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Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Editor: Leonard P. Liggio

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

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III

Self-Interest, Social Harmony, and Aggression

Does the pursuit of private self-interest lead to social order or to human aggression and a war of all against all? The following summaries pose this ancient question under many guises in such diverse fields as ethics, political philosophy, economics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and sociobiology. Should self-regarding behavior (egoism) be pitted against other-regarding be-havior (altruism), or can we reconcile these human actions through harmonizing “invisible hand” processes that, without human intention, achieve economic order or sociobiological evolution?

These questions, in turn, are closely related to the problematic origins of human belligerence, aggression, war, and militarism. Social scientist, Philip Slater in Footholds (1977) discerns three major theories of human belligerence: (1) humans are naturally belligerent due to an innate “surliness” that is biologically inherited but no longer functional as a survival instinct; (2) humans are naturally peaceful but are corrupted by aggression-instilling political or social institutions; and (3) humans are naturally peaceful but are corrupted by child rearing practices that socially reward belligerence but frustrate and repress peaceful pleasure-seeking. Arthur Koestler's recent study Janus 1978, offers a stimulating theory of “holarchies,” to resolve the problem of dependence, autonomy, and aggression in forming stable systems.

Of course, many other explanations for belligerence, social disharmony, and the relation of self-interest to the common good are possible, as witness the present set of summaries. These analyze such themes as spontaneous social order, invisible hand explanations, sociobiology (in relation to human selfishness, altruism, and evolutionary ethics), the self-regulating market and its social responsibility, egoism, the psychological distinctions between aggression and self-assertion, and the socio-political dimensions of individualism and the common good.

Cultural Evolution as Spontaneous Order

F. A. Hayek

Freiburg im Breisgau

“The Three Sources of Human Values: A Postscript to Law, Legislation, and Liberty.” The Hobhouse Lecture given at the London School of Economics, May 17, 1978.

G. E. Pugh's The Biological Origin of Human Values has received high praise from sociobiologists such as Professor Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. Much of the argument is based on the idea of primary and secondary values, “meaning by the first term those which are genetically determined and therefore innate, while he defines the secondary ones as ‘products of rational thought.’”

But there is a third kind of value—cultural evolution—which is older than the biological notion of evolution, and goes back through Charles Darwin to his grandfather, Erasmus, and derived most likely from thinkers such as Bernard Mandeville and David Hume. The notion of cultural evolution, quite familiar to an-thropologists and some geneticists, is a much more rapid selective process than the biological one. “What has yet to be more widely recognized is that the present order of society has largely arisen, not by design but by the prevailing of the more effective institutions in a process of competition.”

In short, “Culture is neither natural or artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learned rules the conduct of which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand.” What is good need not be either innate or rationally chosen, and culture is not merely the result of whim or caprice. In fact, “civilization has largely been made possible by subjugating the innate animal instincts to the non-rational customs which had made possible the formation of larger orderly groups of gradually-increasing size.”

“Mind and culture developed concurrently and not successively.” To attempt to recreate this process we must resort to the kind of conjectural history advocated by the Scottish moral philosophers of the late eighteenth century. What distinguished man was not only his capacity for reason but his “capacity to imitate and to pass on what he had learned.” The brain enables us to absorb, but not to design culture.

It is this process which sociobiology has neglected. It entails evolution and spontaneous order, a complex interaction of patterns which Professor Donald Campbell has called “downward causation,” which far exceeds any quantitative search for two or three variables. Most of the steps in the evolution of culture occurred when some persons broke away and developed new rules and forms of conduct, not because they were better understood, but because the innovative persons prospered. Property, competition, and other aspects of the market economy developed in this way, and made specialization possible. Man did not deliberately invent his most important institutions, from language to law. Freedom demands a certain discipline in maintaining this market order.

The modern age has witnessed a reemergence of the primordial instincts. Marx and Freud were two of the leaders in this assault. Egalitarianism and the advocacy of liberating the instincts are steps backward. The process of civilization depends on the reassertion of this concept of cultural evolution and the spontaneous order of the market.

