Essay Of The Day: Self-Interest Is Not Evil But Human

Essay in The New Criterion titled The Self-Interested Society:

Excerpts:

"The first problem is that the virtue of benevolence can attach itself, like a parasite, merely to the having of good intentions. The crimes of communist regimes often avoided censure by virtue of the supposed good intentions of those committing them. Again, people lacking integrity (in, for example, exploiting claims for expenses) commonly defend themselves by the claim that they had broken no rules. Further, the term “interest,” even in the moral context of “self-interest,” invokes politics, understood as an arena in which interests conflict with each other. Hence at its least sophisticated, one form of self-ascribed good intentions may be the mere fact of supporting welfarist political policies. Such a view, not uncommon in leftish parties, takes the illusion of costless good intentions to its limit.

And this leads us to a second defect of this version of the moral life: That altruism and benevolence, as the essence of goodness, cast into the shade such more elusive and subtle virtues as integrity and courage. One notable collapse of integrity consists in the happy belief that the costs of one’s policies will be borne by others, and particularly in politics, by the more heavily taxed rich. Just such a belief is a popular recourse in the more demagogic versions of current politics. Such a view corresponds precisely to the corruption that Greek philosophers diagnosed in democracy as a political system, understanding it as an instrument by which the poor might plunder the rich."

"Even the device of off-loading the costs of one’s public altruism on the taxable rich, however, is merely a political solution to the problem, and what politics gives, politics can also take away. The ideal solution to such a problem is—an ideal! The public altruism of welfare must be entrenched in the ideals of justice and of rights. A real solution to the conflict between self and others must transcend this distinction itself, for in a real community, cooperation transcends conflicts of interest between individuals. Such, I think, is the logic behind our admiration for “social justice,” however difficult we may find it to define. And it seems to me that in the concept of justice, in its contrast with self-interest, we have one clue to the destiny of our free society: That we shall never quite be free of the illusion that our psychological foundation in self-interest is the imperfection, the vice, that stands in the way of the social and human perfections that would create a better world."

Some people take the view that we in the West are fortunate to enjoy freedom, because it is a universal human aspiration that has been commonly frustrated in most societies. This is one of the more pernicious illusions we entertain about human kind. Most people have never lived in free societies, nor exhibited any desire or capacity for freedom. Totalitarian movements reveal even the danger that many who have enjoyed freedom can be happy to abandon it in the name of some passionate cause. The illusion that everyone wants to be free means only, perhaps, that people don’t much like being frustrated, but that is quite different from the self-discipline involved in an association of individualists managing their own lives. This illusion has been happily indulged by many commentators on the “Arab Spring” of recent times, in which the instability of authoritarian regimes might suggest a whiff of libertarian feeling. What most people seem to want, however, is to know exactly where they stand and to be secure in their understanding of their situation.

"Rules and processes are risky because they will produce unexpected and sometimes unwelcome outcomes, and it is this contrast which makes freedom constantly vulnerable to those who try to seduce us with dreams of perfection. My argument has been that even perfectly valid ways of explaining ourselves can easily slide into pejorative accounts of freedom. When that happens, it can seem obvious that governments should not merely regulate the economy (as they must as part of the rule of law in modern societies) but that they should also intervene to manage its outcomes by the use of subsidy redistribution and welfarism. These policies are suggested by the slide from a descriptive account of human psychology (the pursuit of self-interest) to a corrupt identification of the description with the vice of selfishness, ruthlessness, greed, and similar evils. The reality of pursuing self-interest in a free modern society is no doubt better described by invoking some such virtue as self-reliance, but that is the demand which a free society makes on everyone, and it is that demand which is often found burdensome by those who find security in a structure of welfare from which they may benefit"

"In politics, every policy has some advantages and also some disadvantages. But notable about the disadvantages of this range of welfarist reforms is that they have led most rich Western states into a condition of chronic bankruptcy. The crisis of the early twenty-first century is no doubt attributable to bankers and to other public actors, but unmistakably central to the problem is a level of both personal and public debt, which is unsustainable, and will get worse for more than demographic reasons. And when governments become indebted, they have virtually no solutions to the problem except to deceive their populations with inflation and other monetary forms of smoke and mirrors."

"It is not merely governments that act corruptly. It is also the democratic voter. As we have seen, the demos is also corrupted. A great deal of political sentimentalism floats on the illusion that rising public expenditure would not affect most of the population because the rich can be taxed more heavily. Much indignation is often expended about large firms that “avoid” taxation, as if taxation were a form of charity one should offer to governments, rather than known rates to be paid by specific and well-defined classes of taxpayer. The problem is in part that the rules of taxation have become so complicated that skilled professionals are needed to reveal what must be paid and what may be kept. Politicians however are keen to talk of the rich “paying their share” of taxation; it is a cry advanced under the popular rubric of “fairness.” It is only as it dawns upon voters that the costs of welfare cannot forever be loaded onto the rich without serious economic consequences that public opinion turns against welfare spending."

"It seems to me that our preoccupation with the defects of our civilization is a standing temptation, and a dangerous one, to have recourse to civil authority in order to deal with what we may be persuaded to understand as social imperfections. And that preoccupation with our imperfections is most commonly grounded in the corrupt sense of explaining freedom in terms of self-interest."

"To recap, such an assumption about the motivation of moderns invokes the moral criterion of justice or fairness as condemning many of the consequences of our economic life (in terms of the supposed distribution of benefits). Such a view in turn generates a succession of vulnerable classes of people each with claims on the state for redress. Welfare programs responding to this process have no determinate end in sight. There is no viable conception of a society without vulnerable classes demanding special treatment as victims of one or other kind of injustice or unfairness. We begin to conceive of modern societies as associations of incompetents and cripples, which is absurd. The human condition is not like that. We entertain many foolish ideas, and no doubt will continue to do so. But this is a piece of nonsense that we can no longer afford."