Benjamin Cain
3 min readJan 11, 2022

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No, that opening caricature of yours isn’t descriptive. It’s a pure strawman, so I’ll set it aside.

There’s some confusion about what I’m saying about egoism. First, I’m not the one alleging that everyone’s selfish. I’m not defending psychological egoism. I’m saying the economist’s rational choice theory posits that everyone acts to maximize their personal “utility,” which means their pleasure or happiness.

I understand that this model isn’t supposed to account for all aspects of human nature. The question is how representative is that model. If the model deals with only a narrow slice of human activity, the “economizing” slice, the model’s likely to be misleading unless economists are upfront about its limitations.

Far from being upfront, most modern economists hide behind impenetrable math until we eventually have Gordon Gekko saying that greed is good, and everyone cheers. The reason economists keep quiet rather than denouncing such social Darwinism is that they know the richest one percent are disproportionately sociopathic and meanspirited, and the leading economists have financial conflicts of interest.

Moreover, if the model of rationality proves to be very accurate in predicting economic behaviour, I’d expect that that success is due partly to the influence of capitalism and economics in training people to be greedy and short-sighted. This would be like a quantum mechanics experiment in which the scientist influences the phenomenon by trying to measure it. Or it would be like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I agree that there’s a difference between selfishly harming others to benefit yourself and taking pleasure in helping others. But the difference between selfishness and self-interest is quite slippery, especially in the early modern economic discourse which hid behind the technical term “utility.”

I agree also that saints are anomalies, but I used that extreme example to illustrate the point. The same argument applies to the more realistic, mixed examples, albeit to a lesser degree. Again, this must be just academic for you since you already think Adam Smith’s invisible hand logic has been discredited, and my argument is set up to challenge that logic.

But let’s take that mixed example of boycotting a company, to see what the rational choice theory entails. I take it the economist will say the boycotter seeks to maximize her utility, regardless of her sources of information. Even if she intends to help others at her expense by boycotting the economy (even if she loves its products), she’ll weigh her options and decide to act in a way that minimizes her pain (her cognitive dissonance, worries, guilt, etc). She’ll have moral and nonmoral considerations, and she’ll weigh them ultimately according to how well she can live with herself by applying them.

Of course, I don’t deny that we seldom leave our benefit entirely out of our calculations, as a saint might, especially in the economic context when we’re deciding what to buy or to sell. But this model of rational decision-making is still quite individualistic, and it assumes a degree of autonomy even many companies dismiss in their manipulative advertising.

Regarding the mixed examples, then, my argument would be that to the extent we’re being altruistic or empathetic, we often emotionally submit to the interests of others, and that interdependence is left out of the rational decision theory. Moreover, that kind of collective or social thinking conflicts with the invisible hand defense of capitalism.

Again, the early economists assumed we compete for scarce resources, so like rats in a cage, we’re forced in that state of nature to be amoral and often indeed brutally selfish, acting against our better impulses. But Adam Smith said that’s alright because the free market will miraculously take care of itself even with all that individual narrow-mindedness. Collectively, the free society will be at least as well-off as a centrally-planned, moralistic one.

What we found from the history of capitalism is that the competition is either notional or fit just for the little people. The winners of the competition become too big to fail so they enjoy a kind of socialism thanks to their monopoly power. And while capitalism indeed frees and gratifies us in many ways, the benefits may be temporary and self-destructive if our progress ends up destroying the world’s ecosystems.

That’s not to say I’m entirely opposed to capitalism or that I think we should switch to some other economic system. I don’t know of a superior one. I’m just trying to tell the unvarnished truth about how we got to where we are, and that includes laying bare the economist’s role.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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