Besides my previous interventions on the issue of altruism, I’d take this opportunity to add some other considerations.
If the economic model, with its explicit attention to the interdependence of individual choices, is susceptible of modification to include moral values and norms, it might provide an improved framework for analysis. In particular, it might allow more systematic consideration of the interaction of moral values and norms with other incentives and social structures, issues that have not so far been satisfactorily addressed by philosophers, political scientists or sociologists. As has recently been pointed out, there are difficult but important questions about the consistency of an admixture of altruism and egoism with attainment of a Pareto-optimal equilibrium (Kolm, "Ethics", 1983) and serious questions about the "costs of creating and mantaining a social norm" (Bergsten, "Public Choice", 1985,115). Economists might well provide a useful conceptual framework for answering these questions. After all, as Arrow and Hahn noted , it is one of the great intellectual triumphs of economics to have shown the theoretical coherence of the disposition of economic resources in a "decentralised economy motivated by self-interest and guided by price signals" (1971, vii) and it would seem worthwhile to try to build on this foundation to answer somewhat broader questions (p.43). On the other side of the coin, there would seem to be some danger in placing too much reliance on the economic model of man as currently understood. One danger is a tendency of economists, when pressed about the narrowness of the concept of "self-interested" man to which they appeal, to defend the claim of universal self-interested behavior by simply taking any behaviour as ipso facto "self-interested" when chosen by some self, which reduces the hypothesis to a non-testable tautology.
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