BRIAN M. BARRY

"What is the public interest?" Instead of being mesmer-
ized by the contemplation of this pseudo-question let us observe
the words "public" and "interest" in use in everyday discourse
and then see if we cannot make some sense of "the public inter-
est" by assuming that the constituent words have exactly the
same sense when put together as they have when used separately
in other contexts.

To say that x is in A's interests is to say that he would
want it if he were rational and not altruistic or principled in
a certain way to be made precise later. By "rational" I mean
(1) "perfectly knowledgeable," (2) "having perfect capacity to
compute," and (3) "perfectly in control of himself so that the
achievement of long-run ends are not sabotaged by momentary
impulses"; in other words "calculating" in the widest sense of
the word. This is the way "rationality" is used by Hume and
also in most economic analysis.

We can approach a more precise characterization of what it

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