Answering the Case Against Psychological Egoism
Is our only ultimate motive or ultimate chief motive for all that we do based
around what we think we can get out of it? If the answer is yes then we are
psychologically egoists.
Think of it this way. Joanna is in dire need of help or she will suffer terribly. Only you can help. If you cannot do it unless you find even 1% of a benefit in helping for yourself then it follows that though the 99% is about her you are weighing you against her. You are still what matters.
You help her not for her but for yourself. She is
not helped because she is suffering but because you want to help her.
Few care for psychological egoism and wish to refute it.
Here are attempted refutations.
1 If you say that everybody is an egoist all the time, you are saying something
that is impossible to test. You can’t see anybody else’s motives. What is to
stop you from saying that psychological altruism is true? What is to stop you
saying that psychological egoism is true either? Both theories are unverifiable.
Somebody could be a recluse for altruistic reasons. It could be because they
think they have nothing good to offer anybody. Or they think they could be a
recluse because they don't want to offer good to anybody.
Reply to 1
Even if you look inside yourself you may not see reasons why the altruistic act
you did was not really as other-centred as it seems. Good results of your
actions and how good you feel for doing them blind you to the selfish motives.
The refutation certainly shows that nobody has the right
to tell somebody not to assume psychological egoism!
2 "Just because an intention, desire, motive or thought is mine does not mean it
is about me. I really can give."
Reply to 2, It does not mean it is not about me either.
It is always a mixture of motives I have, think I have and motives deep down that
I am not even aware of. I am a creature that intends, desires, and has
motives and thoughts so to exercise them is just good for me. It is just
good to do them even if there are problems with them in other ways. So in
that sense it is all about me. Others are an afterthought.
3 "If psychological egoism is true, then we do everything we do to make
ourselves happy. But if we pursue happiness we won’t get it. If we simply just
get on with life and do good for others and forget about it, it is then that
happiness comes. Happiness is a by-product."
Reply to 3
Selfishness cannot be refuted by going wrong!
The claim is that because we wreck our happiness and weaken it if we pursue it
all the time that psychological egoism must be false. But the mistake in this
argument is in thinking that forgetting about happiness is not self-interest. It
is self-interest. If you intend to forget about how happy you are in order to
feel happiness that is self-interest.
4 People are interested in other people. They are not just interested in
themselves. People love, are grateful to, are friendly to, and show compassion
to, others.
Reply to 4
To love is to value. To value means to take pleasure in them. Altruistic love is
a contradiction. You want your wife not just to enjoy loving you but to love you
BECAUSE she enjoys it. The altruistic wife can enjoy loving you but as soon as
she starts loving being with you rather than loving you that is when it starts
to work. You don’t want her to love you altruistically. Altruism says love is
sacrifice. It says the wife who agonisingly helps you from day to day and gets
no pleasure from it is the wife who truly loves not the one who enjoys being
your partner.
Life is full of horrendous dangers. We switch off our perception of that in
order to be able to smile. Rationally, we think we want to be loved for
ourselves - altruism. But it is not that simple. We use self-deception to believe
that those who look after us because of the benefits we provide them love us and
not the benefits.
We know it is in our best interest to be interested in other people. It is
egoistic.
5 People have very different interests. Different things make them happy so
egoism is not true. If psychological egoism were true, the man who saves lives
would have the same self-interest motive as a man who does not save them but
prefers to sleep in bed. But he does not. The actions prove that.
Reply to 5
This has no relationship at all to the issue. Does people having different
interests, people preferring to nurse rather than to teach children, prove that
altruism isn’t true?
Suppose you have two men who want to be happy. Does that mean the two of them
have to go about it in the same way? People see things differently.
6 People do not do everything they to do please themselves and satisfy their own
interests for people can want something badly and still be unsatisfied when they
get it.
Reply to 6
That has nothing to do with the issue of whether or not egoism is true. Egoism
does not necessarily mean that you will go after what you think has the most
pleasure in it or what consequences will provide the best service for your
interest. Egoism is about fulfilling the desire to act.
7 People don’t always do what they perceive to be in their best interest. People
smoke too much for example. People will engage in dangerous sports such as motor
racing. And people make mistakes about what is in their best interest. If I were
offered a pill to make me wrongly think I had provided for my family forever so
that I could feel happy for life would I take it? No so psychological egoism is
false.
Reply to 7
Arrogance is taken as self-interest. You are risking for you are convinced enough you are too special for anything bad to happen to you.
8 People often have a mixture of motives for what they do. Some of the motives
may be altruistic, some egoistic and some may even be egotistic. Psychological
egoism denies this so it is false. If a person is altruistic and is rewarded for
it, that reinforces and encourages the altruistic behaviour in future. So even
though the person is not motivated by looking for the reward, the reward
increases the tendency to be altruistic. Self-interest and caring about the
welfare of others are not necessarily incompatible. For example, a doctor can be
nice to his patients though he just cares about himself. He is nice because he
knows that the patients will find another doctor if he is not.
Reply to 8
We refuted the mixture idea as having any relevance when
we looked at Joanne at the start of this page. Selfless motives don't work
by themselves. Only the egoist one works.
