Am 14.05.2012 01:31, schrieb Pavol Luptak:
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 06:26:20PM -0400, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
People are greedy, they were and they will. They care about their
self-interest. It's evolutional.
This is too one dimensional - people are more than their greed and while
everyone has needs and desires, it's an easy reductionist argument to
simply say greed is the sole defining attribute of a person.
Furthermore, when you discuss greed, it's unclear to me if you only
include money or property - do you also include power over other people,
even when it comes in direct conflict with wealth?
OK, I would distinguish between self-interest and greediness. The difference
between these two terms is that greediness is when your self-interest
harm other people. So this pure self-interest we can consider to be natural and
not bad (that's why we are living :-)
So I mean self-interest in this case. People care about their self-interest
and being altruistic can be also considered as their self-interest (because
they are internally satisfied with that).
I recommend you the broad display of actions at Purtill, R., Thinking
about Ethics, 1976. Actions and motivations are often a blind spot in
economics. Purtill's collection is simple and mind-blowing. He lists
cases of personal/social benefit/harm. For instance a person walks in
his nightgown in the cold attic, starts its lawn mower in order to annoy
the neighbours. The self-interest argument is a no-brainer here, because
we would basically attribute it to all actions taking place. A singer
only sings for his own delight but neighbors enjoy to listen. A person
does not like to sing at all but cheers an audience up with his singing.
You always risk an intentional fallacy. An example which you could
attribute to me:
Before chemical fertilizers were invented, Europe and the US imported
large amounts of Guano from South America. /Guano/ is the excrement of
seabirds. Guano use in agriculture helped to prevent starvation in the
Western civilization.
But: Birds do not shit on rocks "in order to" save the Western
populations from starvation. We do not really have to care about the
seabirds' intentions when we harvest it from the rocks.
In the same way people could edit Wikipedia or fix bugs for whatever
personal reasons.
When economics makes assumptions about rational players and
self-interest, that is a model case. In reality persons take actions for
whatever irrational personal motivations, and there is no direct
connection between intentions and effects.
People tend to rationalise natural causes, we saw that when a crazy US
priest interpreted the Haiti eartquake as a punishment from the Lord for
Haitian "satanism".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ti-MzHRgDE&feature=related
Rationalising nature is the cradle of religion. Taking fruits from the
soil, mining silver from the Earth. That is felt suspicious by humans.
Spirits and dwarfs have to be appeased. You sacrifice fruits or flesh to
your gods.
Best,
André
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