Who's the self in self-interest? Part 2

Self-interest when the self is individualized

Last week, using a story about Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of his motives for rescuing some baby pigs, we discovered that the notion of self-interest is more complicated than ordinary usage suggests. We roughed out a definition of interests that defines them in terms of what’s good for us (leaving “good” a bit loose, but noting that it’s something we can be mistaken about and therefore has an objective element). And we distinguished selfishness from self-interest in a way that suggests that self-interest isn’t necessarily bad, and may even serve as a (defeasible) justifying reason for our choices.

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

The problem with the “common sense” view of self-interest

Here’s the structure of the problem. Lincoln’s claim that he rescued the baby pigs for his own peace of mind—and hence out of self-interest rather than altruistic concern for the pigs—occasions an interesting question about the nature of self-interest and the self. We’ve got an action that appears selfless, but the very person who took the action claims he did it entirely for his own good.

Let’s take Lincoln’s claim at face value. If we do that, though, how do we reconcile the man’s own claim that he was acting selfishly with our admiration of his piglet rescue? Our distinction between selfishness and self-interest comes in handy here. Using it, we can preserve both our sense that Lincoln’s decision to rescue the piglets was admirable and his own report that it was “selfish” by suggesting that his he was speaking imprecisely: his action may have been self-interested in the sense of being motivated by his interests, but it wasn’t selfish. It didn’t serve his interests at the expense of others’.

But how can Lincoln act from self-interest and not be selfish at the same time? Our assumptions seem to lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s interests included or were somehow intertwined with the pigs’.

Maybe that seems strange. We’re not used to thinking of self-interest as related to the interests of others because somewhere along the way, the European philosophers whose work shaped the modern Western worldview lost sight of the relational view of human nature and swapped in an individualist one.

It would be interesting to investigate the complex history of how this happened,¹ but for present purposes it doesn’t matter how. What matters is the story itself and its influence on how we think about ourselves now. So I think it’s worth spending a little time with one influential version of the “state of nature” origin story that appears in several works of early modern political philosophy and illuminating its implicit assumptions. I’m going to pick on Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan is now a classic of political philosophy. His project is ultimately to justify absolute monarchy, and although we’re not interested here in that particular goal, we are interested in his hidden premises. In his work we can see what I’ve called “human nature individualism” operating powerfully without ever being directly stated or justified.

There's individualism, and then there's individualism

A version of the individualist story

In a section of Leviathan called “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning their Felicity and Misery,” Hobbes argues that we all have equal hope of getting what we want and are in that sense natural equals. But (based no doubt on his own experience of civil war) he explicitly assumes that (1) there aren’t enough resources to go around, and (2) we all have a right to preserve our own lives as best we can—the basic political-individualist idea that everyone is important. These two assumptions put us—naturally, remember—in conflict with one another. This is what Hobbes calls a “state of war.” There isn’t always out-and-out fighting, but the atmosphere is tense and everyone is on alert. That means that nobody has the time and energy to produce more than is really necessary. “In such condition,” he says, “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain,” and also there’s no economy, science, arts, or society. And “which is worst of all, [there is] continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Fun times.

One way to depict the state of nature… Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

We don’t actually live like this, of course, and Hobbes never really claims we do.² What’s important here is that in this thought experiment Hobbes is implicitly assuming without examination that people are, as a matter of their nature, isolated and independent; society is not natural and needs to be constructed. Given this origin story, however, the only tool we have for constructing civil society is individual self-interest.

In fact, Hobbes contends, it’s rational (and in our interests)³ to pursue peace whenever we think we can make it work; everybody does better that way. This is what he calls the first law of nature: “seek peace and follow it.” Using reason to rein in our short-term self-interest in favor of longer-term interests, we can forge agreements to keep our hands off other people’s stuff and generally abide by laws to keep order. The second law of nature enjoins this: we must renounce our natural right to simply take or do anything we need, and only allow ourselves as much liberty as we’d allow others. For Hobbes, this is the origin of justice and civil society.

But it only works when everybody keeps to the bargain, and if somebody doesn’t, then we can do whatever it takes to protect ourselves. This is ultimately why we need a sovereign to enforce the laws we make. The peace is very fragile, since at bottom we’re always going to act in our own interests—even if it means reneging on an agreement—the minute the pros and cons work out right (or wrong, if you want to look at it from the point of view of civil society). A sovereign who enforces laws is meant to put your interests firmly on the side of peace.

Short-term and long-term self-interest

Notice what’s going on here: a primitive, very immediate and perhaps short-sighted kind of self-interest drives us toward the state of war, but a more sophisticated and restrained understanding of self-interest can pull us out. That is, given our disconnection and the competitive situation, if we just let our basic drives—which according to Hobbes are born of a fear of death—drive us, things devolve into chaos. But since we’re capable of standing back from our basic drives, analyzing the big picture, and adjusting our behavior accordingly, we can set up a system that makes life better for everyone. And it’s in our interests to do so: life is generally more stable and pleasant for us if we exercise some self control in coordination with others. We can even actively cooperate with each other and get further than we could if we passively stay out of people’s business. We could call this “enlightened” self-interest. It’s still all about me. But it’s a wiser, longer-term view of what’s in my interests.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

The peace is fragile, however, because of the view of the self as separate and independent that’s at the heart of the story. Hobbes’ thinking is based entirely on the idea that humans are fundamentally little atoms that bounce around and knock into one another, but don’t bond to one another in any significant way. The basic unit of society isn’t any sort of community, or even a family, but first and foremost a single individual. We are first ourselves, and then we may construct roles and relationships, but these are not fundamental to who or what we are. There’s very little mention and no discussion of family and friendship here; Hobbes is focused on the public arena, where any roles and relationships we take up are entered into for our own interests, whether that’s self-preservation (which includes both survival and power) or pleasure. Nothing that’s done is at bottom about the needs or interests of someone else, even if it looks that way on the surface. The bonds we form with one another are voluntary and can be dissolved any time those bonds are no longer serving us, whether we’re talking about business contracts or government. This is good news for the eventual formation of modern democracy; it’s bad news for our understanding of human psychology and Lincoln’s pig rescue.

Although it echoes through Western thought—as

Elissa Strauss

recently reminded me, evolutionary theory is shot through with the idea of “selfish” entities from organisms to genes—I’ve already said that I think this picture is impoverished at best. In fact, I’ll argue that as a picture of human nature it’s false, though I certainly can’t deny that we do often act in the ways this picture predicts. Still, there are other ways to think about the self, and they make it possible to understand how Lincoln’s self-interest connects to the interests of the pigs he rescued. See you next week!

1. It no doubt includes accounts of patriarchy and power.

2. He does, however, erroneously and in a clear display of the racist misunderstanding of Europeans toward the indigenous peoples of the Americas, claim that the latter live in the “brutish” state he has just described.

3. Reason and self-interest are closely related in Western philosophical thought. We’ll save discussion of this for another day, however.