Yet there are really no conflicts of interest among rational men. A person fully committed to reason can live a completely selfish life, fully confident that his interests will never conflict with those of another rational person. Most people might find the suggestion of a completely selfish life abhorrent. The conventional view is that some degree of self-sacrifice is inherent in virtually every act of benevolence. To the extent that one is sociable, he is thereby presumed to be self-sacrificing or, at least, indifferent to his own interests.
In the limited space allowed here, it would be futile to attempt a sufficiently comprehensive refutation of the alleged dichotomy between selfishness and generosity, or between selfishness and other expressions of benevolence. The briefest and most cogent argument I can recommend is Ayn Rand's 1962 essay, "The Conflicts of Men's Interests," in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. The key question is what really constitutes one's rational interests.
Joseph Curran
Daly City, CA
Loren Lomasky replies:Paul Bent is surprised that neither Tibor Machan nor I thought to explain generous behavior as motivated by a perception that what goes around comes around. We had our reasons.
First, what goes around does not always come around; all too often it swings back wildly and hits you in the face. On this count the Book of Job and The Simpsons' Mr. Burns are instructive. Second, although a society in which most people are both providers and recipients of generosity is much to be desired, only occasionally is generous treatment received as a return on generosity supplied. So, third, someone whose interest is mostly or entirely in what comes around will be more apt to free ride on others' generosity than to supply his own. Fourth, scratching others' backs in order to secure relief from one's own itch is honorable and prudent, but it is not generosity.
So why, then, do people act generously? I remain content with the hypothesis offered in the review: One acts to ameliorate others' distress for their sake, not one's own. Toward this end generous individuals are willing to bear some small (or, occasionally, substantial) sacrifice of their own interests to advance the well-being of others.
Joseph Curran finds this unintelligible because, he says, the interests of rational persons don't conflict. Based on extended research at the poker table, I judge this claim to be false. Curran might respond that I have failed to grasp the sense in which he uses rational and interests. Perhaps; his letter is long on pronouncement and short on explication. Not that it matters much in this context: Ordinary people's generosity is to be understood by reference to what they themselves take their interests and reasons for actions to be, not what Mr. Curran or Ms. Rand declares that these should be.
Heavy News
Letters directed at Jacob Sullum's review of my book The Fat of the Land (Letters, May) are really directed at my own research, and I gladly respond.
Brian Carnell scores me for criticizing the EPA report concluding that passive smoking is a carcinogen based on a mere 19 percent increase in deaths, then turning right around and accepting "American Cancer Society claims that men 19 percent overweight have a 15 percent increased likelihood of death." He doesn't tell readers that the ACS study also found that the fatter you are, the higher the likelihood of death. By the time members of the ACS cohort were 40 to 49 percent overweight, their increased chance of death was 87 percent for both men and women.
Further, the larger the sample size, the greater the relevance of any increase in death or illness. The EPA report looked at a combination of 11 studies that between them had a mere 734 subjects. The number of people in the ACS study and every obesity study I relied upon dwarfs the size of the EPA study. They also all use the considerably tighter 95 percent confidence interval (meaning there's a 95 percent chance the conclusion didn't come about by chance), not the 90 percent confidence interval the EPA used to make its results for any of the 11 reports or all 11 together statistically significant.
For example, the study by Dr. June Stevens and others in the January 1, 1998, New England Journal of Medicine observed over 320,000 men and women. It found, "Excess body weight increases the risk of death from any cause and from cardiovascular disease in adults between 30 and 74 years of age." Longest life was associated with the leanest bodies, specifically those with body mass index (BMI) between 19 and 22. Yet the average American has a BMI over 25. "I'm sorry to tell you," Stevens told one reporter, "it's the very lean weight that is associated with the best survival rate."
The second largest obesity report, from the ongoing Nurses' Health Study, looked at 115,000 women and found that a mere 30 to 40 extra pounds on a five-foot, five-inch woman more than doubled her chance of death over a 16-year period. Only 15 to 20 extra pounds greatly increased the risk of adult-onset diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
The male counterpart to the Nurses' Health Study, the Harvard Alumni Study, with 20,000 subjects, has so far found that men in the thinnest fifth of the group had a 60 percent lower chance of dying of a heart attack than those in the heaviest fifth. Other huge studies, such as the famous Framingham Heart Study and numerous ones from the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and other nations have produced similar findings. Observations by insurance actuaries dating back to the 19th century have shown a strong association between fatter bodies and shorter lives. Modern epidemiological studies have merely quantified these risks.
Evidence continues to come in that thinner is better. A study released January 14 of 170,000 Swedish women found that the heavier the woman, the more likely she was to miscarry. Among women who had not yet had children, "the risk of late fetal death was roughly doubled among women of average weight [BMI 20-24.9], as compared with lean women [BMI less than 20], tripled among those were overweight [BMI 25-29.9], and quadrupled among those who were obese [BMI 30 and above.]"
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