a beautiful mind

[quarrel]

Someone I know has put forth the claim that the best way to achieve the most prosperous society — the one with the greatest total quality of life across all people — is for each individual person to give highest priority to his own well-being. One of his personal philosophical heroines called this concept “rational self-interest”. She promoted it because she thought all behavior ought to have a wholly rational basis and she could not find such a basis in putting others' well-being first. (At least, that’s what Wikipedia says.) My acquaintance says he has an even better reason to stand behind this claim: it’s been proven by famous mathematician John Nash. In fact, there's even had a name for it: a “Nash equilibrium”.

I have a couple of problems with this. For one, he’s wrong about the term. A Nash equilibrium is when no one can get a better outcome for himself by being the only person who does something different. It may or may not be the best possible overall outcome — and if it’s not, reaching a better one will take at least two people mutually agreeing to change their actions together. So Nash equilibria are actually obstacles on the road to the true global maximum. They’re pitfalls for human psychology to fall into. People are naturally averse to giving up an acceptable, already-achieved result in exchange for a better potential outcome that requires even more effort.

Number two: focusing exclusively on maximizing the total combined well-being of society doesn’t consider how bad each individual life is. If one person’s livelihood can be cut to a tenth to double that of twenty others of similar standing, the math of pure practicality says to do it. Take this to the extreme and you get the parable of Omelas.

Comments

A problem with "rational self-interest"

[buni]

The biggest problem with Objectivism, one that every Objectivist overlooks, is that pure reason is not an attainable or desirable goal. I can't quote him precisely, but to paraphrase George Lakoff, the Enlightenment model of mind, with the conscious center of thought directing the brain, is misguided. The conscious mind is, pardon the pun, an afterthought, a layer of narrative assembly stitched on top of a collection of distinct thought-making systems whose decisions get stitched together into the veneer of identity after the decisions are made. We think in narratives and metaphors and analogues, not in facts. People who lack emotions make highly irrational decisions precisely because they cannot properly evaluate the impacts of their decisions, because they lack the necessary context to do so. To be purely rational is to blindly deny the reality of our own inner nature, a clear violation of the principle that A is A.

I was on the O for thirteen years. I know its pitfalls and its foibles. It took a while to crack out of it, but I did eventually, and I think I'm a better person for it. If you have any other questions about it, I'll be glad to discuss the subject at length.

Re: A problem with "rational self-interest"

[quarrel]

I’m not sure how much it matters that Objectivism is the philosophy in question. (That's why I skirted around identifying it.) Maximizing the sum total of some characteristic, like wealth or happiness, across all people is the basis of many ethical systems. It is not even exclusive to ones based on pure rationality. But if you’re trying to argue something based on rationality and math, screwing up your terms hamstrings your argument regardless of whether rationality is desirable.