What Price the Moral High Ground?

Are people fundamentally selfish? In textbook accounts of rational choice, economists generally take an agnostic position on this question: a person's tastes are her own business, and rationality requires merely that she act efficiently in pursuit of whatever preferences she happens to hold. This approach affords obvious flexibility. A person's anonymous gift to charity, for example, can be readily explained as the consequence of a taste for helping others. But this flexibility comes at the expense of what George Stigler might have called the "crankcase oil" problem. If we see a person drink the used crankcase oil from his car, and he then writhes in agony and dies, we can assert that he must have really liked crankcase oil. (Why else would he have drunk it?) Virtually any behavior, no matter how bizarre, can be "explained" after