Spontaneous Order in Human Action

Edna Ullmann-Margalit

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Invisible-Hand Explanations.” Synthèse 39 (1978): 263–291.

Both natural and artificial phenomena invite explanation, but a middle realm, “the result of human action but not of human design,” needs a distinctive kind of explanation. Some phenomena of human (social) life are “structured in some interesting sense,” which suggests that they may have been designed. But invisible-hand explanations (IHE) dispel this idea by the contention that an “invisible-hand process”—that is, “the aggregate mechanism which takes as ‘input’ the dispersed actions of the participating individuals and produces as ‘output’ the overall social pattern”—accounts for the patterned structure.

First of all, such an explanation requires “the description of the initial stage from which the process is supposed to take off” [and] “is to consist of nothing but the private intentions, beliefs, goals, and actions of the participating individuals, in a specified setup of circumstances,” and, “that these individuals do not have the overall pattern that is ultimately produced in mind, neither on the level of intentions nor even on the level of foresight or awareness.” Secondly, an invisible-hand explanation requires “that, given the circumstances specified at the outset, the story by means of which the invisible-hand process is conveyed has got to sound like a description of the ordinary and normal course of events.”

IHEs may be true and cogent or simply cogent, which alone could make them good. A cogent IHE alone could suffice to indicate “how [something] is maintained.” Moreover, the “even though its own probability cannot be determined a priori, the mere availability of a cogent invisible-hand explanation does indeed undercut the probability of the intentional-design account it purports to displace.”

Now, it is argued, that IHEs are the counterpart (in the social domain) of the biological-evolution explanations found in the realm of living organisms, namely, of functional-evolutionary explanations. But caution is warranted. Confusion has been created by some, (e.g., F. A. Hayek and Malinowski) since “for both of them to explain the manner of functioning of a social institution is at the same time to answer the question of its origin or formation.” But there are two molds of IHE: one concerned with “how did it-or how could it have-come about?”; the other with “given that a certain social pattern or institution exists, why is it in existence?” or “Why is the social item under study existent rather than non-existent, or, again, why does it exist rather than some alternative?” If some social pattern needs explaining, we might employ the first mold and thus may obtain “an invisible-hand account of how it (could have) emerged” but once it is pointed out that the item in question is functional, the second mold of IHE comes in handy, “yielding an invisible-hand account of its durability and prevalence.”

It is important, the author argues, to keep these two molds of IHE “distinct and to conceptually isolate them from each other.”

Aggression: A Sociobiological View

Edward O. Wilson

Harvard University

“Aggression.” Chapter 5 in On Human Nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Yes, human beings are innately aggressive. Many critics forget “that innateness refers to the measurable probability that a trait will develop in a specified set of environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all environments.” Aggression in any species is “an ill-defined array of different responses” among which at least seven can be distinguished. None of these exists across a broad range of species.

Under the intense pressure of natural selection, changes can occur throughout an entire population in a few generations. Aggression is one of these changes whose behavior is usually responsive to crowding, or what has been called a “density-dependent factor.” Human beings are not bloodthirsty as in the “drive-discharge model of Freud or Lorenz, but rather are best described by the “culture pattern” model developed by the anthropologist Richard G. Sipes. Thus the cultural growth of war is also accompanied by the parallel development of combative sports and other lesser forms of violent aggression.

While the behavior is learned, “it is the pattern of such probabilities that is inherited.” Territoriality is one of the variants of aggressive behavior provoked by scarce resources, and these variants evolve “only when the vital resource is economically defensible.” This appears in studies of hunter-gatherers such as those by Rada Dyson-Hudson and Eric A. Smith. Such biological territoriality translates easily into the notion of property toward which each culture develops its own particular rules.

In testing several hypotheses about aggression, William H. Dunham concluded that “cultural traditions of primitive warfare evolved by selective retention of traits that increase the inclusive genetic fitness of human beings.” The cultural evolution of aggression is guided by three forces; a genetic predisposition toward learning some form of communal aggression, the necessities imposed by the environment, and the previous history of the group which will bias it toward the adoption of one innovation as opposed to another.

