5
Motivation and behavior
The contrast between self-interested and altruistic motivations is deceptively simple. As a first approximation, let us understand an altruistic motivation as the desire to enhance the welfare of others even at a net welfare loss to oneself, and an altruistic act as an action for which an altruistic motivation provides a sufficient reason. If I see you give money to a beggar in the street I call it an altruistic act because it is an action that could spring from altruistic motivations, whether or not it actually does.
For a more complex example, consider the experimental findings on “altruistic punishment.” In these studies, one subject A has the option of punishing another subject B for non-cooperative behavior, at some cost to himself. There is no face-to-face interaction and the two subjects will never meet again. Yet many subjects use the punishment option, causing B to be more cooperative in his later dealings with a third party C. The punishment could spring from altruistic motivations, if A anticipates, and is motivated by, the benefit his punishment of B confers on C. In reality, it is more likely to be motivated by a desire for revenge.
There are many instances of such behavior outside the laboratory. In eighteenth-century France, peasants usually granted requests by beggars and vagrants for dinner and lodgings. If a peasant refused, he risked seeing his trees felled, his beasts mutilated, and his house burned down, acts of destruction that produced no benefit to the beggars and involved a risk of being caught. Although there is no reason to believe that they were in fact motivated by a desire to make the peasant take in future beggars, that motivation would be sufficient to explain them. In preindustrial England, urban food riots caused by the high prices of bread invariably ended in failure – producing nothing but “a few ruined mills and victims on the gallows,” as the historian of these movements writes. Yet by virtue of their nuisance value the rebellions had a long-term success in making the propertied classes behave more moderately than they would have done otherwise.
The reason for defining altruistic motivations in terms of sacrifice of welfare rather than of material goods is to exclude cases like the following. If I pay $100,000 for my child's college education, it may be because my child's welfare is so bound up with my own that the “sacrifice” makes both of us better off.1 The motivation, although other-regarding, is not altruistic. A case of genuine altruism would be if I sent my child to a public school when I could easily afford a private school and believed it would be better for my child. In doing so I would sacrifice not only my child's welfare but also my own. Similarly, donating to a blood bank (as distinct from giving blood to a close relative) is more likely to spring from genuinely altruistic motives. In practice, though, it may be impossible to tell whether a motivation is altruistic or merely other-regarding.
Whatever the problems of identifying altruistic motivations, there is abundant evidence of altruistic behavior. The Carnegie Foundation regularly hands out medals to individuals who have saved the lives of others at great risk to themselves. Many people give blood without being paid for the effort.2 In Norway, most kidneys for transplantation are donated by relatives of the recipient. The extraction of the kidney carries a medical risk, but there is no monetary reward.3 Many individuals, especially women, look after their old parents in addition to holding jobs and taking care of their own families. In many countries, more than half of the adult population make regular donations of money for charitable purposes. After the 2004 tsunami, high peaks of giving were observed in many developed countries. In wartime, some individuals try to disguise their disabilities or their young age so that they will be allowed to fight. The short-sighted McGeorge Bundy memorized the eye chart to get into the army. (Others mutilated themselves to get out of the army.) Many soldiers volunteer for dangerous (and some even for suicidal) missions. When people vote in national elections and thus contribute to the viability of democracy, they incur some costs and derive virtually no private benefits. The list could be extended indefinitely.
The reason why we cannot infer the existence of altruistic motivations from altruistic behavior is that other motivations may mimic altruism. In the terminology of Chapter 4, we may see altruism as a species of reason, which can be effectively simulated either by interest or by passion. (The word “mimic” or “simulate” may, but need not, imply a conscious effort to deceive others about one's real motivation.) Many people who are little concerned with being disinterested are very concerned with being praised for their disinterestedness. Thus Hume was surely wrong when he claimed that “to love the glory of virtuous deeds is a sure proof of the love of virtue” (my italics). A classical scholar asserts, more brutally, that among the ancient Greeks, “goodness divorced from a reputation for goodness was of limited interest.” Montaigne, by contrast, asserted, “The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness: goods displayed are already halfway to being sold.” Plutarch, Hume, Adam Smith and Schopenhauer all observed that minor actions are the most revealing of a person's character because they are less likely to be performed before an audience or, as Smith said, “less apt to be perverted by wrong systems.” At the limit, the only virtuous acts are those that never come to light. The angelic grandmother of Proust's Narrator had internalized this principle so thoroughly that she attributed all her good actions to egoistic motives. To the extent that virtue has this self-effacing character, there may be more to it than meets the eye. For other reasons, to be sure, there may be less.
