The Soul of Modern Economic Man: Ideas of Self-Interest, Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith

1984 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Robert F. Hebert ◽  
Milton L. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Economic Man ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Modern Economic

Evolution and Moral Motivation in Economics

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Utility Maximization ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Economic Man ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Preference Functions ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
Other Regarding ◽  
Other Regarding Preferences ◽  
Descent Of Man

Adam Smith argued that humans were motivated by both self-interest and moral concerns. Economics has since moved towards a contrasting utilitarian view where behavior is understood in terms of unifying preference functions. Also most economists have presumed that these preferences are “self-regarding.” Two major treatises in economics were published in 1871, with self-seeking economic man at their center. In the same year Darwin published The Descent of Man, which emphasized sympathy and cooperation as well as self-interest, and argued that morality has evolved in humans by natural selection. This stance is supported by modern research. This article reconciles Darwin’s view that developed morality requires language and deliberation (and is thus unique to humans), with his other claim that moral feelings have a long-evolved and biologically inherited basis. It also questions whether the recent addition of “other-regarding” preferences is adequate, and whether morality and altruism are reducible to preferences or utility maximization.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subramanian Rangan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Market Power ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Paradigm ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
Great Output

Our quest for prosperity has produced great output (i.e. performance) but not always great outcomes (i.e. progress). Despite mounting regulation when it comes to fairness, well-being, and the scope of our humanity, the modern economic system still leaves much to be desired. If practice is to evolve substantively and systematically, then we must help evolve an economic paradigm where mutuality is more systematically complemented by morality. The bases of this morality must rest, beyond the sympathetic sentiments envisaged by Adam Smith, on an expanded and intentional moral reasoning. Moral philosophy has a natural role in informing and influencing such a turn in our thinking, especially when education is the preferred vehicle of transformation. Indeed, rather than just regulate market power we must also better educate market power.

scholarly journals HOW SHOULD WE RECONCILE SELF-REGARDING AND PRO-SOCIAL MOTIVATIONS? A RENAISSANCE OF “DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM”

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-102
Author(s):  
Natalie Gold
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Intrinsic Motivations ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Motivation Crowding ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Selfish Agents

Abstract“Das Adam Smith Problem” is the name given by eighteenth-century German scholars to the question of how to reconcile the role of self-interest in the Wealth of Nations with Smith’s advocacy of sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments. As the discipline of economics developed, it focused on the interaction of selfish agents, pursuing their private interests. However, behavioral economists have rediscovered the existence and importance of multiple motivations, and a new Das Adam Smith Problem has arisen, of how to accommodate self-regarding and pro-social motivations in a single system. This question is particularly important because of evidence of motivation crowding, where paying people can backfire, with payments achieving the opposite effects of those intended. Psychologists have proposed a mechanism for the crowding out of “intrinsic motivations” for doing a task, when payment is used to incentivize effort. However, they argue that pro-social motivations are different from these intrinsic motivations, implying that crowding out of pro-social motivations requires a different mechanism. In this essay I present an answer to the new Das Adam Smith problem, proposing a mechanism that can underpin the crowding out of both pro-social and intrinsic motivations, whereby motivations are prompted by frames and motivation crowding is underpinned by the crowding out of frames. I explore some of the implications of this mechanism for research and policy.

scholarly journals Corporate Responsibility: In the Dilemma between Fake and Trust?

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 143-147
Author(s):  
Simon Fietze ◽  
Wenzel Matiaske ◽  
Roland Menges
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Market Organization ◽  
Corporate Social

The accusation of whitewashing accompanied the discussion about corporate social responsibility (CSR) since its inception the 1950s. That's not surprising. Ever since its beginnings in Scottish moral philosophy, economics did not expect the general good to be enhanced by the individual's social orientation, but rather by its self-interest, a concept less liable to disappointment, and the work of the invisible hand (Hirschman, 1977). The latter aims to promote a common goal that individuals have not intended. Following his famous text, Adam Smith (2007 [1786], p. 350) continues: ‘I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.’ The ‘mistrust’ of the ‘goodwill’ of the capitalist lives on in various streams such as Marxism, (neo-)liberalism or sociological system theory, to name but a few schools of thought. Marxists do not expect societal progress any more than (neo-)liberals from benevolent capitalists who, demand more taxable profits, instead of social responsibility, in the framework of the market organization of companies. System theorists find that ethical demands are hardly transferable directly into the economy code of payment/non-payment. Although Adam Smith (2007 [1786], p. 350) shared the view that the claim of public good orientation is ‘indeed, not very common among merchants’, but that ‘very few words need to be employed in dissuading them from it.’

scholarly journals What’s the problem, Mr. Smith? Shedding more light (than Heat) on Adam Smith’s view of man *

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Emmanoel de Oliveira Boff
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Impartial Spectator ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

Abstract Why has the “Adam Smith Problem” recently been discussed in the literature? Although most historians of economic thought regard the problem solved, these discussions cast doubt on this apparent solution. This article suggests that the “Adam Smith Problem” may originate from the concept of the human being developed by Smith in the “Theory of Moral Sentiments”: in this book, human beings can be understood as composed of an empirical and a (quasi) transcendental side, in the form of the impartial spectator. It is argued that it is the tension between these two parts which creates supposed inconsistencies between aspects of the “Theory of Moral Sentiments” and the “Wealth of Nations” like, for example, the role of sympathy and self-interest in each of these books.

Adam Smith's Philosophy of Riches

Philosophy ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 44 (168) ◽  
pp. 101-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. West
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Central Planning ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the name of Adam Smith was popularly associated with the sort of ‘laissez faire’ policy that is expounded with all the fervour of a religious faith. Smith, so the story ran, in his eagerness to combat the excessive mercantilist government intervention of his day, had resorted to supra-natural claims in his general onslaught against central control and planning by governments. Such intervention was ‘unnatural’ and conflicted with Deistic Design. Only through private actions could mankind reach satisfying and ‘natural’ fulfillment. Action through private self-interest was twice blessed; it. blessed him who profited and his fellows who were ‘profited from’. True there was a kind of central planning that was of supreme importance; but it had a divine origin and it worked not through governments but through individual free trade. Private actions in fact were directed by an Invisible Hand which brought society into a grand and spontaneous Natural Harmony.

The Adam Smith Problem: A Reinterpretation

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Lundestad
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Interest

As long as the market is said to be based on the motive of self-interest, any argument in favor of expanding the market will have to be seen as an argument in favor of self-interest. Such an argument, however, clearly conflicts with the notion that this motive, when viewed from a practical-political point of view, must be deemed a vice and thus, at best is something to be tolerated. As long as the market is seen as presupposing the motive of self-interest, as the currently dominating interpretation of Adam Smith implies, it therefore appears virtually impossible to see how Smith – or anyone else for that manner – can possibly justify extending the market in practical-political terms.

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