What needs further exploration is the idea that in times of plenty and in the absence of other predators, females tend to become a density-dependent factor limiting population growth.

“The evolution of warfare was an autocatalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally was to fall victim.” Keith Otterbein has suggested that as societies become more centralized and complex they develop more elaborate military organizations and seek to expand. This process can be reversed as it was with the Maoris after the introduction of European firearms had decimated the population.

“To provide a more durable foundation for peace, political and cultural ties can be promoted that create a confusion of cross-binding loyalties.”

Sociobiology's Program and Weaknesses

Charles Frankel

“Sociobiology and Its Critics.” Commentary 68 (July 1979): 39–47.

Although the present development of sociobiology has caused some debate in academic circles, many of the ideas go back to the Greeks and were based on common sense. “The discipline carries the implication that mankind's social institutions and mores are the product not simply of tradition, historical accident, ideology, or the machinations of ruling classes, but of dispositions and drives of the human animal that have developed in the process of biological evolution and belong to the species' genetic heritage.”

Perhaps the basic book is Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In Wilson's view, sociobiology seeks to bring the insights of Darwinian theory to a new level of comprehensiveness and precision. But this is a call for something not yet in existence. Though less extreme than the statements of Konrad Lorenz or Robert Ardrey in making pronouncements about contemporary political and social problems, Wilson must also bear some of the blame for the criticism along these lines which have come his way.

Sociobiology's core doctrine, in Wilson's approach, is a program to unify biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. It is based on a classic form of philosophical materialism and is joined to what used to be called “evolutionary ethics.” These doctrines go back to such atomists as Democritus and Lucretius, but Wilson's scientific materialism is of a special kind. Wilson espouses the traditional form of reductive materialism, although he veers away from some of its consequences and thereby adds to the confusion. Wilson believes his ideas are “more radical in their implications, and more contrary to views that are widely held, because he reads a meaning into them which, in my opinion, they do not and cannot have.”

A major reason biology cannot be unified into such disciplines as the humanities, is because those studies use terms (such as love, hate, and envy) that cannot be dealt with adequately in science. “I am not persuaded that his own version of evolutionary ethics is an improvement over nineteenth-century versions.”

Many of Wilson's terms such as “Altruism” have little cash value when applied to the insect world. Wilson is most vague and guarded when he comes near to what should be the basic question concerning sociobiologists: “what proportion of human behavior is physiological and genetic in its causes? How much of what we commonly explain as a product of history and convention, like monogamous marriage, private property, or organized warfare, is in reality bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh, and not subject to change except with extraordinary effort and unpredictable consequences?” Often on these contemporary questions Wilson's answers, such as they are, are rather conventional but in “biological wrappings.”

What caused the major debate after Darwin was the notion that evolution was a process with no preordained end, a profoundly anti-teleological idea. This disturbed even Darwin. One would hope that as an emerging new area of scientific inquiry sociobiology will in the future offer more insight into this fundamental question than has thus far been the case.

Aggression vs. Cooperation

E. Richard Sorenson

Smithsonian Institute

“Cooperation and Freedom Among the Fore of New Guinea.” In Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies. Edited by Ashley Montagu. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 12–30.

The Fore were hunter-gardeners, having already moved away from the hunting-gathering way of life. They exhibit a high degree of individual freedom and a close cooperation in searching out new garden sites, tilling them while they last, and then searching anew. This kind of proto-agriculture was a way of life which could remain stable as long as its ecological and demographic prerequisites persisted. However, in some regions settled agriculture was developing, “so what also presented itself was a kind of transformation which may have occurred extensively during the emergence of settled agricultural practice on our planet.”

In the proto-agricultural environment, infants were in almost constant bodily contact with the mother while the child was allowed considerable opportunity for exploratory activities and independence with age-mates. “Undoubtedly the lack of frustration during infancy and childhood was a key factor in the development of their cooperative and free proto-agricultural character.” This nonaggressive social system began to breakdown as settled agriculture emerged.