Approbativeness and shamefulness
Montaigne also recognized the rarity of virtue, when he drew a distinction between true and false motivational “coins”– acting for the sake of what is right and acting for the sake of what other people think about you. As the former motivation is rare, policymakers may have to rely on the latter:
If that false opinion [a concern for what other people think] serves the public good by keeping men to their duty … then let it boldly flourish and may it be fostered among us as much as it is in our power … Since men are not intelligent enough to be adequately paid in good coin let counterfeit coin be used as well. That method has been employed by all the lawgivers. And there is no policy which has not brought in some vain ceremonial honours, or some untruths, to keep the people to their duties.
Napoleon echoed the idea when, defending the creation of the Légion d'Honneur in 1802, he said that “by such baubles are men led.” (His old soldiers from the republican army reacted strongly against this invention.) Approbativeness – the desire to be well thought of by others – is a false coin that may have to substitute for the true coin of altruism and morality. Alternatively, shamefulness – the desire not to be thought badly of by others – may serve as the false coin. Social norms may induce people to refrain from actions that they might otherwise have carried out. Abiding by the norm is not enough to make others think well of them, however. Approbation is reserved for supererogatory acts, that is, those that go beyond the norm. What is obligatory in one society may be supererogatory in another. In Norway and in the United States, there is a (mild) social norm that a sibling should donate a kidney if one is needed (and suitable) for transplantation,4 whereas in France such behavior might be seen as supererogatory. In certain social circles, donations to charity are mandatory. Thus in England in the eighteenth century, “at each level of society the principle of keeping up with the Joneses dictated the requirement to give as much and to the same causes as the Joneses,” once an example had been set at the top of the social chain. Those who fell behind in their contributions were exposed in printed blacklists.
These motivations may be illustrated by two contrasting examples from eighteenth-century politics. In the first French Assemblée Constituante (1789–91), the deputies several times sacrificed important interests, ranging from giving up their feudal privileges to declaring themselves ineligible for the first ordinary legislature. Although their motivations were complex, an important component was the desire to be seen as disinterested. In the words of the biographer of one of them, they were “drunk with disinterestedness.” Around the same time, in the United States, George Washington repeatedly manifested his fear that others might think he was motivated by private interest. (At the same time, he was aware that too much concern for one's virtue might appear as unvirtuous.) For another pair of illustrations, consider two conceptions of honor. According to one, honor must be acquired, through glorious deeds. According to another, honor is assumed as a baseline but can be lost through shameful deeds.
Whether approbativeness or shamefulness can mimic altruism depends on the substantive criteria others apply in assessing behavior. Some societies may place high value on – and thus stimulate the expression of – qualities that do not in any systematic way tend to mimic altruism (see Chapter 9). The desire for honor may induce all sorts of socially wasteful behavior. Napoleon's baubles were intended to encourage soldiers to risk their lives to enhance the glory of France, not to promote the welfare of the French. According to Metternich, he once said that “I grew up on the battlefield, and a man like me cares little about the lives of a million men!” Some individuals may choose a life of self-abnegation because of the praise their society bestows on religious virtuosi, but hermits and monks are often more focused on the rituals of worship than on their fellow beings. The cult of beauty in modern Western societies stimulates self-centered behavior that would seem to be inimical to the concern for others. In societies subject to what has been called “amoral familism” (southern Italy has been cited as an example) there are social norms against helping strangers in distress or against complying with the law. In The Godfather, Don Corleone memorably blamed his son Michael for volunteering for war service. After his son won medals for valor, “the Don … grunted disdainfully and said, ‘He performs those miracles for strangers’.” Overall, therefore, it is hard to say whether the desire for praise or for blame avoidance tends to mimic altruism.
