It’s worth pondering that the 19 firefighters who died Sunday battling a huge wildfire near Prescott, Arizona, presumably were motivated by something other than rational self-interest. Like the first-responders to 9/11 and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, they put themselves in harm’s way (or chose a job that did so) because they wanted to serve. Economics, and much of public policy and political strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself, and that other values – service, duty, allegiance to others, morality, and shared ideals – are either irrelevant or negligible. Yet shared values are the essence of a society. They fuel not only acts of valor, such as those of these 19 young firefighters, but also social movements – abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, environmental protection. Human beings want to be part of something larger than themselves; they crave moral purpose and social solidarity. If we overlook this, we fail to understand the means of social progress.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 15:36:18 +0000
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