A time of troubles began as the different groups began to converge on the few remaining strands of virgin forest. Initial warfare began as informally organized raids. There were reprisals, usually against individuals or small groups which had violated property such as stealing from a garden or taking a pig. As time passed and the pressure for land became severe, the “warfare became more common, better organized, and more institutionalized.”

Thus three distinct ecological and demographic phases can be observed in the development of the Fore society and the growth of warfare:

(1) With abundant land and a structure of proto-agriculture, the society had little fighting and considerable cooperation.
(2) The second phase was characterized by the beginnings of competition for land as alien groups began to converge in the remaining forest. “There were increasingly frequent episodes of confusion, anger and fighting. Conflict characteristically involved small raiding bands bent on redressing specific immediate grievances. There was an increase in migration to avoid conflict.”
(3) In the final phase, with a rarity of new land there was an increase in sorcery, suspicions, and accusations. More organized groups and attacks began to occur including alliances to drive some groups away. Some of these then undertook migrations of some distance.

This whole process was interrupted by the arrival of officials of the Australian government. The Fore utilized the opportunity to let these officials serve as arbitrators, and “an anti-fighting ethic quickly spread through the region.” This provided an immediate solution to the warfare which might have otherwise taken a long time, if at all, to be resolved. The experience of the Fore suggests “that aggression is a culturally programmed trait which is not necessarily always adaptive or even expressed.”

Natural Values and Individual Decisions

George Edgin Pugh

President of Decision-Science Applications, former Deputy Assistant Director of U.S. Arms and Disarmament Agency

“Values and Personal Decisions.” Chapter 15 in The Biological Origin of Human Values. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

The individual is constantly caught in a conflict between his need for social approval and his personal preferences. What he needs is a prescriptive theory to guide him. Philosophers have traditionally developed criteria for decisions along three broad categories: authoritarian, absolutist, and naturalistic. The authoritarian has been based upon the supernatural, the absolutist on reason, while the naturalistic has sought for values that were innate in human nature.

“In the present theory, we postulate that the evolutionary development of human values can be explained by a chain of primary-secondary valuative deductions.” Any practical system of ethics must be compatible with the innate human motivational system. In practice, a “natural” ethics is almost indistinguishable from hedonism, except that in application there is an altruistic or social component of innate values.

Antisocial behavior and violation of social norms is a problem of motivation as the social environment has failed to provide a system of psychological rewards and penalties to which the innate system can respond. Punishment for violators of the norms thus has an important role in society.

The natural ethics has a close relationship to the ethics of the great religions of the world. These include such ideas as “Know Thyself,” “To Thine Own Self Be True,” “Be Moderate in All Things,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” and “Honor Thy Father and Mother.” At the same time it is compatible both with a religious and a scientific world view. Widespread cruel behavior within a given social order is a result of superstition and a distorted world view.

There is rather strong evidence that cultural evolution accelerated with the advent of modern man about 40,000 years ago, and was very closely related to an improved linguistic capability. The natural theory of values offers some means to reconcile certain important differences between the humanist and existential philosophers. There are some similarities since the natural view also emphasizes that a person must discover who he is, decide what he is going to be, and learn by doing. The failure of the existentialist view is its inability to provide practical criteria for social change. This stems from an “excessive emphasis on personal individuality” and “insufficient emphasis on the role of reason.”

We are now in a period of crisis resembling the axial period of several millenia ago. The natural value system offers a way to reconcile the religious, philosophical, and scientific points of view and to help us out of the present impasse. Rational analyses that do not take into account man's genetically inherited value system will not work.

Sociobiology and Ethics

Andrew Oldenquist

Ohio State University

“Evolution and Ethics.” The Personalist 59 (1978): 58–69.

Reflecting on the relationship between evolutionary biology and moral philosophy, Oldenquist confronts the position that “Rightly or wrongly, it is difficult to resist thinking that while the hypotheses of social scientists might be useful to educators, social revolutionaries and others who are in the business of altering moral beliefs, the causal explanations proposed by evolutionary biologists are the deeper and more ultimate ones.”