Virtue, ability, energy
One sometimes observes a tendency to confuse virtue and ability, or moral and intellectual aptitude, as Bentham called them. As I note in Chapter 22, when people are asked about their trust in institutions, it is rarely clear whether they assess the competence of officials or their honesty. Although many writers over the centuries have distinguished clearly between these two qualities, others have either failed to do so or assumed that ability would lead to virtue. I do not know of any evidence that the latter assumption is true, at least on the individual level. In an observation on what is known today as the ecological fallacy, Hume claimed, though, that “good morals and knowledge are almost inseparable, in every age, though not in every individual.”
Bentham added a third quality to the equation: energy, or what he called active aptitude. He also observed, crucially, that the three qualities interact multiplicatively rather than additively to form what he called “aggregate aptitude”; hence intellectual or active aptitude are not desirable in themselves. “In so far as moral aptitude is deficient, by intellectual aptitude or active talent, both or either, in proportion to the degree in which they are present, appropriate aptitude taken in the aggregate will, instead of being increased, be diminished.” He cited Napoleon as an example of a person utterly deficient in moral aptitude, but supremely endowed with intellectual and active aptitude, and Louis XVI as “one of those monarchs whose disposition was least adverse to the happiness of their fellow citizens,” yet ineffective because of his “simplicity.”
This conceptual scheme is simple and commonsensical, yet was not, I believe, explicitly stated before Bentham. It may have been in the air, as some quotations from his slightly older contemporaries Gibbon and Hume will show.
(i)Virtue and ability.5 Commenting on Henry VIII's relations to Cardinal Wolsey, Hume wrote that “the high opinion itself, which Henry had entertained of the cardinal's capacity, tended to hasten his downfall; while he imputed the bad success of that minister's undertakings, not to ill fortune or to mistake [which a less capable person might have made], but to the malignity or infidelity of his intentions.” He observed that the policies of James I “were more wise and equitable, in their end, than prudent and political, in their means.” By contrast, he said about Sir Henry Vane that he was “extravagant in the ends which he pursued, sagacious and profound in the means he employed.”
(ii)Ability and energy. Hume affirmed that when the policies of Charles II took a turn for the worse, “happily, the same negligence still attended him; and, as it had lessened the influence of the good, it also diminished the affect of the bad measures, which he embraced.”
(iii)Virtue and energy. Gibbon cited a Latin poet as comparing “in a lively epigram, the opposite characters of two præfects of Italy; he contrasts the innocent repose of a philosopher, who sometimes resigned the hours of business to slumber, perhaps to study, with the interested diligence of a rapacious minister, indefatigable in the pursuit of unjust, or sacrilegious gain. ‘How happy … might it be for the people of Italy if Mallius could be constantly awake, and if Hadrian would always sleep!’”
Bentham may have been the first, however, to put all three qualities into the equation.6
Over the centuries, there have been many attempts to select voters, jurors, and deputies for their virtue and ability (more rarely for their energy). Since virtue is not an observable quality, one would need an observable proxy that can be expected to be highly correlated with it. Property, especially real estate, has been the most frequently used indicator, on the grounds that only landowners had a permanent interest in the welfare of the country. This argument was rarely made, though, by non-landowners. Ability is somewhat more amenable to direct observation and testing. Literacy, in particular, is easily ascertained, but is likely to be a necessary rather than sufficient condition for competence. In 1856 and again in 1857, two British parliamentarians made proposals to create a Public Court of Examiners to determine both the intellectual and moral qualifications for candidates in elections to the House of Commons. Unsurprisingly, they came to nothing.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity can be a simple dyadic relation, as when each party in an ongoing relationship faces the choice between cooperating and not cooperating. One farmer may harvest in August, another in September, and each can benefit from the help of the other. If the farmer whose harvest arrives first solicits the help of the other but then refuses to reciprocate in September, he is unlikely to receive assistance the following August. A stable relation of mutual assistance is likely to develop that, although it does not rely on feelings of fellowship, may foster them. During World War I, some German and British troops developed a tacit truce, a live-and-let live practice of shelling the adversary less aggressively than they could have. In this case, too, a friendly attitude toward the other side emerged over time, but as a result of cooperation, not as its cause.
