Demanding Rationaltity

I disagree with Sen’s assumption that self-interest precludes actions that benefit others. When economists model human behavior based on the concept of self-interest, they are merely looking at how much utility a person derives from something. In models, they rarely make a judgement about what exactly gives a person that utility. Most economists simply assume that any rational action taken by a human is self-interested, even if it benefits others. People can derive utility from actions that do not benefit them directly, and so helping others is considered self-interested, because it provided the actor with a certain amount of utility. I believe it is entirely reasonable for an economist to assume that people perform actions because they derive utility from them, and I don’t believe that this assumption excludes the possibility of acting to promote the needs of others. Sen equates self-interest with selfishness, and claims that there is little factual evidence of the predominance of selfishness. He presents a study conducted in Japan in which people acted to improve duty, loyalty, and goodwill to prove that people do not always act selfishly. I contest that this study does not necessarily show that people do not act against their self-interest. If a person acts to increase kinship relations, this is not against their own self-interest, but is in reality something that a person benefits from and derives utility from.

Sen claims that too much distance has grown between economics and ethics. It seems that he is basing this on the assumption that the model of self-interest excludes all behavior which does not increase one’s own holdings. This view is inaccurate, and misrepresents the wide definition of self-interest economists use to determine their models. Economists are constantly attempting to determine from what actions people derive utility, because they don’t know. Their only assumption is that people perform actions from which they derive utility.

I was also interested by Sen’s claim that ethics could do more if integrated with economics. It seems to me that Sen’s argument for this rests on the idea that ethics tends to disvalue certain concepts, granting them mere instrumental value when they deserve intrinsic value. However, determining the value of certain considerations doesn’t appear to be an economic matter. Simply because the word “value” is used does not mean we necessarily need to invoke economic principles. Economics deals with the transfer of wealth and material goods, and while I agree that it could be incredibly helpful in attempting to decide how best to implement certain models of ethics, I don’t think Sen makes an argument sufficient to prove that the engineering method of economics can assist in assessing the value of ideas. It makes a degree of sense that in modeling human behavior, one may need to take ethics into account. It makes less sense that we must use economics when modeling theories of ethics. The two may have some overlap, but in the end, economics attempts to model how people live, while ethics attempts to model how people should live.