First, the author explores the straightforward idea of whether altruism (or helping behavior) or egoism (crude selfishness) is more functional. He argues that “The selective superiority of reciprocal altruism over both promiscuous altruism and total selfishness presupposes that the animals involved are intelligent enough to remember who helped them and who didn't. And it requires that the group be small enough for individuals to meet each other again fairly often.”

Second, the program of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is appealing because it rejects T. H. Huxley's dichotomization of the selfishness of our biological nature and the altruism of our nobler human nature. Wilson's program rightly proceeds on “a conviction that Man is part of nature.” Wilson claims that “we are conscious and our genes make us value the behavior they make us emit.” Not only do our genes explain our behavior, but our genes also account for our reflection and our behavior. Thus, if “altruism was selected for in humans,” then we will be inclined toward an altruistic ethical theory.

Also, this view would seem to favor the ethical theory of Charles Stevenson, that is, emotivism, in which “moral beliefs are not propositional items but instead are identical with supportive dispositions. . . .” A close bond may link “the causes of behavior and the causes of our feelings and attitudes.”

Thirdly, we may dismiss the nature/nurture dichotomy as too simplistic. By Wilson's account “ultimate moral attitudes are the joint product of genes and environment.” Of course, “this determinism. . . invites the usual arguments for ethical relativism; for whenever one claims that some set of causes external to our thoughts produces our basic values the reasons and justifications we give for them look like mere rationalizations.” What upsets political thinkers about sociobiology is that a biological account for values leaves the social engineer with little to manipulate. “Social reformers can tinker with society and thus change people's values, but they cannot (now) change people's values by tinkering with their genes.”

Fourth, evolution itself is not strictly a biological notion, so contrary to wide-spread belief, sociobiology may leave more room for play and diversity and lifestyles. It seems that “selection and evolution which is cultural or ‘Spencerian’ does not fit into the sociobiologist's program because it is not biological. Once acquired traits get transmitted, it would appear that genes and the population biology based on the study of genes can no longer explain what happens.”

Sociobiology and Edward O. Wilson, proclaim bold things at first but then retreat. It seems much of what is normatively relevant is not “innate” and has “wholly non-genetic causal differentia.” So, “if some behaviors expressive of values were selected for in a way that involves only cultural, nongenetic evolution, the task of tracing their origin will belong more to the intellectual historian than to the Darwinian geneticist: here we shall do better reading William Lecky than reading Wilson.”

Self-Interest: An Invisible Hand for Social Good

David Levy

“Adam Smith's ‘Natural Law’ and Contractual Society.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (October/December 1978): 665–674.

Can Adam Smith's argument that a free and pleasant society is feasible meet Thomas Hobbes's contention that a society of free individuals must be a conflict-ridden state of war? We can sustain Smith's argument (illuminated by Hobbes opponents, Bernard Mandeville and David Hume) when we realize how Smith stipulated that free, self-interested choice should be informed by ethical judgment.

In his Leviathan, Hobbes contended that in a free “state of nature” unrestrained by fear of retaliation, each man's self-interest would unleash his “natural passions” in violence. Freedom and self-interest seemed to condemn man's life to being “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” In game theory language, Hobbes attacked a society of individual freedom with the “prisoner's paradox: that state of affairs in which an individual's maximizing of his own utility does not seem to lead to maximizing results for the group.” In effect, we need the fear of Big Brother, the Leviathan State, to serve as a “civil theology” to restrain our anti-social self-interest.

Smith rejected Hobbes's malevolent view of man's nature as tied to debased anti-social passions. Men, for Smith, would adopt a rule of law because it in fact reflects humanity's commonly chosen morality. Through social evolution, as Mandeville pointed out in The Fable of the Bees, men would recognize their frail but good human nature and freely choose those institutions that would confer social order and benefits. Ethics would evolve a code that would not suppress our passions but channel any “anti-social passions into harmonious social conduct.” Hume believed that moral codes evolving for socially beneficial purposes would, for reasons of utility, devise such rules of justice as respect for property. Individuals could learn that justice was in each's self-interest.

