Intervention
Gurucharan DasGupta writes on something that I have long pondered upon.
"We are aware of the missed opportunities and the economic loss from Nehru's decision to place the State at the 'commanding heights' of the economy. We don't realise how much damage Nehruvian socialism has done to our moral character. Our reforms are rightly shrinking government's role in business, but it will take much longer to rebuild character. Are people honest only because of the fear of punishment ? Without checks would people behave like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata? Modern social scientists assume that people are only motivated by 'self-interest'. But is that true? If a child is in danger, don't we have a natural desire to rush and save it?"
"Institutions have to depend both on the 'good' and 'bad' in human beings. If one is cautious and re-designs government only on selfish motives, you might erode whatever public spirit that exists. But ours was the opposite mistake — we relied on too much public spirit. To restore accountability now you don't need new solutions. Just adopt the accountability systems of high performing governments like Canada and Australia. Even better, follow the recommendations of our own administrative reforms commissions. "
[TOI]
My tentative hypothesis is that humans act on their instincts, self-interest which is just economicspeak for selfishness is one such instinct, altruism is another. Which instinct predominated is decided by social conditioning. I guess, among all animals, human is the most suggestible.
The real problem is in deciding our value system. Should it be independent of empirical observations? If yes then how do we judge one system is better than other ?
As far as I am concerned, value systems can only be reasoned and therefore judged, when it is assumed that our data or observations have some relevance. Which, to me, means that life and evolution has a meaning beyond bio-chemistry.
4 comments:
Acording to some recent research, even altruism is a genetically determined response to sexual selection. Being altruistic makes us desirable to the opposite sex, and people are likely to be far less altruistic when they know that nobody from the opposite sex is watching or will ever know about the act of altruism. And this is an instinctive, rather than measured or rational response.
Conversely, one could also believe the neo-Darwinians who claim that filtering out the bad genes through competition is not the only way of natural selection, but ensuring larger numbers of the species through cooperation plays a significant role too. Which is to say that natural selection is not wholly capitalistic.
And I may be coming around to your view that value systems cannot possibly be axiomatic. Except that, empirical data, I feel, will be terribly inconclusive. And any deductions that any of us make from the empirical data would be a slave to some axiomatic value system that we already hold, for whatever reasons. Cognitive sciences may hold a clue to any such human praxeologies.
Ritwik,
That may be a possible explaination, though I found the hypothesis put forward by Dawkins in "the selfish genes" more convincing which was altruism from point of view of gene is a survival mechanism just like self-interest. Briefly the arguement, even if "individual" organism acts in the way which benefits others (which means near and dear) at his own expense, from point of view of genes, it is the genes whose probability of survival gets maximized.
But even if this is correct, it is moot in discussion of value systems, because context is never gene centric.
Also regarding axiomatic, my point was broader, value systems are derived from certain assumptions (or axioms if you like), it is up to us to decide what assumptions we choose, freedom can be one such assumption, but I dont find it convincing enough. My assumptions were outlined in my wagers.
Dude, glad you never gave GRE. It's Gurcharan Das. Where did Gupta come from?
Hmmm,
Imitation is best form of flattery :-)
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