In direct reciprocity, A helps B if and only if B has helped A. In indirect reciprocity, A helps B if B has helped C. As we shall see in later chapters, a similar distinction applies to “negative reciprocity”: A may hurt B if B has hurt A, but also if B has hurt C. (Both ideas were first stated by Descartes.) The existence of indirect reciprocity suggests that people might behave altruistically in order to develop a reputation for having altruistic motivations. Other people will then have to decide whether the behavior reflects genuine altruism or merely a strategic desire to build a reputation for being altruistic. In this case reputation is valued on instrumental grounds, not on intrinsic ones. Whereas approbativeness causes the agent to desire esteem for its own sake, reputation is sought for the material rewards it might yield.
People may also reciprocate in one-shot situations that offer no opportunity for subsequent reward. If A behaves altruistically toward B, B may reciprocate even if both know that they will have no further interaction. The farmer harvesting in August might help the one harvesting in September even though he is planning to emigrate before the next season. One can, to be sure, imagine self-interested reasons for such reciprocation. Perhaps the farmer harvesting early fears that the other will punish him in some way if he does not reciprocate, or third parties on whose assistance he depends might ostracize him. In experimental conditions, however, one can exclude such effects. In the experimental games to be discussed later (Chapter 19), subjects interact anonymously through computer terminals, thus excluding any face-to-face effects such as shame or embarrassment. Often, the games are also designed so that a given person interacts only once with a given partner. Even under these stringent conditions, reciprocity is observed.
Moral, social, and quasi-moral norms
I shall return to the implications of this and related experiments. Here I shall only make distinctions among three kinds of “other-regarding” motivations. Moral norms include the norm to help others in distress, the norm of equal sharing, and the norm of “everyday Kantianism” (do what would be best if everyone did the same). Social norms (Chapter 21) include norms of etiquette, norms of revenge, and norms of queuing, drinking, and tipping. What I shall call “quasi-moral norms” include the norm of reciprocity (help those who help you and hurt those who hurt you) and the norm of conditional cooperation (cooperate if others do, but not otherwise). Both social norms and quasi-moral norms are conditional, in the sense that they are triggered by the presence or behavior of other people. Social norms, as I understand them, are triggered when other people can observe what the agent is doing, and quasi-moral norms when the agent can observe what other people are doing.7 Moral norms, be they consequentialist or non-consequentialist, do not depend on either of these.
Two cases of individual responses to water shortage will illustrate the distinction between social and quasi-moral norms. In Bogotá, under the imaginative mayorship of Antanas Mockus, people followed a quasi-moral norm when reducing their consumption of water. Although individual monitoring was not feasible, the aggregate water consumption in the city was shown on TV, so that people could know whether others were for the most part complying. It appears that enough people did so to sustain the conditional cooperation. People were saying to themselves, “Since other people are cutting down on their consumption, it's only fair that I should do so as well.” When there is a water shortage in California, by contrast, it seems that social norms operate to make people limit their consumption. Outdoor consumption such as watering the lawn can of course be monitored not only by neighbors, but also by municipal inspectors. Indoor consumption can be monitored by visitors, who may and do express their disapproval if the toilet bowl is clean.8 In fact, monitoring of individual behavior also occurred in Bogotá, since children sometimes gave their parents a hard time if they did not economize on water.9
Quasi-moral norms can obviously be powerful in inducing altruistic behavior. Do they merely mimic altruism or are they altruistic motivations? The reason I refer to them as quasi-moral and not as moral is also why I lean to the first answer. The norm of reciprocity allows you not to help others in distress unless they have helped you previously. A typical moral norm is to help others in distress unconditionally, even if there is no prior history of assistance. The norm of conditional cooperation allows one to use normal amounts of water if nobody else is reducing consumption, whereas both utilitarianism and everyday Kantianism would endorse unilateral reduction. Moral norms, one might say, are proactive; quasi-moral norms, only reactive. Another way of expressing the difference is that the feeling of injustice seems to have stronger motivational force than the sense of justice. As we shall see later (Chapter 19), proposals that Responders in an experiment tend to reject as unfair, with the consequence that neither they nor the Proposers get anything, are of the same order of magnitude as what Proposers tend to offer when unconstrained by the fear of rejection.
