Difference Between Selfishness and Self Interest For Adam Smith

Getty Lustila, Georgia State University, writes (6 November) in The Partially Examined Life Blog HERE:

“David Hume and Adam Smith in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy, Part 1”

“Moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues. First, was “the selfish hypothesis,” which maintained that all declarations of public interest were ultimately expressions of private interest. Second, was the explanation and justification of moral judgment. And third, was the character of moral virtue.

The selfish hypothesis, though largely a minority view, was defended equally by Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville. The mechanists considered man to be a machine, one whose parts functioned “every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follows from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.” (Descartes, Treatise of Man, 108; Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: And Other Writings, 36) Man’s principal commitment to his own self-love undercuts genuine other-regarding action and stymies the opportunity for moral virtue.

David Hume and Adam Smith repudiated this thesis. Hume referred to the self hypothesis as one that proceeded from “nothing but the most depraved disposition.” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 247) For Hume, the fact that a good amount of people act selfishly a good amount of the time fails to ground the claim that such people always acted selfishly (much less the charge that all mankind act in this way!) Man’s selfishness admits of degrees, something that is obvious to our “common sense and our most unprejudiced notions.” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 250) In Hume’s estimation, only philosophers—with their love of simplicity in principle—could affirm such an absurd view of human nature as the selfish hypothesis. Likewise, Smith claimed that “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin Classics), 1) For Smith, all human beings are naturally ‘in-tune’ with one another through the faculty of sympathy; which, acting as a mirror for others, allows us to take part in their suffering and joy. The ability to sympathize with our fellows is not a virtue (in the traditional sense). Instead, the faculty of sympathy is a constitutive part of human agency: devoid of sympathy, we are not human. Smith and Hume recognize that sympathy is most naturally felt for our family and friends. Nonetheless, they equally affirm that man’s moral sense has developed and expanded through the progress of history; a process that will continue to be realized through his continual interaction with the others, the world, and himself.”

Comment
This is a neat summary of some complex philosophy developed in the 18th century and I am happy to commend Getty Lustila’s article as a good first step to reading the texts that she mentions.

The difference between ‘selfishness’ and Hume–Smithian ‘self interest is mostly misunderstood by those who fall into conflating Smith’s meaning of these words and not just in the modern invention of the IH metaphor, when attributed to Adam Smith (i.e., that selfish actions ‘miraculously’ generate ‘public good’ – which is pure Bernard Mandeville, and Ayn Rand) but also in the misreading of the famous ‘butcher, brewer, baker’ quotation from WN (Book I.ii: 26-7), often commented upon on Lost Legacy.

Mirror Neurons and Smith's Sympathy

Nicholas Baumard writes (23 June) in The International Cognition Institute (HERE): and takes on a topic which has appeared with increasing regularity recently and, while appreciated as a step towards greater understanding of Adam Smith’s actual contributions, it still leaves much that is not understood.

“OK, I admit. Adam Smith never talked about mirror neurons. So why am I bringing this topic up? Because Smith actually did, in a way, tackle the debate about mirror neurons and empathy.

What is this debate? In recent years, empathy, understood as the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient being, has received more and more interest. In particular, the study of the neural underpinnings of empathy has received increased interest following a Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article published by Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal, following the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys that fire both when the creature watches another creature perform an action as well as when they perform it themselves. In their paper, they (as well as others like Gallese) argued that perception of the object's state automatically activates neural representations, and that this activation automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless inhibited.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam Smith? Like modern psychologists and anthropologists, Smith thought that our capacity to experience feelings about the feelings of others was the basis of social life. In fact, his Theory of Moral Sentiments starts with these words:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it."

And for those who are tempted to doubt the connection between Smith's view of sympathy and its modern counterpart, he immediately adds that it is automatic:

"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations."

So does this mean that we should see Smith as the 'big ancestor' of the modern mirror neuron theory? Not so fast. Actually, my point is that Adam Smith had anticipated some of the weaknesses of the mirror neuron theory.

Although Smith agrees with modern advocates of empathy that humans have a unique capacity to be moved by the feelings of others, he disagrees about the actual mechanism. We do not feel pain for others because their emotions automatically activate similar emotions in us. Instead, it is because we understand their situation:

"Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality."

Indeed, says Smith, we are sometimes moved by others' situations while not sharing the same emotion:

"We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner."

