The Invisible Hand

Adam Smith's phrase "the invisible hand" is one of his more popular phrases despite him reportedly using it rather sparingly across his writings.  The idea is that when individual people work towards their own flourishing without even necessarily thinking about their fellow humans and the latter are unexpectedly made better off by the former, it is as if an invisible hand is lifting up the collective community, nation, or species (depending on the scale).  There are of course situations where apathetic or totally self-absorbed people will neither help nor hinder others without intending to or simply hurt them, yet incidental flourishing can be a part of some societies.

When an entire community or country of people contributes to a culture while only trying to survive or improve their own lives, say, for a job that addresses a genuine need, the community as a whole is indeed benefitted in ways that might or might not have been intended, whether or not anyone contributing to the economy even did so with explicitly philosophical, moral, or personal motivations beyond just wanting to survive.  Such a thing could happen numerous times without either party becoming explicitly aware of the evidence for this occuring.  This much is true: it is possible for unintended benefits to be granted to others by those working for their own personal wellbeing.  The nature of this so-called invisible hand and whether a person should strive to care only for self-interest would be the deeper issues.

Regarding the first of these, the wording of this concept as put forth by Adam Smith can almost come across as misleading.  The phrase "invisible hand" and the comparison to an unseen hand could make it seem like unintentional positive consequences for broad societies are the result of some independent force beyond the person laboring for their own benefit and the potentially unexpected people who benefit from the former, when at most it is just a relationship between two or more people that they are not aware of.  There is no additional metaphysical being or force needed for this to come about (it is not that unseen beings could not exist, of course, as this is logically possible, but that the invisible hand is not necessarily literal).

Regarding the second deeper issue here, that apathetic, blind, or egoistic self-interest can have unintentional positive consequences does not make them morally good or permissible.  The difference between self-interest and selfishness is of course vital, as self-interest does not necessarily exclude fulfilling one's moral obligations, if there are any, to others (and oneself), while selfishness is the philosophically invalid prioritizing of oneself over all else just because one has a personal desire to live in such a way, whether or not one is treating others as they deserve or being rational.  A certain kind of capitalist might both conflate consequences with moral obligation (the two are distinct concepts) and think that the possibility of accidentally helping others justifies selfishness as opposed to self-interest.

This, though, neither logically follows nor is logically possible since selfishness excludes concern for reason and morality, so to the extent that a person is selfish, they care about themselves more than even more important things.  Selfishness is inherently stupid and, if moral obligations exist, immoral.  A focus on the self of this kind is not what any rational person will embrace after realizing that people can bring about beneficial conditions for others without even thinking about it or trying to do so.  The words invisible hand are on their own not really important to understanding how one person/group could benefit another without trying to, but the idea of an invisible hand still stands on several core philosophical issues in ethics.