Beyond compassion: Selfish reasons for being unselfish

Daedalus

Volumn 131, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 26-38

  Patterson, Orlando ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 0347052420     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The Amnerican Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism amid Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 3.
2. Sidney Verba and Gary Orren, Equality in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 1.
3. Jennifer Hochschild, Wliat's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 143 and chap. 5 passim.
4. McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos, 125.
5. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society (New York: Free Press, 1995), 202 and chap. 10 passim
6. Frank and Cook have vigorously argued that there is a close relationship between the spectacular rise in inequality in recent decades and the spread of winner-take-all markets. There has been a change in the distribution of opportunities, rather than talents, and in the ability of those at the top to leverage their relative standing into disproportionately higher earnings (The Winner-Take-All Society, 61-84; 86-89).
7. While I am in general sympathy with Frank and Cook's argument, we differ in one important emphasis. While they emphasize an elite of winners, it seems to me that what has emerged is a society in which the majority are winners and, of equal importance, are smug in their belief that they are successful middle-class winners. Surveys repeatedly show that over three-quarters of Americans believe that "in a capitalist society, every individual has an opportunity to develop his/her own special abilities."
8. See, for example, Robert Peterson, Gerald Albaum, and George Kozmetsky, Modern American Capitalism: Understanding Public Attitudes and Perceptions (New York: Quorum Books, 1990), 43.
9. For an analysis of the survey data, see Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration (Washington, D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1977), 147-158.
10. Ibid., 158-169.
11. See also Derek Bok and William Bowen, The Shape of the River: Long- term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
12. John Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
13. I made this point many years ago in my paper "The Moral Crisis of the Black American", The Public Interest 32 (Summer 1973): 43-69.
14. For more on the problems of undersocialized and oversocialized conceptions of human agency, see Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure", in Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, eds., The Socialogy of Economic Life (Boulder, Cob.: Westview Press, 1992), 53-81.
15. These examples will immediately raise the hackles of many, since there is a dogmatic tradition in social science that rejects all cultural explanations of problems. I say "may" to signal my own position that cultural effects always operate interactively. A cultural pattern may be a real source of failure in one context, yet be harmless in another. See my chapter, "Taking Culture Seriously", in Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds., Culture Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chap. 15.
16. A recent study by the National Opinion Research Center of public responses to the terrorist attack of September 11 found the percentage of Americans expressing "great confidence" in the executive branch of government increasing from 13.5 percent prior to the attack to percent in the weeks afterwards. There was a similar increase from 12.7 percent to 43.8 percent of persons having "great confidence" in Congress. Tom W. Smith, Kenneth A. Rasinski, and Marianna Toce, America Rebounds: A National Study of Public Response to the September 11th Terrorist Attacks (Chicago: NORC, October 2001), Table 1.
17. John Rawis, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 5.
18. Note this is the revised version of the principle. Compare the earlier version in Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 302.
19. Orlando Patterson, "The American View of Freedom: What They Say; What They Mean", Society 38 (4) (Spring 2001): 34-45.
20. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 6.
21. Smith et al., America Rebounds, Table 1.