"Enlightened Self-Interest": Different Contexts

A couple of weeks ago, a made a blog post Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, and how foreign aid requires both “compassion and enlightened-self interest.”  This is somewhat of a sequel to that post.

Well, as it turns out, enlightened self-interest is actually a term prevalent in philosophy and in psychology. In both these fields, the term is used to describe an action which helps others, but is also designed to benefit the self.

In philosophy, including political philosophy, the term is used to explain why we should allow the system of capitalism to work for itself.  Think Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” If everyone acted with enlightened self-interest in mind, proponents of enlightened self-interest argue that this ensures the health of a system that best serves everyone.

The problem with this line of argumentation is that it’s somewhat of an esoteric understanding of how a society or an economy should function.  If a government trusts people to act with enlightened self-interest, then that begs the question of what to do about those people who act with un-enlightened self-interest for their own personal exploits?

I came across one blogger, who made the interesting argument that it is a libertarian argument. As such, it is subject to the run of the mill critiques of libertarianism, which this blogger characterizes as: “How can the poor/environment/elderly survive without the government to protect it against the ravages of capitalism?"  Additionally, he points out that it is subject to the Tragedy of the Commons. and that it is a rhetorically weak argument as “you will usually get much farther by appealing to man's virtues than by excusing his vices.”

To design a large economic or political system based on enlightened self-interest certainly seems to have its problems, but for a specific policy, like foreign aid, I think it fares better.  In fact, it seems to be quite ideal. Aiding poor countries is, after all, in the long term economic interests of the entire world.  But if, in a purely capitalist sense, it was a good investment to give huge amounts of foreign aid as a percent of GDP, then the United States would have already done it. Simply put, it would cost money which politicians are unwilling to spend.

Therefore, donor countries need to design foreign aid in such a way that it is sufficiently "self-interested" to get enough votes to past, but "enlightened" in such a way that it is a good policy.

So in political philosophy, enlightened self-interest applies to a government – to a very large group.  To Collier, in the context of foreign aid, it applies to one specific policy.  In psychology, the term is applied even more specifically: to a couple or to an individual.  I'll save that for a future post.