Smith argued that the moral sentiment (and justice) went beyond simple considerations of general utility. Men would indeed agree with the utilitarian benefits to social stability in adhering to laws of justice. But men approved of justice even before recognizing the social utility of justice. As men we restrain our “passions” and form a general rule of our duty to be just “as an inductive process resulting from our sympathetic judgment of resentment of injustice in individual cases.” Thus our natural sense of duty will constrain our choices and prohibit ignoble action. Rational religion in evolutionary fashion, if free and competitive in its “market” will diffuse a noble sense of duty through society. Thus humane religion will inculcate duty as part of other market processes and will allow “selfish” individuals to respect their fellows and form a stable and free society.

Is Market Self-Interest Socially Responsible?

Harold Demsetz

University of California, Los Angeles

“Social Responsibility in the Enterprise Economy.” Southwestern University Law Review 10 (1978): 1–11.

Are self-interested market activities compatible with social benefits and social responsibility?

Free enterprise firms and corporations face the problem of evaluating which “individual choice opportunities” they should select in an economic context of resource scarcity. Market enterprises employ two criteria in selecting their behavior: (1) the competitive profit and loss signals of the market, and (2) the preferability of voluntary market transactions over coercive, fraudulent, non-market transactions. Demsetz, from a cost-benefit analysis, reveals that coercive, non-market transactions fail to allocate resources to their highest value use as is done in voluntary, profit-seeking transactions. Ethically considered, the free and voluntary market is superior to the governmentally-controlled command economy: “The command economy by virtue of its restrictions of choice opportunities strips observed behavior of ethical significance.”

Market self-interest is socially responsible. As Adam Smith observed, the self-interest of profit-seeking is superior to altruism as a motive for securing “the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes” who have no personal knowledge of each other. The “profit and loss system creates a prima facie case in terms of the net benefit criterion in support of those activities that survive the market test.” Furthermore, profitability in the market is highly ethical if we value freedom over coercion.

Government solutions seek to challenge the social responsibility of the market's profit and self-interest motivation by appealing to: (1) the need of paternalism to correct individuals' tendency toward unenlightened self-interest; (2) the need to correct underlying inequitable distribution of wealth; and (3) the problem of externalities by which businesses pass on costs to unwitting parties. Demsetz's detailed analysis finds each of these critiques of the market unpersuasive. After scrutinizing anti-market attacks on high prices, the evils of large monopolistic corporations, and the separation of corporate ownership and control, he concludes: “the charge of social irresponsibility runs a considerable risk of being irresponsible itself.”

Is Egoism a Valid Ethic?

Tibor R. Machan

State University of New York/Fredonia

“Recent Work in Ethical Egoism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (January 1979): 1–15.

This bibliographical essay listing 65 works reviews selected philosophical treatments of ethical egoism published since 1950, and sketches a plausible version of ethical egoism.

Taken broadly, ethical egoism holds that basic principles of conduct must be ‘related’ to some benefit for the agent. Machan distinguishes subjective egoism (the view that “a code is applicable to the unique individual one happens to be”) and classical ethical egoism (the view that treats the ego or the self “as an individual of a kind,” namely, a human being). The egoism the author defends answers the question “How should I conduct myself?” with: “One should conduct one's life so as to achieve, in one's particular case, excellence as the kind of being one is.”

Machan considers both proponents and opponents of egoism, developing in some detail the views of the former. His concern is the answers philosophers have given to two related questions: (1) Can egoism be a bona fide ethical theory? (2) Is ethical egoism a (the) correct ethical theory?

Philosophers concerned with the first question have considered issues such as whether the egoist principle is universalizable or satisfies other putative requirements of a moral principle. Machan gives no account of the troublesome principle of universalization, or of its role in moral theory. Discussing a critic's suggestion that a theory which embodies a preference for the good of the agent is no less acceptable from a formal point of view than a theory that embodies a preference for the good of others, Machan replies that “any practically viable morality must admit to some biases. . . . To ask of a moral position that it be completely unbiased, impartial, and universalizable is to ask the improbable, perhaps even impossible, of human beings.”

