Psychological and Ethical
Egoism
How do we decide what to do? How should we
decide?
Joel Feinberg (1926-2004)
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Social and political
philosopher at
University of Arizona
Wrote on a wide range
of moral issues (capital
punishment, treatment
of the mentally ill,
environmental ethics).
Psychological Egoism
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Human beings always act in pursuit of (what
they see as) their self-interest.
Psychological egoism is purely descriptive –it
says this is what humans do, not that it’s what
they should do.
But it’s a very strong claim– it isn’t that
people are often, or even typically selfish. It
holds that people are always being selfish, no
matter what they do.
Selfish?
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This is obviously some strange usage of the word
‘selfish’ that I wasn’t previously aware of. (apologies
to D. Adams)
For example:
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Bentham’s psychological hedonistic egoism: all voluntary
behaviour is motivated by a desire for one’s own
‘pleasure’.
Or perhaps it’s not ‘pleasure’ that motivates us, but
happiness.
Or some kind of personal well-being (our own idea of
what would be good for us)
Why suppose this strange view at all?
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After all, we enjoy it when we get what we want– so
maybe all we really want is the enjoyment…
Further, I can only act on my motives, pursuing my
ends and desires, so surely I’m always acting
selfishly.
We know people can deceive themselves into
thinking they’re being generous when they’re really
serving their own interests.
We teach morality by reward and punishment, so
maybe that’s the only reason people act morally.
The charge against PE
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This is vague, armchair ‘science’, not real
(empirical) psychology.
How testable is the claim that we are always (really)
selfish?
Think of the behaviour we have to explain under this
assumption:
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A mother gives up her life in defense of her child.
A busy man distributes food and clothing to homeless
people at night.
A soldier throws himself on a hand grenade to save his
comrades.
My motives needn’t be selfish
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Sure, my motives are my own.
But that doesn’t mean (isn’t equivalent to
their being) selfish.
All voluntary action emerges from the agent’s
motives. These motives belong to the agent,
in some sense.
But not all motives are selfish, in the sense of
serving only the agent’s own interests.
Pleasure and motive
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Further, even if we always enjoy or take pleasure in
the results when our voluntary actions succeed (and
it’s really hard to say this for the soldier case), this
wouldn’t show that the motive for the action was to
experience that enjoyment or pleasure.
James: the fact that coal is always burned on a
transatlantic voyage doesn’t show that burning coal
is the purpose of every voyage.
The Lincoln story: what exactly does it show,
according to Feinberg?
Revenge and malevolence
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Studies show that people are quite prepared to
sacrifice their own interests to punish others
who have refused to cooperate with them.
This has been noted by many– these actions,
too, cannot be plausibly explained in terms of
purely selfish motives. (Why would you
‘enjoy’ such a sacrifice if you weren’t bent on
harming this other person from the outset,
rather than on serving your own interests?)
Seeking pleasure or happiness alone?
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What’s puzzling about the ‘pursuit of
happiness’?
Consider Feinberg’s “Jones”:
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No particular desires or enjoyments.
But desperately wants to be ‘happy’.
Is there any hope for such a person?
Note the parallel here to the Lincoln example: we
can’t take pleasure in things unless we already
value those things themselves.
Morality vs. Reward and Punishment
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It’s true that we teach morality, in part, by the use of
reward and punishment.
But it doesn’t follow that no-one behaves morally
except out of desire for reward or fear of
punishment.
In fact, studies show that too much emphasis on
rewards (rather than on an activity and its intrinsic
goals) can undermine performance.
And a ‘moral’ person who is only moral in this way
is hardly trustworthy…
Against Hedonism
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‘Pleasure’ can mean either intrinsically enjoyable
sensory experiences, or
Something that arises from achieving goals or
desires.
The second kind of pleasure presupposes a real
desire for something other than pleasure.
Exclusive focus on the first kind of pleasure is rare
(consider gourmets on a food tour, or an oenophile
on a wine tour). It doesn’t dominate our aims and
goals in general, and does a terrible job of explaining
a lot of what we do.
Pleasure as satisfaction
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If the hedonist’s claim is that it’s always only
satisfaction we want, then we seem to be in
even worse trouble.
