override them. If my authority in the classroom were undermined by my choice of wardrobe, for instance, then my preference for jeans might not be a strong enough reason to wear them.

This brings us to reasons. Is something’s being in our interest a justifying reason for acting? We certainly take it to be explanatory: saying that someone thought it was in their interests to make the choice they did renders it understandable. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether self-interest always justifies a decision. Because each of us is important, and given that interests have to do with what’s good for us, I suspect self-interest does ordinarily count in favor of a decision—with an important caveat. The fact that we condemn selfishness suggests that even if self-interest always counts in favor of an action, it’s not an overriding reason: sometimes the interests of others outweigh our own interests.

Justifying reasons, explanatory reasons, and whether it's ever okay to be hangry

So far, then, we’ve discovered that the notion of self-interest is not as clear as everyday life makes us think it is. We’ve got a rough definition of interests. And we’ve made a distinction between selfishness and self-interest that opens up space for thinking that self-interest isn’t necessarily bad, and may even serve as a (defeasible) justifying reason for our choices.

Where the self comes in

Let’s go back to Abraham Lincoln, though, and Hume’s observation that we admire people whose interests are such that they do things like rescue baby pigs. What could explain having interests like that? Maybe the problem here is the way we understand the self, not the way we understand interests or how we weigh them in our reasoning about what to do. I’ll say more next week.

More pigs, just for cuteness. Photo by Kenneth Schipper on Unsplash

1. Acting out of self-interest means that self-interest is a motivating reason for the action. Acting in self-interest harmonizes with self-interest but may or may not be motivated directly by it.

2. James Rachels and Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 7th ed, p. 69. You can find the 10th edition here.

3. This is in Appendix II of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

4. Descriptively expect, not necessarily prescriptively.

5. Even if Lincoln’s motivating reason was his own interest, it’s also an interesting question what sort of reason the pigs’ distress was for Lincoln: explanatory, yes (though apparently not the whole explanation); justifying, yes; motivating? He claims he was acting for his own peace of mind. We’ll take his word for it, but doesn’t it seem odd to think that their distress was no part of his motivation?

6. This may be part of why emotions have a bad reputation: they’re often responding to the here-and-now and not taking long-term interests into account. Also, we can have mistaken beliefs about what’s good for us, as the history of medicine amply illustrates.