It would seem that we could identify the operation of genuinely altruistic motives if two conditions are satisfied. First, the action benefiting others is proactive, not reactive. Second, it is anonymous, in the sense that the identity of the benevolent actor is known neither to the beneficiary nor to third parties.10 We may imagine, for instance, a person sending an anonymous money order to the charity Oxfam or dropping money into the collection box of an empty church. The second example is not as clear-cut as one would want, since the person might be motivated by his belief that God observes him and will reward him. The belief may be illogical (an instance of the “by-product fallacy”) but might still be quite common. The first example might seem more unambiguous. Yet even the purest acts of altruism such as anonymous donations to strangers may stem from murky motives. According to Kant,
it is absolutely impossible to make out by experience with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action, however right in itself, rested simply on moral grounds and on the conception of duty. Sometimes it happens that with the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action; since, when the question is of moral worth, it is not with the actions which we see that we are concerned, but with those inward principles of them which we do not.
Kant is saying that even if we are not performing before an external audience, we can never know whether we are playing to the internal audience, to use a metaphor whose meaning will become clearer, I hope, by the examples I give in Chapter 9.11 The act of hiding one's virtue to others that Montaigne found so virtuous will be apparent to oneself. As La Rochefoucauld noted, amour-propre “always finds compensations, and even when it gives up vanity it loses nothing.” As he also said, “If pure love exists, free from the dross of our other passions, it lies hidden in the depths of our hearts and unknown even to ourselves.” At best, said Proust, we may be able to learn our true motives from others: “We are familiar only with the passions of others, and what we come to know about our own, we have been able to learn only from them. Upon ourselves, they act only indirectly, by way of our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives alternative motives that are more acceptable.” I return to this important idea of a substitution, or transmutation, in Chapter 9.
Both Kant and Proust were influenced by the French moralists of the seventeenth century, notably by La Rochefoucauld. We can state their framework as follows. All individuals some of the time and some individuals all the time are egoistic, motivated only by their private material benefits. Many more individuals are egocentric, motivated by material self-interest, but also by two forms of amour-propre: vanity and the desire for self-approval. People want be approved by an external audience, even, as Seneca noted, by those of whom they disapprove. Amour-propre can also make people seek the approval of the internal audience. In either case, the approval may require some sacrifice of material self-interest. Yet the egocentric does not really care about others: they matter only as spectators of, or conditions for, his sacrifice. Some people, finally, are genuinely altruistic, and as such indifferent to both the external and the internal audience. The Narrator in Proust's Recherche offers a description, when he notes that:
when, in the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, which is the face devoid of gentleness, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.
The warm glow (the Valmont effect)
I pursue this issue by means of an example. When people donate to good causes, what motivates them? For specificity, consider donations to the charity organization Save the Children. If donors are motivated exclusively by altruism, that is, by their desire to increase the welfare of children, they face a collective action problem (Chapter 23). For altruistic donors, the welfare of the recipients is in fact a public good, on a par with a clean environment. What matters for each potential donor is that children be better off, not that he make them better off (Chapter 4). He benefits as much from the donations of others as from his own, just as an environmentalist benefits as much from the cleaning-up efforts of others as from his own.
In terms to be explained later (Chapter 18), economists assume that individual donations have to form a Nash equilibrium. Each altruist donates the amount that is optimal, from his perspective, given how much others give. In deciding how much to donate, he does not take account, however, of the benefits he provides to other potential donors. If philanthropic donations were constrained to form an equilibrium in this sense, predicted levels of charitable giving would be much lower than what we actually observe. Moreover, private donations should be crowded out by government interventions, also contrary to what we observe. Economists have responded to these problems by assuming that donations are motivated by a private good, the “warm glow” from giving.
An early reference to the warm-glow effect occurs in the sulfurous work by Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses. In one scene, the cynical rake Vicomte de Valmont engages in charitable behavior for the purely selfish motive of seducing the Présidente de Tourvel. Knowing that one of her servants is following him to observe his behavior, he seeks out a poor family whose property is about to be taken from them to pay for tax arrears:
I summon the tax collector. And, giving in to my generous compassion, I nobly part with fifty-six livres, for which paltry sum five human beings were being reduced to straw and poverty. After this simple little action you may imagine what a chorus of blessings echoed all around me … In the midst of the blessings from this family, I looked not unlike a hero in the final act of a drama. You will not forget that my faithful spy was there in the crowd. My aim was accomplished … After all, I am very pleased with my idea. I have no doubt that this woman is worth making a great effort for. One day this will count for something in her eyes.
