Self-interest motive has won the war

From Mr Raymond S. Franklin.

Sir, I believe that Jeremy Rifkin (“Towards the empathic civilisation”, March 17) and the letter response by Dr William Dixon and Dr David Wilson (March 19) are both wrong.

There has been a running debate over the years about the relationship between Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments and his Wealth of Nations , the former published before the latter. The debate has been identified as the “Smith Problem”. My conclusion related to this debate – empathy derived from Moral Sentiments versus self-interest derived from the Wealth of Nations – is as follows: Pure empathy, the ability to identify with the “other” – even at the expense of self – is rooted in family, friendship and community, that is, in the social sphere that is outside the commodification of relations that define the market. The economy, cut loose from the social and moral sphere, involves individuals producing, buying and selling for material gain without seeking to imagine the consequences of the individual’s self-interested actions. Such actions may end up being virtuous to the whole society, but the virtue was unintended.

It is possible to hope that the two spheres of Smith, the moral (empathic) and economic (self-interest driven) could co-exist in some form of equilibrium. But, in my view, this was never demonstrated adequately and constitutes the “Smith Problem”.

Jumping forward to the present, it is clear in my judgment that the economic self-interest motive, dominant in the economic sphere of life, won the war. The institutions of the market have overwhelmed and penetrated the social spheres of life. Even the nuclear family, via Nobel Prize-winning Gary Becker, is viewed as a production unit with a division of labour and implicit prices in the way husbands, wives and children relate to each other.

Although I wish Mr Rifkin success, the idea of establishing an “empathic civilisation” at this juncture in history is singularly utopian.

Raymond S. Franklin,
Queens College,
City University of New York, US