All posts tagged: Adam Smith

The Founders’ Guide to Happiness

The Founders’ Guide to Happiness

In 1815, the head of a boarding school in Maine wrote to Thomas Jefferson asking for some wisdom to pass along to his students. Jefferson responded by sending a passage from a Stoic self-help manual, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, that he had copied down as a teenager to console himself after his father’s death. “If the Wise, be the happy man, as these sages say,” Jefferson paraphrased, “he must be virtuous too; for, without virtue, happiness cannot be.” Who were these other sages? And what was the connection Jefferson saw between virtue and happiness? A reading list that Jefferson first drafted in 1771, five years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, provides the beginning of an answer. Jefferson sent the list to his friend Robert Skipwith, who had asked for books to include in a private library. There, under the category of “religion,” Jefferson listed his favorite moral philosophers—the “sages” of his letter. They included Cicero as well as the classical writers Xenophon, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca and the Enlightenment writers John Locke, David …

Tiny Climate Crises Are Adding Up to One Big Disaster

Tiny Climate Crises Are Adding Up to One Big Disaster

The Louisiana wildfire that upended Katie Henderson’s life was barely a blip on this year’s string of catastrophes. On August 24, just after she’d brought her 7-year-old son home from school, she spotted a red band of flames speeding across the treetops, crackling like static on the world’s largest television. She had time only to hand off her son to a neighbor and herd the family’s four dogs into a horse trailer hooked to their pickup. (Their cat, Windy, she plopped into an unzipped backpack.) As she and her neighbor caravanned out through the backwoods, fire filled her rearview mirror. Her house was so badly damaged that day that her family hasn’t yet been able to move back. On the scale of disasters, this one was small—Henderson’s house was one of the few affected, and the overall damages will likely be orders of magnitude less than those of the billion-dollar disasters the country racked up this year. Go just a mile down the dirt road to the highway that leads into Evans, a town of …

Introduction to Ethical Egoism

Introduction to Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism is the view that each of us ought to pursue our own self-interest, and no-one has any obligation to promote anyone else’s interests. It is thus a normative or prescriptive theory: it is concerned with how we ought to behave. In this respect, ethical egoism is quite different from psychological egoism, the theory that all our actions are ultimately self-interested. Psychological egoism is a purely descriptive theory that purports to describe a basic fact about human nature. ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF ETHICAL EGOISM 1. Everyone pursuing their own self-interest is the best way to promote the general good. This argument was made famous by Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) in his poem The Fable of the Bees, and by Adam Smith (1723-1790) in his pioneering work on economics, The Wealth of Nations. In a famous passage Smith writes that when individuals single-mindedly pursue “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires” they unintentionally, as if “led by an invisible hand,” benefit society as a whole. This happy result comes about because people generally are the …