In his further reflection on his experience, Valmont also discovers the intrinsic pleasure of doing good. When the family members kneel before him to express their thanks, he discovers a strange sensation: “I shall confess to a momentary weakness. My eyes filled with tears and I felt within me an involuntary but delightful emotion. I am astonished at the pleasure one feels at doing good. And I should be tempted to believe that those whom we call virtuous do not have so much merit as we are led to believe.” Thus Valmont explains the seemingly virtuous actions of others – but not his own – by the warm-glow effect.
The explanation raises empirical as well as conceptual questions. Empirically, the cited objection to an altruistic equilibrium assumes that each potential donor is aware of the amount other people donate. This assumption seems unrealistic. Moreover, altruism and the warm glow do not exhaust the set of possible motivations for charitable behavior. After a natural disaster, a tsunami or an earthquake, people donate more when they learn from the media that others are donating heavily, consistently with the operation of a quasi-moral norm. In politics, too, this mechanism can be at work. Thus in a 1963 fundraising campaign for Barry Goldwater, the newspaper “Roll Call reported that the Goldwater campaign already had $7.5 million in the bank. It was really $125,000, although [the campaign director] hardly minded the publicity; it would only bring in more.”
The conceptual questions are more serious. Let me try to reconstruct the mindset of a typical – not, I hope, caricatural – economist. Faced with any observed behavior, she will first try to explain it by assuming that the agent was motivated by rational self-interest. In cases such as donations to charity or voting in national elections, this line of argument is clearly unpromising. Generally speaking, the natural reaction to an explanatory failure is to try to explain the observed facts by departing as little as possible from the original model. In the case that concerns me here, the smallest deviation from rational egoism might seem to be that of rational egocentricity. The agent might be concerned both with her own material benefit and the degree to which she can think of herself as a moral person. As in other cases, there would be a trade-off between these aims: as La Rochefoucauld suggested, she might be willing to sacrifice some material welfare to get the warm glow from the enhanced self-image.
Warm-glow theorists of philanthropy, voting, and similar non-selfish actions do not seem to realize, however, that this small adjustment to the model, substituting egocentricity for egoism, requires another and more radical one: substituting irrationality for rationality. Specifically, agents have to deceive themselves about their own motives. This substitution is required by what I take to be a conceptual truth: one cannot derive a warm glow from an action unless the agent believes that the action was performed at least in part to benefit others. An egocentric agent who performs for the inner audience has to believe that she is altruistic. An agent who performed “good actions” only for the conscious end of enhancing her self-image could not achieve that aim, any more than one can enhance one's self-image by paying another person to praise oneself.12
Moreover, introspection and casual observation suggest that the strength of the warm glow depends on how much we donate to others. I cannot easily persuade myself that I have an altruistic character merely by giving a quarter to the panhandler in the street. The greater the benefit to others (and the greater the cost to oneself), the warmer the glow. In practice, and perhaps in principle, it would be hard to distinguish between the enhanced welfare of others as the altruistic goal of the donor and its role as a condition for achieving his egocentric goal.
Imputing motivations
In addition to the agent's own motivation, the explanation of her behavior must often appeal to her beliefs about the motivations of others. In forming these beliefs she faces the same hermeneutic dilemma as does the historian or the social scientist. Since she cannot take the professed motivations of others at face value, she can use triangulations of the general kind I discussed in Chapter 3. In addition, she can deploy techniques that only apply to face-to-face interactions. Other people may be able to identify an amateur liar by his body language (or lack of it), since concentration on what he is saying causes him to neglect the gestures that normally accompany spontaneous speech. Also, to verify professed motives one may set a trap for the agent. Whereas historians are unable to trap the individuals they are studying and social scientists are usually prevented on ethical grounds from doing so, an employer, a spouse, or a parent may feel less constrained.
