Self interest or self love? Towards alternative basis for understanding cooperation

ROCHA, H.

Congreso; INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ETHICS, BUSINESS AND SOCIETY; 2006

The relationship between self-interest and others’ interests is at the core of cooperation, broadly defined as working together for a common purpose. This relationship has been mainly approached from a conflicting perspective, which is now commonly known as social dilemma –i.e. a situation in which individual rationality, which is based on self-interest, leads to collective irrationality. This paper argues that assuming self-interest as the only motive for cooperation overlooks the human potential for fostering cooperation based on a more comprehensive view of human motives. Based on the assumption of self-interest, the mainstream approach to cooperation, game theory, has focused on different strategies and structures for fostering cooperation, without paying attention to the motivational side. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes the concept of self-love, or the inclination of human beings to strive for their own good and perfection, as an alternative lens to that of self-interest for uncovering the richness and potential of human motivation and its impact on cooperation. The main thrust is that cooperation is rooted in human intentionality and conditioned, not determined, by organizational practices and contexts. The self-love view allows considering both self-interest and others´ interests as ends simultaneously, which implies that these motives are not exchangeable commodities subject to end-means logic but qualitatively different goods subject to part-whole or practical rationality logic. The paper shows that self-interest underlies only three out of eight possible generic motives for cooperation and exemplifies the potential richness of the approach comparing a self-interest view with an excellence view of cooperation at both the intra-organisational and inter-organisational levels. The paper ends with directions for future research