Topics Freedom

Question I am not schooled in philosophy but do enjoy thinking about philosophical questions. In the gaps of time I have in my ordinary day-to-day existence, I have given some thought to better understanding human behavior and have come to believe (or, more accurately, am trying to further refine my basic belief) that human beings "can not but act in their perceived best interests." I believe that each decision that an individual makes represents the sum of that individual's accrued experiences, which informs that individual's "decision" (and I believe the concept of "decision" to be a bit of a fiction, but I will use the term because I do not know a better term). I believe that, when confronted with a decision, an individual weighs, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the gravity of the decision and the individual's degree of experience, sophistication, intelligence, etc., the sum of his/her experiences and ultimately makes a decision based on his/her perceived best interests at the time. I believe this premise to be near inviolable (although I do have difficulty fitting people's self-destructive tendencies into this framework, i.e., if people always act in their perceived best interests, why do they procrastinate?). I was hoping you could help me refine and/or provide some feedback/criticism of my thoughts as well as letting me know whether there are any proponents of this view or an approximation of this view (preferably letting me know if there are any accessible reads on the subject for a busy salaryman such as myself). Thanks! Mark

Accepted:
April 28, 2009

Comments

Procrastination and weakness of the will (as when people continue to smoke and to eat a lot of red meat even while they understand the health risks and want to lead a long healthy life) are obvious problems for the view you are entertaining. Another problem is moral and altruistic conduct. You are kind to a stranger, or generous to a rival, at some cost to yourself -- are you acting in your own (perceived) best interest? Not in any ordinary sense. Agents themselves will often deny that they decided on the basis of what was in their own best interest: "Here I tried to act in his best interest, not my own."

Now you can simply always overrule such agents. You might say that an agent's conscious conduct necessarily is conclusive evidence that she must be taking herself to have some interest that she takes this conduct to promote -- perhaps an interest in being regarded (by others or at least by herself) to be kind or generous, or a strong interest in smoking, eating red meat, or procrastinating. But if you say this, your point is in danger of disengaging from empirical reality. It is then no longer a proposed insight into human behavior (which can be empirically investigated and supported or refuted with evidence), but becomes a stipulation or axiom of your thinking which is wholly immune to empirical assessment (and indeed, you once call your point a premise).

Insofar as you are interested in understanding human behavior, you want to avoid interpreting your point as a stipulation. You want to interpret it instead as an empirical hypothesis. You then need some empirical criteria for the predicate "believes at time t that doing X is in her own best interest". And you can then empirically investigate whether indeed, whenever a person decides at time t to do X she also believes at time t that doing X is in her own best interest.

You ask for an accessible read for a busy salaryman. I would recommend Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, and there especially the long discussions of the self-interest theory (attractively named "S") in Parts I and II. This is not an empirical theory about how people decide, but a normative theory about how they have most reason to decide. Nonetheless, you will learn a lot from the differentiations and difficulties Parfit discusses in regard to what it means to act self-interestedly. You will see how very hard it is to give clear meaning to your phrase "acts in her perceived best interest".