Question

In economics, pursuing one’s self-interest means acting to gain what one needs and wants. Some people argue that this is the same as acting selfishly. Do you agree? When a person acts in one’s self-interest and when they are selfish, is this the same thing? Present your answer in a paragraph of no fewer than five sentences, and use at least one example to explain what you mean.

Answer 1

Market relations are continually criticized for being greedy or selfish, with rendering them "ethically damaging".

Explanation:

• Markets do involve "self-interested people" jointly advancing their goals, usually without  knowing one another, but "pursuing one’s "self-interest" is not the same as being selfish"
• Economists assume that people are interested in themselves. This simply means that every person cares for some things; some ends matter more to them than to others. It has the consequence that every person would choose more resources rather than less – i.e. the power to decide whether to use them – because we can achieve anything that has a higher value than we might otherwise. However, assessing control over the provision of more resources is not monomaniac.
• Another way of distinguishing between themselves is that although selfish people are"interested in themselves" (they care about themselves), they do not imply selfishness. And self-interest (irrespective of being selfish or not) enables social cooperation to be improved and benefits other individuals from a voluntary market behaviour, whether selfish or not. Even if someone was selfish in markets, not imply  that markets have made them more selfish, or that the markets have expanded the sphere of "selfishness in human affairs".
• The critique of market behavior "selfishness" is also allowed by concentrating research on market exchanges only. There is no theoretical distinction between selfishness & self-interest in such a narrow context that causes people to overlook proofs that disprove "universal selfishness" However, we see vast evidence of non-selfish conduct, from taking care of families & friends to giving loving charity hundreds of millions of hours and trillion dollars to random acts of kindness, when we consider the behavior of individuals beyond the microscopic focus of market exchange.
• The debate on self-interest and competition usually leads to a debate about the right role of government regulation. Some consider a market economy to be largely self-regulatory, as there are sufficient companies competing on the market to control their self-interest. Others point to examples of fraud, which has not been adequately controlled by competition, which are that the government should play a more active role in regulating economic activity. In fact, much of the struggle between political groups is related to how much government control is required for economic regulation.