If the advocates of mirror neurons were right, we should experience the same emotions as others. But this is not the case. We do not automatically imitate others' emotions. Instead, we experience our own emotion, which depends on our interest in the other's situation: if a friend is in a bad situation, whether or not he feels bad at the time, we will be sad; in contrast, if an enemy, someone for whom we have some antipathy, is in a bad situation, we may actually be happy; and if a friend feels, say, jealous of his partner, we won't be jealous as well, we will, depending on our opinion of the situation, be sad as well, or maybe angry at our friend who is unjustly jealous. In all these cases, others' emotions do not automatically generate similar emotions in ourselves (a point that is well emphasized in Anderson and Keltner's reply to Preston and de Waal). In other terms, it is not clear that humans have a capacity for empathy (to share someone else's emotions) rather than a capacity for sympathy (to share someone else's interests).”

Comment
Follow the link and read some more. Also, best if you read Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), bearing in mind that his book covers much of his lectures to his moral philosophy class, which were also supported by his students undertaking additional ready and attending regular tutorials where they read their essays and discussed set questions. With today’s shorter attention spans and less stylish reference books, quite different in their 18th-century literary style than today’s, reading Smith may take some effort.

The behavioural school consists of psychologists, sociologists, and some pretty sharp economists of the neoclassical school. The latter realized quickly that their observations of behaviours in their ‘games’ did not correspond to their economics beliefs that they (wrongly) understood were rooted in the Homo economics of the rational calculus in their theory, attributed, surprisingly to Adam Smith. I exchanged emails with a Professor Cramer some years back drawing his attention to this wrong attribution in a multi-author paper in which he featured. He dismissed my comments on ground that he did not write that part of the paper – it was another one of the authors – as if that was a sufficient grounds for dismissing my observation that the reference to Adam Smith on the invisible hand was inaccurate (a mild rebuke as these exchanges were in the early year of Lots Legacy) and I had expected leading economist to be aware of this fact.

On this occasion, Nicholas Baumard, contrasts Adam Smith’s assertions about sympathy with modern behavioral ideas about empathy. Smith’s ideas on self-interest too easily slide in the minds of modern thinkers into an idea of selfishness – check how Samuelson and others equate Smith with selfishness, as in ‘the selfish actions of individuals are led by an invisible hand to benefit society’, which has nothing to do with what Smith ever wrote, though it was in what Bernard Mandeville argued, and which views Smith said were ‘licentious’. Likewise Smith was not an exponent of the idea that self-interest meant selfishness, particularly in the parable of the ‘butcher, brewer, and baker’. Smith’s point is explicit that the customer must have regard for the interests of the trio to agree a bargain. In short, self-interest is not enough; the customer and the trio had to ‘other regarding’, not selfish.

I posted on Lost Legacy ‘Adam Smith On Bargaining’ making this point specific – scroll down to Tuesday 10 August:
‘Adam Smith on Bargaining and My Experience Applying His Theory’ and take a look at what TMS and Wealth Of Nations really meant.

Literature Scholars Look at Adam Smith's Philosophy

Leeann Hunter, Marion L. Brittain, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, reviews , “The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction,1818-1860, Adam Smith, and the Genre of Realism”, by Eleanor Courtemanche, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 (HERE):

“This book makes a strong case for the humanities through its interdisciplinary study of political economy in the nineteenth century. Instead of viewing political economy through the lens of literature, Courtemanche writes as a political economist, using realist novels to trace the intricate webs of economic relationships and to illustrate the social and economic thought of the nineteenth century, as inspired by Adam Smith. She thereby shows that compared with economic theory alone, literary irony, tragedy, omniscience, and character can deliver a fuller portrait of political economy. Harriet Martineau, one of the authors featured in this study, made a similar case for the use of narrative--by writing novels to educate her readers in the principles of political economy. While Courtemanche simply writes about novels, she clearly explains how literature can reach across disciplines.