The question is, satisfaction of what?
Our desires?
Then what are our desires for?
For satisfaction? Surely that’s too tight a
circle!
Alternative forms of egoism
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Could our motives always be self-regarding
(and thus selfish) even if they aren’t always a
desire for pleasure or happiness? What could
show this?
We need to know the status of the claim first:
is it
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Analytic (a matter of meanings alone)?
Or Synthetic (something that is true, but could be
false)?
Playing games with the distinction
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One way to produce strange, but philosophicalsounding assertions is to say things that are naturally
understood to be empirical but false, but
To defend them in ways that make it clear that they
aren’t empirical at all, but instead ‘built into’ a nonstandard take on what the words involved mean, i.e.
that (for you) they are analytic.
Then it seems we’re engaged in a dispute over the
meanings of words, not the way the world is.
A use for ‘selfish’
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Many words get their force from a contrast
that they invoke.
Selfish/unselfish is one example of such a
contrast, as are good-bad, large-small,…
If we lose the contrast, then we lose
something important to their meanings.
But when everything we do is said to be
‘selfish’, we’ve lost the contrast here.
Reductio ad trivium
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If we re-define a word so that a superficially startling
statement actually turns out to be tautologous, then
we’ve reduced the statement to the (merely) trivial.
Worse, in this case, as well as having made a trivial
claim (on one way of reading it, that “all motivated
actions are motivated”), the PE advocate has
suppressed the correlative.
Our assumption that the correlative remains is all
that makes the claim seem non-trivial.
Changing languages
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We could change our language to adopt the PE
proposal.
This involves accepting that all motivated actions are
‘selfish’,
But we will still need to distinguish selfish actions of
the kind we would discourage and regard as
wrongful from those that we praise and encourage.
The old distinction is still there, and we still need our
language to recognize it, one way or the other. So in
the end, the PE proposal is pointless.
James Rachels (1941-2003)
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An ethicist with broad
interests including
applied ethics
(euthanasia, the
treatment of animals,
crime and punishment),
in ethical theory, and in
the history of
evolutionary thought.
Famine Relief
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Millions of children die every year of hungerrelated illness (not to mention other, easilypreventable causes).
We don’t do much about it (governments have
repeated failed to meet their pledges to
increase foreign aid, and often tie food aid to
support for their own agricultural sectors).
What should we do about it, if anything?
“Common sense” vs. ethical egoism
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Common sense morality holds that we are
required to ‘balance our interests against the
interests of others’
Ethical egoism holds that we have no ‘natural’
duties towards others, i.e. none that we don’t
explicitly incur by (voluntarily) making
promises…
This is pretty radical– and it has obvious
implications for the opening question here.
Three Arguments for ethical egoism
1.
2.
3.
It’s for the best (the pursuit of our own
selfish interests actually produces the best
overall result for everyone).
Ayn Rand: Only ethical egoism recognizes
“the value of an individual life”, the ultimate
value for each individual.
Ethical egoism is the best explanation/
theoretical framework for the demands of
common sense ethics.
Bad arguments:
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Argument 1 is confused: it assumes that we aren’t
EEists, and argues we should nevertheless act as if
we were.
Argument 2 works only by presenting a false
dilemma. The real alternative (the common sense
morality of balancing interests) never gets discussed.
Argument 3 shows that an EEist should behave
reasonably well, but that’s not enough to show that
EEism is correct.
Arguments against EEism
1.
2.
3.
Baier’s conflict of interest argument: the point of
ethics is to resolve conflicts of interest, but EEism
cannot do this.
Baier et al.’s contradiction argument. EEism leads
to a contradictory result– by EE, you should always
act to prevent someone from doing you harm, but
sometimes, by EE, they should harm you, so you
should not act to prevent them.
The argument from relevant differences.
Bad arguments?
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Rachels says argument 1 and 2 both make
assumptions that an EEist would reject.
What about argument 3 (Rachels says it’s the best
one)? Does the lack of any relevant difference
between the interests of different groups or
individuals show that we can’t justify declaring that
some matter to us but others don’t?
What is the key point about morality that Rachels
draws from argument 3?