The imputation of motives to others is often tainted by malice. Given the choice between believing that an altruistic action was caused by an altruistic motivation and that it was based on self-interest, we often assume the latter even if there are no positive grounds for the belief. Although such distrust can make sense for prudential reasons, in many cases this justification is unavailable. Gossip, for instance, seems often to be motivated by what the French moralists, following Augustine, called the malignity and weakness of human nature.13 According to La Rochefoucauld, “If we had no faults we should not find so much enjoyment in seeing faults in others.” In fact, as he also wrote, our desire to find faults in others is so strong that it often helps us to find them: “Our enemies are nearer the truth in their opinion of us than we are ourselves.” Yet, even if our enemies are closer to the truth, they err, too, even if they err less, from the opposite direction. On a scale from 0 to 10, if I am 6, I will think I am 9, and my enemies will think I am 4.
For an analysis of this attitude – sometimes called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” – I can do no better than quote from Jeremy Bentham (translated from his clumsy French):
Whatever position the King [Louis XVI] takes, whatever sacrifices he makes, he will never succeed in silencing these slanderers: they are a vermin that bad temper and vanity will never fail to nourish in even the most healthy political body. It is first and foremost vanity that is the most prolific source of this injustice. One wants to deal subtly with everything … and prefers the most contrived assumption to the shame of having suspected that the behavior of a public person might have a laudable motive. If Washington persists in his retirement, it can only be a means to use the road through anarchy to open up the path to despotism. If Necker instead of accepting payment for his services like anyone else pays with his own funds for being allowed to render them, it can only be a sophisticated means to satisfy his greed. If Louis XVI abdicates the legislative power in favor of his people, it can only be as the result of an elaborate plan to take it all back and even more in a favorable moment.
An irony is that the last of the specious accusations cited in this text (written in early 1789) was probably justified by the fall of 1790. One of the king's closest advisers, Saint-Priest, wrote that by that time he had stopped resisting the encroachments of the legislature because “he had convinced himself that the Assembly would be discredited through its own errors.” Conspiracy theories can be accurate, because conspiracies exist. Yet the tendency to find them may owe less to experience than to a malignant reluctance to admit that public figures might act for good reasons.
In Chapter 16 I consider other examples of the hermeneutics of suspicion, related to the interpretation of texts.
Bibliographical note
This chapter draws on my “Altruistic motivations and altruistic behavior,” in S. C. Kolm and J. M. Ythier (eds.), Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism, vol. I (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006). Other chapters in this volume, notably the introductory essay by Kolm, provide a wealth of empirical information and theoretical analysis; the essays in vol. II are equally informative. The reference to French beggars is from G. Lefebvre, La grande peur (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), p. 40, and that to English peasant rebellions from E. P. Thompson, “The moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century,” Past and Present 80 (1971), 76–136. On attitudes toward kidney donation, see H. Lorenzen and F. Paterson, “Donations from the living: are the French and Norwegians altruistic?” in J. Elster and N. Herpin (eds.), The Ethics of Medical Choice (London: Pinter, 1994). I take the idea (and the word) of “approbativeness” from A. O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961). The role of disinterestedness in the French Revolution is discussed in B. M. Shapiro, “Self-sacrifice, self-interest, or self-defense? The constituent assembly and the ‘self-denying ordinance’ of May 1791,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002), 625–56. For the American parallel, see G. Wood, “Interest and disinterestedness in the making of the constitution,” in R. Beeman, S. Botein, and E. Carter II (eds.), Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). The comment on mandatory giving to charity in eighteenth-century England is from P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 564–5. The anecdote about Roy Jenkins is from J. Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Rounded Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), p. 228. For the proposal to require moral and intellectual tests of English MPs, see H. Witmer, The Property Qualifications of Members of Parliament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 201. The tit-for-tat example from World War I is taken from R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). For the Trust Game, see C. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory (New York: Russell Sage, 2004), Chapter 2.7. An extensive discussion of warm-glow giving is in J. Andreoni, “Philanthropy,” in S.-C. Kolm and J. M. Ythier (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity, vol. II (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2006), pp. 1202–69. I criticize the warm-glow account in “The Valmont effect,” in P. Illingworth, T. Pogge, and L. Wenar (eds.), Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy (Oxford University Press, 2011), 67–83. A warm-glow theory of voting is offered in B. Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press, 2007); for a criticism, see J. Elster and H. Landemore, “Ideology and dystopia,” Critical Review 20 (2008), 273–89. The reference to the Goldwater campaign is in R. Perlstein, Before the Storm (New York: Nation Books, 2001), p. 320. On detecting lies, see P. Ekman, Telling Lies (New York: Norton, 1992). The passage from Bentham is taken from his Rights, Representation, and Reform (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17–18.
