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Why do people do good?
In the history of western philosophy, there are basically two answers to that question. The first is that people act morally because they are virtuous, because they’re committed to certain principles like honor or fairness. The second answer is that people act morally out of self-interest, because it is good — and ultimately profitable — to be known as someone who does the right thing.
A new book by David Wootton, a British historian of ideas, argues that the second interpretation has prevailed in the West, and that it has permeated every aspect of our lives. Today, we take it for granted that humans are hardwired to pursue power, pleasure, and profit. According to Wootton, this isn’t true at all.
In fact, he argues, this view of human nature is an invention of modernity, handed down to us by influential Enlightenment philosophers like Adam Smith, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes. Wootton believes this cultural revolution overturned an entirely different way of thinking about human behavior and morality, and replaced it with what he calls “instrumental reasoning or cost-benefit analysis.”
Now, he concludes, we’re trapped in a world of hedonism and competition, in which the only real goal of society is the satisfaction of wants. And our ethical virtues are bound up with our ideas of material success — namely wealth and power.
Wootton’s book, Power, Pleasure, and Profit, is gripping, but it takes a fairly simplistic and narrow view of the Enlightenment. It also overlooks many of the disparate movements that emerged out of it. And yet, on the whole, the book has a fascinating story to tell. The Enlightenment spawned a series of assumptions about what human beings are, why they do what they do, and what the good life looks like.
We’re still hostage to those assumptions, whether we know it or not, and Wootton’s book asks us to consider the consequences. I spoke with him recently about those consequences, and why he thinks the Enlightenment produced a civilization obsessed with consumption and self-gratification.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
It’s a truism in Western culture that human beings are self-interested animals driven by a desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Is that false?
David Wootton
That’s a very cunning question you’re asking me. I’d say that it has become a truism, and my book is about how that happened and how we came to take this idea for granted. Before, say, the 18th century, this view of human nature wasn’t regarded as true. If you look at Christian writings or Aristotelian moral philosophy or whatever, you find very different assumptions about what human beings are like.
But we’re very much living in an Enlightenment paradigm, and this is the vision of human nature that was handed down to us from this era. We just accept that this is what humans are and that they can’t be otherwise.
Sean Illing
But is it a fiction? Is it wrong?
David Wootton
Well, I don’t think it’s true in the sense that I think human beings are clearly capable of doing lots of things which they don’t find pleasurable, because they believe that they are noble or just or valuable in some way. The whole enterprise of one human being loving another human being involves something more than mere pleasure. It’s a commitment that can’t be reduced to mere pleasure.
My own view is that human behavior is far too complicated to say that we only care about pleasure or pain, or that everything can be reduced to such a simple model. I just don’t buy it, and I think it discounts a whole range of human behavior that is rich and interesting and terribly complex.
Sean Illing
How did people think of moral virtue before the Enlightenment? What did it mean to be a “good person”?
David Wootton
Well, there were many ideas about this, but mostly a combination of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. What mattered wasn’t so much whether you succeeded or failed but rather what kind of person you were. It was about honor, self-respect, dignity, reputation, and a clear conscience.
The idea was that one ought to cultivate and practice virtues for the sake of being virtuous, because the practice itself made you a better person. Obviously, not everyone lived up to these ideals, but this was the basic moral paradigm, and it was radically different than the individualistic, hyper-competitive culture we live in today.
Sean Illing
So how did this view of human beings as pleasure-seeking machines come to dominate the western world? How did we become trapped, as you put it, inside this dogma?
David Wootton
I think it starts off with this Machiavellian notion in the 16th century that political systems are pure power-seeking processes, and that there’s no end to the pursuit of power and you can never have enough power and you will never stop pursuing power. Out of this you get an account of all political activities as self-interested and rational.
And it’s a short step from there to conclude that this must also be true of all political actors and people. So the argument starts in politics and then shifts over to this new discipline of psychology in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and it’s hugely popular because it gives an account of all human behavior as rational and therefore understandable and even predictable.
And then the field of economics starts to take root as capitalism emerges as the dominant economic paradigm and people start to say, “Well, we can modify behavior by tinkering with the system of rewards and punishments. We can nudge people into doing what we want them to do by giving them small rewards or punishments.”
Sean Illing
What seems to have happened during the Enlightenment is that our ideas about politics and psychology and morality were subsumed by what we’d now call market logic. And this logic was baked into our values and institutions in a way that made them seem incontestable.
David Wootton
I think that’s more or less right. The puzzling question is trying to understand the causal mechanisms. Did capitalism produce selfish behavior? Or did selfish behavior produce a capitalist society?
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Sean Illing
And what’s your answer?
