Let me summarize what I can take from your voluminous discussion herein:
"Economics is capitalism. Capitalism is only about selfishness and trains us to be selfish. Capitalism, therefore economics, is amoral. If you want a world without concern for moral values, hire an economist."
Do I have that right? A little reductio ad absurdism on my part, but descriptive, I think.
"But by reducing even moral decisions to the maximizing of personal utility, you seem to be assuming psychological egoism." I had to look that up - "Psychological egoism is the idea that all men are selfish, and that we only do things for our own self-interests." That is not what I said. That is reductio ad absurdum on your part. I'm surprised to see that kind of logical fallacy from you.
You also say "...in the extreme case of a saint, for example, the altruist defers to others, having seen through the illusion of her personal self. To say that she seeks to increase her personal utility is to grossly misrepresent the nature of selfless sacrifices." While there are indeed saints and shamans and incredible selfless individuals who feel not for themselves but only for others, these are not typical examples of human behavior. When we feel empathy for others, it does not pass through some filter to determine whether it is "selfish" empathy or "selfless" empathy. It is an animal "gut instinct" that originates in our prefrontal cortex. Empathy originates on the left side of the PFC, but brain scans show that even when the left PFC is on fire, the right side is active as well. For most people, that feeling gets weighed against other feelings, and also other considerations, including personal utility.
When I was an undergrad, we spent countless hours protesting the Vietnam war. It was a selfless sacrifice on our part, I ended up dropping classes and having to work my butt off later to make them up. Sure, I made these "sacrifices", but I was supported by scholarships and grants and loans. When I stopped going to school, further efforts at protesting were muted by my need to get a job and support myself. I didn't stop thinking the war was immoral, I just had to weigh it against other considerations.
In one respect you are right - economics does not deal with saints. It does not cover altruism. It is not concerned with extremes - we assign those to the tails of the human distribution Bell curve. But also that does not mean that saints exhibiting pure altruism do not gain utility by doing so. Do you really think that Mother Theresa would have devoted her life to caring for others if it made her feel bad by doing so? I expect that she would feel bad if she did not try to help, so by helping she lessens negative utility. You seem to think that gaining utility from selfless acts reduces it to selfishness. Whatever, Ben.
I see very few examples of saints in the world that I live in. I see regular people making day-to-day decisions about how much and where to work to gain income that can be used to choose what and how much food or other goods to bring home for their families, and how to spend their time. They don't make these decisions amorally. Someone may believe in God, but if asked to give up all worldly wealth and live a life of aestheticism most will balk, and take that moral value as far as maybe going to church. Other factors - personal factors - interfere with their ideas about becoming a monk.
Suppose we see someone on the street being accosted by several muggers with weapons. A "selfless" person would jump right in there to help. But many if not most of us will weigh any action based on several factors, including our own safety. You call that "selfish". I have to disagree with you vehemently on that. The definition of selfish is: "(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others (emphasis mine); concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure." But just because a person is concerned with his own safety or health or personal welfare does NOT mean that he lacks consideration for others, that does not make him selfish. I think you are taking a very neutral interpretation of the word "selfish", but it is not just the combination of "self" and "ish" - it is very pejorative, it implies concern ONLY for oneself.
You posit that economists think everyone is selfish, in an Ayn Randian fashion. That is not the case. Economists don't generally make judgments like that. You seem to think of the concept of "personal utility" as an ethical or moral statement about the mind of man. It is not. Utility is simply an imaginary unit of measurement, like the metric system, or the CPI, except it is a way to describe how things normally work. It is a construct to help understand human behavior in ways that we can quantify or rank. We cannot predict whether people will buy EVs over ICEs based on how much they will feel concern for the environment. But we can predict it based on price, current income, features, quality, brand loyalty, reviews, surveys, etc., all functions of the utility concept.
Also you make a lot out of the fact that we don't make decisions in a vacuum, that they are influenced by the inputs of others. Your example of a woman boycotting a company, because of the info she gets from her father only goes so far. Suppose she has a sister with a new baby, and the baby needs medicine only available from that company. Her sister will weigh her empathetic feelings she gets from information from her father against the needs of her family. If you want to call that selfish, have at it.
Economics is not philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, or politics. Basic economics is a deliberately limited field, concerned with how people make choice decisions in the daily world, and it posits one theory that has been proven to be quite accurate in predicting human behavior. Far more accurate than any predictions based on peoples' moral values. But economics does not contend to cover the entire range of human emotions. Economics does not say that all decisions have to be economic decisions, it merely describes how those economic decisions are made. It leaves plenty of room for those decisions to be overridden by moral considerations. That misunderstanding is why it is so easy to trash the science. Economics is about one aspect of human behavior. One very important critical aspect. But if you assign to it other motives you set it up for failure. In your mind.
