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    Individuals pursuing self-interest contribute to the comm... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
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    Individuals pursuing self-interest contribute to the common good.

    ConsequentialismSocial Contract
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.In economic life, individuals pursue their self-interest.
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    • 2.The pursuit of self-interest leads individuals, as if by an invisible hand, to take socially beneficial actions.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Individual self-interest aggregates into collective action problems where rational individual choices produce suboptimal group outcomes.
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    • 2.Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' demonstrates that self-interested resource exploitation systematically depletes shared goods.
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    • 3.Therefore, self-interest structurally undermines the common good in domains of finite shared resources.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Smith's 'invisible hand' argument applies only under idealized competitive market conditions that rarely obtain in actual economies.
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    • 2.Monopoly, externalities, and information asymmetries—catalogued by Pigou and later Stiglitz—systematically break the self-interest-to-common-good inference.
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    • 3.A claim whose scope conditions exclude most real social domains cannot serve as a general principle about self-interest and collective welfare.
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    Topics

    ConsequentialismSocial Contract

    Connections

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    Rights & Liberty1 linked

    Related

    A claim whose scope conditions exclude most real social domains cannot serve as ...Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' demonstrates that self-interested resource exp...In economic life, individuals pursue their self-interest.Individual self-interest aggregates into collective action problems where ration...
    +4 moreShow less
    Monopoly, externalities, and information asymmetries—catalogued by Pigou and lat...Smith's 'invisible hand' argument applies only under idealized competitive marke...The pursuit of self-interest leads individuals, as if by an invisible hand, to t...Therefore, self-interest structurally undermines the common good in domains of f...

    Similar

    The pursuit of self-interest leads individuals, as if by an invisible ...83%Morality and self-interest coincide, reuniting Practical Reason with i...82%Excessive self-interest insensibly diminishes affections towards publi...80%In economic life, individuals pursue their self-interest.79%

    Source

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    Smith's central observation is that, in economic life, it often happens that individuals in pursuit of their self-interest nevertheless contribute to the common good (1776, 484–485). It is as though they are “led by an invisible hand” (485) to take socially beneficial actions. For instance, Smith argues that the division of labor is the spontaneous outcome of the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (14). Humans engage in this activity for self-interested re
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit