Does human nature boil down to self-interest?
I don’t think we’re so simple.
The New Mindscape #9–2.
The debate on human nature between the European philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 17th and 18th centuries, had something in common with the debate between Xunzi and Mencius, discussed in The New Mindscape #9–1 — it was also about whether humans have inmate goodness or not [1].
Rousseau was influenced by the idea of the ‘noble savage’, which I discussed in The New Mindscape #7–3. He considered that before they had any education or culture, humans were wild, but they were good and pure. But then, sophisticated culture and education have actually made humans lose their purity and simplicity. According to this view, humans have an innately good nature.
On the contrary, Hobbes said that life is “nasty, brutish and short”. All humans do is to struggle and fight against each other in their pursuit of self-interest. He saw human beings in a totally materialistic way, considering them to be only matter in motion. Humans are just like machines without a moral sense inside them.
Nowadays, some of the most prevalent theories that structure our social, political and economic life are derived from Hobbes. These theories — which underpin the operating system of modern society — are based on a simple theory of human nature. At the core of most theories of economics, biology, and sociology, human beings are considered to be innately selfish. [2] Of course, I am simplifying things, as there are many different theories with many variations. Nevertheless, most prevalent theories in biology, social science, economics and politics share similar basic assumptions about human nature.
Let’s take “rational choice theory” in economics as an example. It is the core theory in economics, and it has spread to other disciplines such as psychology and even sociology. It is an extremely influential theory with a very clear belief about human nature.
It is a theory about what humans are, and what motivates them. It considers that humans are motivated to maximise their self-interest. They always make rational choices that maximise their benefits and minimise their costs. All human behaviour, according to this theory, can be explained by understanding how people try to maximise their utility — their self-interest. Human beings are essentially and fundamentally self-interested.
According to this theory, even when people are acting selflessly, they are, in effect, being selfish. That is to say, even when they are being charitable, generous, kind to others and so on, they are maximising their self-interest in another way.
How could that be? For people who publicly do charity, they are maximising their self-interest by engendering others’ good impression of them, improving their reputation, and so on. Moreover, even if they do charity secretly or privately, doing charity gives them a feeling of subjective well-being, which means they are acting in a self-interested way.
According to this theory of human nature, humans can only be selfish, and are selfish all the time. Every type of behaviour you see in the world is only a different form of being selfish. For example, if I make a lot of effort to write an interesting and engaging essay for you to read, it’s because I’m selfish — because I might benefit from your appreciation. If I’m sloppy about it, it’s just a different way of being selfish. Whether I am honest with you or deceive you, these are different ways of maximising self-interest: depending on which one brings the most utility, I will choose to be honest or deceitful based on the circumstances. If I give you a good grade, it’s one way of maximising my self-interest; and if I give you a bad grade, it’s another way of maximising utility for me. These are simply different ways of being selfish and maximising utility.
Basically, rational choice theory reduces all human activities to one motivation — every human being has exactly the same motivation: to maximise self-interest. There are differences only because people have different definitions of their self-interest, and they have different information that leads them to make different choices.[3]
I am painting a caricature of rational choice here, and I don’t want to belittle its explanatory power in many situations. But I just want to emphasise that although it claims to be an economic theory, it is based on a very strong belief in the deepest motivation of human behaviour.
There are other powerful theories that we should consider. Let’s think of Darwinian evolutionary theory. According to evolutionary theory in biology, evolution is operated by natural selection to the extent that individuals can transmit and spread their genes to the next generations. The basic drive of an individual in his or her life is to make more copies of his or her genes by passing them down to his offspring. What drives every individual is the overriding desire to have the most successful offspring, who can survive and carries the same gene. A man wants to have sexual intercourse with as many women as possible so that his genes can be spread out as widely as possible. It’s a self-interested drive. Humans exist only to reproduce their own genes.[4]
In sociology, many theories are based on power. The idea is that individuals and groups are always engaged in a perpetual struggle for power. They struggle to impose their power on others, or to maximise their power over others, or, if they are weaker groups, they try to struggle for their empowerment [5]. No matter whether we are talking about individuals or about groups, about the strong or about the weak, social life boils down to a struggle for power. So again, individuals or groups are fundamentally self-interested.
Self-interest is the dominant paradigm of most of the dominant theories in the social sciences, in public policy, in economics and in politics. The postulate is that human nature is simply self-interested — that is what humans are, and that humans can never change.
Now, just think about these questions. Are human beings only self-interested? Or are they both self-interested and altruistic? Self-interested sometimes, and altruistic at other times? Mixing self-interest and altruism in subtle ways? Can all of our behaviour be boiled down to a single basic motive, or do we have a more complex human nature?
[1] Schwitzgebel, Eric. “Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2007): 147–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27745086.
[2] Miller, D. T. (1999). The norm of self-interest. American Psychologist, 54(12), 1053–1060. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.12.1053
[3] Hodgson, Geoffrey M. “On the limits of rational choice theory.” Economic Thought 1, no. 1, 2012 (2012).
[4] Dawkins, Richard. The selfish gene. Oxford university press, 2016.
[5] Lukes, Steven, ed. Power. Vol. 2. NYU Press, 1986.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