At the center of her inquiry is, after all, a literary-economic figure of speech: the metaphor of the "invisible hand." First used by Adam Smith in the late 18th century, the "invisible hand" has long come to symbolize the supposed benevolence of capitalism as it regulates the self-interest of the individual. When acted upon, this self-interest triggers a series of unseen forces that work together to benefit the larger economic society, but are "only comprehensible as an unstable composite of the mutually exclusive points of view of sovereign and merchant. For centuries, however, according to Courtemanche, economists have narrowed and oversimplified our understanding of Smith's complex ideas about social economic theory. By investigating Smith's use of the "invisible hand" metaphor in his major treatises, Courtemanche offers us a more effective way of analyzing the economic relationships at work in nineteenth-century England. The novel, she argues, with its "dynamic interplay between the 'worm's eye view' of the characters and the 'bird's-eye view' of the narrator," offers suitable ground for the study of political economy under Smith's terms. To show more clearly the complexity of invisible hand theory, she defines the gaps between the perspectives of the individual and the sovereign, and then argues that novels most successfully explore these gaps. …

… Essentially, Courtemanche explores the contradictions of what is known as the "Adam Smith Problem." Appealing respectively to sympathy and to pragmatism, two of Smith's major works--The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776)--seem to oppose each other. To reconcile their differences, Courtemanche aims to show how Smith navigates the "perplexing gulf between individual and collective points of view" (9). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, she notes, Smith explains how we can feel sympathy for others: it is only through our individual experience of pain, he suggests, that we can perceive another human's pain, and transport ourselves "into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations" (qtd. 58). Similarly, she notes, Wealth of Nations mediates between the limited perspective of the individual citizen and the sovereign's expansive view of the nation's wealth. Smith's "idea of moral action," she concludes, "is thus based not just on the embeddedness of the individual within a complex society, but on the fragmentation of the individual point of view between the feeling of his own passionate interests and the dispassionate consideration of those interests from both a local and an infinitely distant point of view" (59). The gaps between those points of view are what Courtemanche investigates.”

Comment
First, let’s get the modern myth of the IH metaphor out of the way. (on this occasion I shall not deconstruct the metaphor, see Lost Legacy, passim.)

Instead, I shall draw on the reviewer’s apparent error on when the IH metaphor was “first used” - certainly long before Adam Smith used it.

It was used in classical times (Homer, Horace, etc.,) two millennia before Adam was born (for a list of 17 prior instances see my: “Adam Smith: a moral philosopher and his political economy”, 2010, pp. 151-2, Palgrave Macmillan), and afterwards through the early Christian era, to Shakespeare (MacBeth), and widely, thereafter, in the 17th-18th centuries. Peter Harrison, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2010, provides over 40 other instances of the IH metaphor in theological sermons, literary, and historical novels (including Defoe’s Moll Flanders, 1722, and Voltaire’s Oedipe, 1718, and Walpole, 1764).

In short, the “invisible hand” was a well-known, popular, and almost clichéd, metaphor in regular use before Adam Smith used it, once only, in each of his published books (and on another occasion mentioned once in his posthumous, Essay on the History of Astronomy ([1744-50] 1795). Specialists in English literature should know that fact.

The so-called Adam Smith problem (a pseudo-problem invented by some late 19th century is German philosophers) is a false construct of his meaning in both of this books. Sympathy and self-interest are not counter-poised (nor was his pragmatism at work). Sympathy was a core sentiment fed by an individual’s social contact (society as a mirror) and individual’s learning as the grow up the range appropriate and inappropriate behaviours (‘the great school of self-command’), learned from when the child leaves the protective comforts of the family. His self-love is constrained by the inevitable self-love of others, and social relations are founded on the mediation of his, and their, self-interests.

The individual needs the support of others, and in persuasion, friendship, and exchange, each finds that level of support they seek. Exchange permeates all aspects of personal relations, finding it in the market-place and domestically, and it the act of “bargaining” in which each offers to transact: “Give me this that I want, and you shall have this which you want’ (Wealth Of Nations, Book 1, chapter 2), and in “other-regarding” exchange relations through reciprocal exchange, the elements of what makes society cohere and enables us to inhabit close together in the same space (within the family, near relatives, friends, and strangers), and in the security of justice in wider society (“without justice a man would enter society as in a den of lions”).

Adam Smith was closely interested in literature (from classical times), poetry, the theatre, rhetoric, translations, and letters - (see his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ([1763] 1983), his longest running lecture series was on all aspect of Rhetoric from 1748-64.

Methinks, on this evidence, that Eleanor Courtemanche (and, perhaps, Marion L. Brittain) have some more reading to do on Adam Smith.