1 It might also be the case that I would have paid the school fees even if they were so high that the expense would make me worse off in welfare terms. In that case, payment of the lower fees is explained by other-regarding motives preempting altruism.
2 In fact, it has been argued that non-payment is important to screen out people with infectious diseases who might donate for money.
3 In most countries, in fact, the sale of kidneys from living persons is illegal. In this case, the motivation behind the law may be as much to protect destitute individuals against themselves as to protect recipients against low-quality body parts.
4 In the United States, doctors often help a potential donor to resist such pressure by telling him or her early on in the process that if requested they are willing to provide a medical excuse for not donating.
5 In a recent example of the multiplicative interaction of ability and virtue, when Roy Jenkins was asked why he was opposed to Harold Wilson's becoming leader of the British Labour Party, he “couldn't pretend that [Wilson's main rivals] show greater intellectual integrity. All Roy could say was that it was worse in Harold's case because he was more gifted.”
6 One quality is lacking in his equation: the capacity to take account of temporally remote consequences of present choices. A person may be virtuous and have great intellectual ability as well as energy, and yet her actions may amount to little if they are always oriented toward short-term ends.
7 The two can reinforce each other, when the agent can observe what the observers are themselves doing. If I see you littering, I may not mind your watching me doing the same. If I see you carefully putting your ice cream wrapper in your pocket, however, fairness and fear of disapproval may combine to produce conformity (see also Chapter 21).
8 Saving water is also a concern in normal times. In New York City, it is achieved by laws fixing the maximal volume of toilet cisterns. In some countries, water consumption is monitored and taxed by the public authorities. In much of Europe, it is established by having toilets with two push buttons dispensing different amounts of water for different uses. The latter system is interesting in that it operates neither on opportunities nor on incentives (Chapter 10), only on the unobservable goodwill of the person.
9 Experimental findings also suggest this mechanism. In an energy-saving campaign, signs were posted in shower rooms urging students to save energy by turning their shower off as they soaped themselves, and turning it on only to rinse themselves. The signs had minimal effect. When one or two experimental confederates started complying, however, compliance by other shower users increased dramatically. Although the confederates did not say anything to the others, their behavior might serve as a tacit reproach to non-compliers.
10 In experiments, the identity of the subject is hidden to the experimenter. In donations to charity, it is hidden to the officials in the charitable organization.
11 Hume asserts that when George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, “had been sufficiently consecrated in his own imagination, he felt that the fumes of self-applause soon dissipate, if not continually supplied by the admiration of others.” I do not know of any studies that have examined this question in a more general perspective.
12 In a phrase from Beaumarchais's play Le mariage de Figaro that is now the motto of the newspaper Le Figaro, “sans la liberté de blâmer il n'est pas d’éloge flatteur” (without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise). Two years before the play opened, Gibbon wrote that “the slaves who would not dare censure [Emperor Julian's] defects, were not worthy to applaud his virtues.” Although this conceptual truth has not prevented dictators from ordering underlings and newspaper editors to praise them, its violation points to their fundamental irrationality. Montaigne cites Carneades as saying that “that the only thing which the sons of princes really learned properly was horsemanship, since in all other sports men yield to them and allow them to win whereas a horse is neither a flatterer nor a courtier.” Tiberius, who according to Tacitus detested flattery and criticism in equal measure, was an exception. When he asked the advice of the Senate, it very wisely refused to give it: agreeing and disagreeing would have been equally disastrous.
13 I disagree with those who want to explain gossip by its role in enforcing social norms. True, gossip can act as a multiplier on the informal sanctions that sustain social norms, but I believe its origin is more deep-seated.