Misplaced Pages

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Mandeville's paradox" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Mandeville's paradox is named after Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), who posits that actions which may be qualified as vicious with regard to individuals have benefits for society as a whole. This is alluded to in the subtitle of his most famous work, The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. He states that "Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live; Whilst we the Benefits receive."

The philosopher and economist Adam Smith opposes this (although he defends a moderated version of this line of thought in his theory of the invisible hand), since Mandeville fails, in his opinion, to distinguish between vice and virtue.

References

1. Mandeville, Bernard (1714). The Fable of the Bees. ‘The Moral’.
2. Smith, Adam (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Part VII, Section II, Chapter 4 (‘Of licentious systems’).

This article related to microeconomics is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

This social philosophy-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Paradoxes
• Social philosophy
• Paradoxes in economics
• Microeconomics stubs
• Social philosophy stubs