Ethics
Ethics is the part of philosophy which is concerned, in its most
general form, with the following question:
What is it to lead a good life?
One central part of any such answer will involve claims about how
one ought to behave (normative claims): e.g. one ought not lie, one
ought be pious, one ought be beneficent, and so on. The branch of
philosophy which deals with such claims is called normative
ethics.
The question for normative ethics is this:
What system of rules provides correct regulative guidelines for
morally right action? A claim about what these rules are is an
Ethical Theory.
About any Ethical Theory we a can ask a set of related questions:
1. What makes an ethical theory true? I.e. what is it about one
ethical theory rather than another which makes the first correct and
the second false?
2. Given one or more ethical theories, how can you tell which of
them is true, if any? I.e. how can we reliably judge the correctness
of an ethical theory?
3. Even granting that there is some true ethical theory, which tells
one how to figure out what one ought to do in any given situation,
why should one act according to the theory? Is it that any such
action will turn out to be in one’s self-interest? If not, why should
one act against one’s self interest? Why be moral?
These questions are the topic of Meta-Ethics.
Psychological Egoism
Psychological Egoism is the thesis that all human actions are
selfish.
Or, slightly differently, no human actions are altruistic.
An action can be understood as a behavior undertaken for some
purpose.
Psychological egoism is a claim about the nature of the purposes
for which humans behave in one way rather than another. There
are several versions of the thesis, which vary in how the word
‘selfish’ is understood:
1. These purposes are always those of the person who acts.
2. These purposes are always to satisfy some desire had by the
agent who acts.
3. These purposes are always to give pleasure (or happiness) to the
person who acts.
Version 3 is sometimes called Psychological Egoistic Hedonism.
Feinberg considers several defenses for psychological egoism,
each a defense of one of these three versions of the thesis.
Defense 1:
By definition, in acting we strive to achieve some end, and
achieving that end is the purpose of our actions. The purpose, the
motive, must be that of the person who acts, otherwise the purpose
could not motivate the person to act.
Defense 2: When the end for which we undertake an action is
achieved, when the purpose of the action is satisfied, the actor
typically feels pleasure. So we might think that there is a general
aim or purpose for all actions, the creation of pleasure for the actor.
Defense 3: We often deceive ourselves that our actions are
undertaken from some lofty or altruistic goal, when in fact we act
as we do only to serve our more immediate and less laudable
interests. Once we are aware of our tendency to self-deception, we
might reasonably think that whenever it appears that we act for
reasons that are not self-regarding, there are really underlying
motives which are not virtuous, or altruistic, but simply concern
our own well-being, our own pleasure and happiness.
Defense 4: As a matter of fact, we teach moral behavior by
rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior, so that
children learn to behave well because it is in their self-interest to
behave well. And as a general matter, even adults tend to behave
well only when they stand to benefit from so doing, either because
such behavior is rewarded, or the failure to behave well is punished
(most of us would frequently exceed the speed limit in quite unsafe
ways were it not for the possibility of financially ruinous fines).
This suggests that people are always motivated by self-interest.
The first defense aims to support the first two versions of the
thesis, and in fact succeeds. The problem is that the first two
versions of the thesis do not really rule out the possibility of
unselfish acts.
The first and second versions of the thesis are correct: one always
acts for one’s own purposes and these purposes are always to
satisfy some desire one has. These are simply tautologies (claims
that are necessarily true in virtue of the meanings of the words
used to express them). However, it does not follow from this that
one’s actions are always selfish in the relevant sense. In particular,
if one’s desire, and so one’s purpose, is to make another better off,
even at some cost to one’s other interests, then one’s purpose and
the desire it satisfies are not selfish. Nothing in the first defense,
or for that matter in the first two versions of the thesis, rules out
such unselfish motives.
An action is selfish only if the purpose which motivates it is
selfish, and the purpose is selfish only if the aim of the action, the
desire it is supposed to satisfy, is selfish. Versions 1 and 2 of the
thesis leave it open that some actions might have unselfish
purposes.
The second defense is aimed at version 3 of the thesis. But it fails,
for several reasons:
A. It does not follow from the fact (if it were one) that all
successful actions bring pleasure to the persons who act that the
point of acting was to bring such pleasure.
B. It is false that every successful action brings pleasure. An
action is successful if it brings about the satisfaction of the desire
that motivated it, i.e. if it achieves its purpose. But some
successful actions do not bring pleasure to the person who acted.
