La teoria della benevolenza disinteressata di Adam Smith: sfide biologiche e approcci fenomenologici

In "The theory of moral sentiments" (1759/1790), Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith advances a critique of the pessimistic anthropology of Hobbes and Mandeville, according to whom virtue and disinterestedness are mere semblances. In their view, human beings are constitutively incapable of glossing over their own interests in favor of those of others: even if a person ostensibly puts someone else’s interests before their own, it would actually be a matter of sacrificing a lesser self-interest in view of a greater one to come. In this view, social order and ethical laws would be interpretable as results of the coordination of the egoistic interests of individuals. The fact that this underlying egoism may be unaware to the actor does not invalidate the coherence of such pessimistic system. On the contrary, Smith believes that man's sympathetic capacity allows sincere participation in the emotions of others and genuine interest in the welfare of our fellow human beings. In the present work, such “disinterested benevolence” is juxtaposed with the nineteenth-century notion of “altruism”. The first part of our thesis consists of two chapters, devoted respectively to the historical-philosophical reconstruction of the voices exerting an influence on the Scottish philosopher (Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume and Rousseau) and to the presentation of the Smithian argument. The second part is aimed at attesting the validity of Smith's argument, first by considering those studies in the fields of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology that seem to accredit the pessimistic Hobbesian-Mandevillean account, and then by suggesting a phenomenological reading of the question about the reality of altruism. Thomas Fuchs' enactivism provides a valuable tool to safeguard the Smithian account from naturalistic-reductionist interference. The two anthropological fronts (on the one hand, the pessimistic one of Hobbes and Mandeville, on the other, the optimistic one of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau and Smith) can coexist as two sides of the same coin. This is coherent with what Smith himself argued for in conclusion to his work: the fact that altruism and virtue are pleasurable and coincide with the subject's best interest in no way invalidates the reality of the phenomenon of disinterested benevolence.