The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

There was once a German philosophical conundrum known as Das Adam Smith Problem, which professed to find a contradiction between Adam Smith’s two books. In one he said that people were endowed with instinctive sympathy and goodness; in the other, that people were driven largely by self-interest. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it,’ he wrote in Theory of Moral Sentiments. ‘Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour,’ he wrote in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s resolution of the conundrum is that benevolence and friendship are necessary but not sufficient for society to function, because man ‘stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons’. In other words, people go beyond friendship and achieve common interest with strangers: they turn strangers into honorary friends, to use Paul Seabright’s term. Smith brilliantly confused the distinction between altruism and selfishness: if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic? As the ph...