C. If we define ‘pleasure’ to include ‘desire satisfaction’, and
define this to occur whenever ‘we get what we want’, then we do
have here a defense of version 3 of the thesis. But we have done
so only by turning version 3 of the thesis into an empty tautology
that says no more than versions 1 and 2—we act (by definition) for
purposes, those purposes (by definition) our always ours, and we
(by definition) are satisfied when those purposes are realized, and
hence, since such satisfaction is (by definition) a kind of pleasure,
successful actions always produce pleasure (by definition). What
does not follow from the now tautologous reading of version 3 is
that in acting we always have selfish purposes.
Feinberg claims there is a counter-argument to version 3.
Suppose you act in order to ease the plight of someone else, say
Igor. It may be that easing Igor’s plight (say he is pan-handling on
a cold winter day, and you give him 5 bucks to buy a hot meal)
also causes you pleasure, in that had you not eased his plight, you
would have been bothered all day by the thought of his suffering.
So your action has eased both his plight and your own discomfort
at his plight. The psychological egoist wants to say that the real
reason for your action, its real purpose, was only the latter.
But, says Feinberg, that cannot be right. For if you had no prior
concern for Igor beyond easing your own discomfort, you wouldn’t
feel discomfort at his plight, and so would feel no need to ease it in
order to avoid your own discomfort. In general then, I can aim to
serve my own happiness by serving the happiness of others only if
I have some prior concern for their happiness independently of
whatever effect their happiness has on my own. And that concern
is necessarily unselfish, and a legitimate reason for acting. Hence,
it generates a legitimate motive for action. That motive is
unselfish, and so the actions it produces are unselfish.
The counter argument is not conclusive, since there are other
possible sources for our own pleasure at beneficent acts than some
prior concern with others. For example, we might enjoy the
benefits of praise and the good-regard of others if we act
heroically, or we might desire the gratitude of others, which we
receive when we behave in apparently altruistic ways.
Defense 3 claims there are always such self-regarding desires to be
found behind apparently unselfish acts.
Feinberg says there is here no logical error, but there is a lack of
evidence. It is simply not clear that such selfish desires are always
to be found, or that they are always sufficient to actually motivate
persons to act. Moreover, since there are many apparently
unselfish and altruistic acts, such a sweeping generalization
requires a great deal of evidence, which is simply not available. So
Defense 3 should not be accepted as things now stand.
Further, it is not clear that it really makes sense to think that all
actions can be motivated simply by a desire for pleasure, without
some prior concern with things other than one’s own pleasure,
where the satisfaction of these other-regarding desires is what
brings pleasure.
The idea is simply that the best way to find happiness is not to seek
it, but rather seek success in something else—the beauty of nature,
the joy of skiing, success in business or politics, and so on. If you
then achieve success in your projects, this may bring you pleasure
and happiness. But if you just seek happiness for its own sake,
without any concern for other projects, there is nothing for you to
find happiness in, and so you will not find it. Feinberg calls this
the Paradox of Hedonism.
In sum then, Feinberg says: pleasure can be defined as a kind of
sensation, or as the satisfaction of desires. If the first, then
Psychological Egoistic Hedonism is a clear thesis, but it is not
supported by the facts, as they now stand. If the second, then
Psychological Egoistic Hedonism either reduces to a tautologous
truth (as in versions 1 and 2), or it can not even be stated
coherently, since it says that all people act to satisfy their desire
(for satisfaction of their desires (for satisfaction of their desires
(for…)))
Finally, Feinberg considers the possibility that a Psychological
Egoist might allow that other motives than simply the desire for
pleasure can move people to act, but hold that all such motives are
selfish.
Version 4: All persons act for selfish purposes, i.e. they act from
motives that are self-regarding rather than other-regarding in some
important sense.
Feinberg says this is fine, so long as we know how to distinguish
selfish from unselfish motives (i.e. self-regarding from otherregarding purposes); more specifically, we need to know what the
Psychological Egoist would count as evidence against his theory.
If we are not told what would count as evidence against the theory,
then the theory simply redefines the term ‘selfish’. The
redefinition will no longer capture the contrast we mean to pick out
in our everyday use of the terms ‘selfish’ and ‘unselfish’. Since
that contrast is important for moral evaluation, we will have to
introduce new terms to capture it.
If we are told what would count as evidence against the theory, e.g.
we are told why Aunt Emma’s act of apparent generousity is really
selfish, then the theory is a real empirical theory. But again, it
lacks the appropriate evidence.