David Wootton
I think it’s the new psychology that comes first, and that that psychology is what lays the groundwork for market capitalism. So instead of saying it’s the economy that shapes how we understand the world, I wanted to argue it’s how we understand the world that shapes our thinking about economy.
Sean Illing
I’m not sure I agree with that. There’s this old Marxist notion that economic systems survive through the invention of values that support and justify their existence, and that seems right to me. We entered the age of global trade and capitalism and then conjured up moral philosophies — and by extension, a culture — that justified that way of life.
David Wootton
I suppose I’m trying to say, very cautiously, that that’s not what happened. The way I see it, people like Adam Smith (the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist) wanted to construct a new type of person in order to bring into existence a set of market relations that they thought would be good and admirable.
You can go all the way back to the Greeks and to the Middle Ages and, although they had a sophisticated theories about almost everything, they had no real account of how economies functioned at all. But once you get Newtonian physics and this view of world as a self-regulating system, then you start to see an understanding of society and the economy as a self-regulating system.
So I’d argue that the fundamental preconditions of understanding society in this way wasn’t the emergence of capitalism but rather the emergence of the natural sciences and the belief that the world — and people — could be reduced to predictable, law-abiding machines.
Sean Illing
That’s interesting, though I’m not sure it’s mutually exclusive with what I said. After all, we could accept the premise that humans are as predictable as atoms and still reason our way to another type of economic system.
A lot of this hinges on how we choose to view human nature. You could look at it two ways: Either our consumer society works because we’re naturally greedy and acquisitive or we taught ourselves to be greedy and acquisitive so that our consumer society would work.
David Wootton
That’s right. I tend to the second view. I think we taught ourselves to be power-maximizing first, to be hyper-competitive, and then created political and economic systems suited to that view of human nature.
Sean Illing
The psychologist Carl Jung believed that ideas have people, not the other way around. You seem to be making a similar argument about our views of human nature and happiness — that we’ve basically become hostage to these Enlightenment notions and have forgot that they were invented.
David Wootton
That’s fascinating, and yeah, that is what I’m saying. The natural world is what it is, and will behave the way it behaves no matter what we think. But it’s not so simple with human beings. Who we are, what we are, depends fundamentally on who and what we believe we are.
And so in that sense we construct ourselves through the language we use to talk about ourselves, and that shapes what we become and how we think. If we talk about ourselves in the language of self-interest, then self-interested people is what we get.
Now, we live in very complicated societies where we have lots of overlapping languages in which we talk. But from the 18th century on, the language of selfish, self-interested behavior becomes a predominant language, at least in the West, which creates the notion that the central role of government is to maximize wealth, maximize prosperity, and increase standards of living.
Sean Illing
Perhaps we could put this a little differently and say that these ideas become true by virtue of our belief in him — in the same way that paper money is a fiction but becomes real when everyone collectively agrees that it’s real.
David Wootton
Exactly, money is a perfect example of this. If we lose faith in paper money, paper money ceases to have any value. And it has value simply and solely because we believe in it. The process of creating belief in paper money is a very complicated social process which runs over a hundred years or so. It sometimes breaks down and it did in the French Revolution, when paper money became worthless.
So in that sense we create social institutions that depend upon our own belief in them and we also create types of human behavior that depend upon our own beliefs in them. We often forgot how malleable we really are, and one of the things we need to learn is to look at ourselves and say, “Is this really what we want to be?” And if it isn’t, we need to recreate ourselves.
Sean Illing
I’m curious if you think we’re currently under the spell of any fiction or dogma that guides our daily lives but will, in time, be revealed as false and destructive?
David Wootton
I think we’re at a moment in which there are tremendous strains on democracy as an idea and as a set of claims about rights that have served us very well. One might wonder if, in 50 or 100 years, people will look back and say, “How did we go on believing for so long that that was an effective way of organizing society?”
Personally, I believe Winston Churchill was right when he said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. But — like everyone else — I’m thinking from within the system. Who knows what the world will look in 50 years or what people will think is just and right.
Sean Illing
Maybe what we also need to do is look beyond the West for philosophical guidance. As you say, we have these dogmas that condition us to think in selfish, individualistic terms, and yet there’s an entirely different way of thinking about the self and happiness in Eastern wisdom traditions.
David Wootton
I think we need to step back from our individualist ways of thinking and ask if they’re working for us. And in doing that, we would do well to consider how other cultures encourage more cooperative or communitarian behavior. I’m no expert on Eastern philosophy or Buddhism, so I can’t really speak to this, but there is a lot of wisdom there and it’s hard to see how we wouldn’t benefit from engaging with it.