Machan discusses the egoistic theories of Eric Mack, Jesse Kalin, and Ayn Rand. He mentions briefly the criticisms advanced by Robert Nozick, Hazel Barnes, and James Rachels, and laments the paucity of philosophical response to Kalin's works and to Mack's defense of a neo-Aristotelian, functionalist and essentialist version of egoism. A recurring criticism of opponents of egoism is that they fail to aim their objections at specific views advanced by particular ethical theorists, that they rely instead on their own ‘renditions’ of ethical egoism.

Machan claims that classical egoism satisfies the requirement of universalization; that following egoistic principles need not engender social disharmony; and that in developing an egoist theory one can give the proper role and significance to ordinary intuitions about morality. He further contends that as an answer to the question “How should I conduct myself?” ethical egoism “appears to be as right as answers in the domain of ethics can reasonably be expected to be.” He points out in closing that the ethical egoism he defends includes consequentialist and deontological elements.

Egocentric Altruism

Frederick H. Kanfer

University of Illinois

“Personal Control, Social Control, and Altruism.” American Psychologist 34 (March 1979): 231–239.

This article studies egocentrically motivated altruism (helping) as an alternative to attempts to regulate relationships between individuals and society. The distinctions between social control and personal control (self-regulation) provides the context for this discussion.

Social controls are introduced in an attempt to resolve conflicts between an individual and the group arising from conflicts of interest. Such controls are most frequently applied regarding behaviors “for which there is strong stimulation in the biological makeup or the immediate environment,” e.g., aggression, sexuality, maintenance of property rights, and enforcement of commitments. The use of external social controls requires the existence of elaborate social structures to provide continuous surveillance to identify infractions.

A number of significant problems arise in attempts to exert such social regulation. (1) The regulators must have exclusive discretionary control over the incentives and reinforcers by which a person's behavior may be modified. (2) The surveillance must be constant. (3) The extensive use of aversive consequences and negative reinforcers is considered by many as morally objectionable and may create an impetus to defiance or rebellion. (4) It is necessary that controllers behave consistently within their own actions, and similarly to all other controllers. “When the degree of social control is continually inconsistent with individual needs, the struggle against such control becomes intense.”

Through personal control (self-regulation) the person maintains some independence from the environment. “[It] provides the opportunity for initiating, maintaining, and reinforcing actions that can result in either increased social benefits or excessive pursuit of egocentric objectives.” Development of altruism is mostly to be achieved and maintained when such behaviors are perceived to be self-initiated rather than imposed. “The task. . . is to train persons to act for the benefits of another because it is in their own self-interest.”

Individual Assertion vs. Aggression

James G. Hollandsworth, Jr.

Community Mental Health Center of Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach, Florida

“Differentiating Assertion and Aggression: Some Behavioral Guidelines.” Behavior Therapy 8 (1977): 347–352.

What behavioral criteria distinguish assertion from aggression?

An assertive response is defined as “the direct verbal, and nonverbal expression of one's feelings, needs, preferences, or opinions.” Aggression is defined as “any response which delivers, either verbally or nonverbally, noxious stimulation to another individual.” This latter definition does not eliminate the problem of subjectivity: what may be noxious to one person may not be to another. What we need for greater objectivity is a reliable indicator of what has a high probability of being perceived as noxious. Such an indicator is the use of coercive power, i.e., the use of threats and punishments in an effort to obtain compliance.

Assertive behavior, in contrast to aggression does not involve the use of coercive power. Thus, assertive behavior can be placed under the rubric of the legitimate use of social power. Its power stems from the internalized values of the other individual and is consistent with socially defined rights. Where aggression may be effective in the short-term in gaining compliance, it is likely to reduce the likelihood of developing long-term effective interpersonal relationships. Aggression increases the potential for counter-attack. A person may use aggressive responses because effective assertive behaviors have never been learned.

Constructive Assertiveness

Saul Rosenzweig

Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

“Outline of a Denotative Definition of Aggression.” Aggressive Behavior 3 (1977): 379–383.

