While some readers will take the elephant as a challenge to behave better, others may be tempted to throw up their hands. If it’s in our nature to be selfish, why beat ourselves up over it? Why bother striving for higher ideals? There’s some evidence to suggest that our standards and our behavior can indeed degrade in this way, as the economist Robert Frank has argued. In one study, undergrads reported a greater willingness to act dishonestly after taking an economics course that emphasized self-interest as a model for human behavior. (This effect was stronger than for students who took other courses, such as an astronomy course, or even the same economics course when taught by a professor who didn’t emphasize self-interest.) More generally, people who are “cynical,” that is, who attribute lower motives to others, tend to cooperate less. Are we doing the world a disservice, then, by calling attention to the elephant and by describing it as “normal” and “natural”? Perhaps. Certainly we admit that teaching students about the elephant may have the direct effect of inducing selfishness. But this won’t necessarily be the only effect in a community that takes the ideas in this book seriously. Such a community may learn to enforce better norms against selfishness, for example, by being less willing to accept the shallow appearances of prosocial motives. There’s a whole complex game to be worked out here, well beyond the scope of this final chapter. In any case, we need to be careful to avoid the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken idea that what’s natural (like some amount of human selfishness) is therefore good. So let us be clear: this book is not an excuse to behave badly. We can acknowledge our selfish motives without endorsing or glorifying them; we need not make virtues of our vices. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to conclude that virtue requires us to somehow “rise above” our biological impulses. Humans are living creatures through and through; we can’t transcend our biology any more than we can transcend the laws of physics. So if we define virtue as something that arises from nonbiological causes, we set a literally impossible standard. If we want to improve ourselves, it must somehow be through our biological heritage. By the same token, we can’t ignore incentives—for example, by telling people that “good behavior” requires them to abandon their self-interest. The more sacrifice and suffering we demand in the name of virtue, the less rewarding it will be—and taken to an extreme, it means that “bad” people will fare better than “good” ones in our society. Where does this leave us, then? By what path can we hope to improve our collective welfare? Enter here the philosophy of “enlightened self-interest.” This is the notion that we can do well for ourselves by doing good for others. It’s the philosophy described by Alexis de Tocqueville, preached by Adam Smith, and practiced by Benjamin Franklin.In the biological literature, it’s known as “indirect reciprocity” or “competitive altruism.”
The final excerpt from this book. While no doubt, we all have selfishness and dishonest traits embedded into our behaviours, simply accepting this can cause us to behave in selfish ways. To round off this book, what we need to do is to understand and be aware of our subconscious behaviour while trying to do better than our biology.
The book ends off with a part about “Enlightened self-interest”. We can do well for ourselves by doing good for others.
