Selfish vs self-interest
An excellent post crossed my path today from the blog Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy.
I’ve always been meaning to read more of Adam Smith’s two seminal tomes - The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - but have so far limited myself to chunks from the Cato Institute’s Libertarian Reader and P.J. O’Rourke’s On the wealth of nations.
The one thing I do know is that Smith never wrote anything like, “greed is good,” (bad Hollywood writing) or anything about selfishness. What he did expound on was self interest - something quite different.
What Gavin Kennedy writes is clearer than what I could have with my limited exposure to the source text. Most notably the quote in the second half of the post and especially:
It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.
Read the entire quote and you’ll find that Adam Smith expounded on the idea of empathy as being a critical part of moral self interest. Unless someone is wilfully ignorant they should be unable to allude to Smith’s writings when complaining about greed in capitalism.
If you’re a bit tight on time like I feel I am, O’Rourke’s summary and commentary are well worth the read.
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[...] crunch. He does all of this while discussing the difference between greed and self-interest (one of my favourite topics) and why self-interest is truly what makes the market [...]