This study offers a multi-level approach to the definition of aggression which subsumes under it “(1) generic assertiveness in apposite life situations; (2) neural mechanisms which subserve such behaviors; and (3) physiological conditions which mediate or promote these behaviors.”

Assertiveness can be considered as the essential aspect of aggression with connotations that are not wholly negative. It includes potentially constructive actions by which goals may be achieved. Constructive means are those which do not entail damage or injury to other persons or objects while destructive means are ones which do result in damage or injury.

Three classes of settings for aggressive actions are described: (1) privation, including the frustration of vital needs and frustrations arising from inner conflicts; (2) conflict (social), which involves competition between rivals for need satisfaction or the establishing and maintaining of dominance; and (3) victimization, including predatory-prey relationships and destruction for its own sake, e.g., vandalism. The distinction between destructive and constructive means is particularly relevant to social conflict. Destructive resolutions to conflicts are adversary contests whose object is to destroy, injure or demean the other. Constructive resolutions to conflict treat the situation as “a shared problem which can be solved with mutual benefits—benefits exploit the advantages of cooperating diversity.”

Liberalism and Self-Interest

Eldon J. Eisenach

Cornell University

“Crime, Death, and Loyalty in English Liberalism.” Political Theory 6 (May 1978): 213–232.

Touching on many themes, Eisenach primarily attempts to separate two approaches in English liberalism for explaining human action. One theory bases learning and action on a desire to maximize self-interest in conditions of scarcity. Related to this is a conception of just society which limits government to enforcing contracts and protecting persons and their property. The second approach in liberalism attempts to uncover the springs of action through investigating the historical origins and development of political societies.

Even though these two approaches are distinguishable, some liberal writers, Locke for example, make use of both. Yet, according to Eisenach, “These two patterns of explaining human actions—one set in the timeless logic of psychological empiricism, the other located in the specificity of historical speech and actions—come into obvious conflict in discussions of political loyalty and physical coercion.”

Eisenach examines the treatment of crime, criminals, and coercion in three analytical contexts: (1) “In a state of nature,” (2) “in recorded history, both sacred and secular,” and (3) “in the future, occasioned by the victory of liberal economic and legal values.” By isolating these treatments of crime, criminals, and punishment, Eisenach hopes to show their importance to theories of political loyalty. An understanding of the issues arising from crime and punishment can enlarge our understanding of the problem of political obligation. In particular, Eisenach analyzes the often intriguing relationship between the role of religion and public (governmental) crime.

Sociology: Holism vs. Individualism

Chris R. Tame

“Change and Pseudo-Change in Sociology.” The Jewish Journal of Sociology 19 (June 1977): 79–88.

Has contemporary sociology worked a revolution or “paradigm shift” to replace orthodox sociology's stress on deterministic social forces with a newer stress on “individual autonomy”? Not yet. For a newer paradigm to emerge with sociology viewed as a “science of liberty” that is individualistic alike in its methodology, psychology, and normative content, we need to go beyond the present scholarship.

Dennis H. Wrong's Skeptical Sociology (1977) and Monica B. Morris's An Excursion Into Creative Sociology (1977) are cases in point. Both works critique orthodox structural functionalist orthodoxy but need themselves to be supplemented.

Wrong dissects the inadequacy of structural functionalism's positivism and scientism. He also exposes the holistic and deterministic assumptions of conventional sociology whose over-socialized conception of human nature overlooks human choice and autonomy. His own alternative model of human psychology, however, ignores the rationalist versions of humanistic or “third force” psychologies, and opts for a deterministic Freudianism. Furthermore, Wrong fails to identify the conservative-collectivist origins of traditional sociology as illustrated in such concepts as “rootedness,” “community,” and socially guaranteed “identity.”

Monica Morris introduces the newer “creative” sociology, such as the phenomenological, ethnomethodological, and interactionist approaches, all of which challenge the positivism and deterministic view of human puppets passively manipulated by social forces. However, Morris's exposition needs far more analysis to show how “creative” sociology departs from traditional sociology. We still need to construct a voluntaristic and individualist sociology.

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