9 Self-interest and caring about the self-interests of others are compatible.
You can do both at the one time. You can care about others and yourself at the
one time.
Reply to 9
The argument says that you can look out for yourself (egoism) and others
(altruism) at the one time.
If you are in a football team you will be interested and playing football not
only for yourself but for the team. You work as one.
This seems to prove the point made in 9.
Let us take a closer look.
Caring for others means you want to please yourself by seeing them happy. It is
about you not them. They benefit from your selfishness. Caring for others is
self-interest in this sense. It is not altruism at all.
The argument actually has nothing at all to do with refuting psychological
egoism. This failure of the argument to refute psychological egoism proves that
psychological egoism is true. How do we know? Because what else could opponents
of psychological egoism say in order to try and refute it?
The irrelevance of the argument is proven by the fact that even egotism and
caring about the self-interests of others is compatible. The egotist will rob an
old lady to feed his child. And yet we know that the caring is bad and totally
selfish. It couldn't be further from altruism. The caring is done in such a way
that it is bad caring.
We all know that if we encourage others to be happy and this is so that we will
selfishly benefit from being around happier people - unhappy people make you
unhappy - that there is nothing wrong with that. It is what we all do. The
argument that encouraging people to be selfish is self-destructive overlooks
that we are not talking about the absurdity of a dictator encouraging other
people to become dictators too which will only lead to him being toppled off his
perch. We are talking about people getting along and not about rivalry. The
attractiveness and wisdom of egoism show that we should assume everybody is an
egoist.
10 You only feel good about having done good deeds because you value such deeds.
You don’t value them just because you feel good after them. Egoism is untrue for
it says you only do what makes you feel good.
Reply to 10
Yet these are the people who say you can value deeds without feeling good about
them. If you have to turn off your child’s life support to prevent her suffering
you will not feel good though you value this action.
11 A child and a man are in the sea after a shipwreck. The man lets go of a log
to let the child hold on to it instead. A man agrees to be tortured to death by
kidnappers so that a woman they are holding may go free. These are examples of
totally unselfish behaviour.
Reply to 11
A man challenging his love rival to a duel though he knows the rival will win
can hardly be described as an altruist. So he must be an egoist or an egotist.
Since he is doing wrong, he must be an egotist. Egoism does not deny that the
mind can make the person think in such a way that the best interests for the
person are misperceived. The man thinks he is doing the best thing by
challenging the rival to a duel. The risk to his life hasn’t sunk in and he
won’t let it sink in.
The man who lets the child use the log and the man who is tortured to save the
woman have done the same thing. Their behaviour does not prove that they are
altruistic. They may know that death and suffering are real but may not feel it
enough and if they don’t feel it enough they will prefer to let the other person
live. I said prefer. It is what they desire. They fulfil a desire by doing so.
They are not doing it to feel good after. They are doing it because the pleasure
they see in doing the act attracts them. They value it. It attracts them – in
other word it says to them, “Do me and as you do me you will be fulfilled for as
long as you do me.”
Intelligent people can do stupid things. Some people do smart things while
thinking they are stupid and want or mean to be stupid in doing them. If you can
be stupid, you can calculate 15+15=30. Just because it is right, does not prove
that your faculty of intelligence did it, not the stupidity. Can a soldier
wilfully getting blown to bits to save his comrades be doing it because he is
stupid? If he is, then he is doing it to not be altruistic but to be stupid.
After all, the risk of stupidity increases when there is great stress and
earth-shattering choices have to be made.
The soldier certainly is seeing life at its worst - that is his experience. It
would not be hard to jump on the grenade then. It's like an opportunity to escape
life.
Those who say they don't believe in psychological egoism often have to come up
with extreme examples such as that of soldier to justify their belief in
altruism. They never say that if we look inside we will see how unselfish we can
be. Telling!
And besides, the examples even if they worked, do not refute psychological
egoism completely. What they would do at best is just show there are exceptions
- possibly rare. But it is not clear that they really are exceptions.
Religious people are offended by psychological egoism for they advocate altruism
and a love for God free from all self-interest. But they keep members in the
religion and get converts by dwelling on the issue of, "The meaning of life?
What is it all about?" But when we do good things for others and find that
happiness just appears in us it follows that the question is really irrelevant.
The emphasis put on the question shows they are not the disciples of altruism
and selflessness they pretend to be. At best they are religious manipulators.
They distract us from the most important principle of all and rob it of its
supremacy. That is bad in itself.
We judge something as stupid because of the crazy results. But it is really a
faculty in the person that causes stupidity. Thus a stupid person can succeed
tremendously in life not thought skill but through luck. If we judge them by the
results we will see them as geniuses but they are far from that.
Even intelligent persons are stupid in some areas. The potential for stupidity
differs from person to person.
12 The other idea that animals act altruistically so we can do it too is related
to this one.
Reply to 12
Animals don’t think of the future or understand that they can suffer and die if
they take such and such an action. We can. A dog attacking a bigger dog that
attacks his adored mother is not behaving altruistically but ignorantly.
13 Some people want fame though fame is tormenting and means you have no
privacy. Some people risk their lives and wellbeing needlessly to take revenge.
Reply to 13
Such behaviour is seen as extreme egoism or egotism. How it can be thought that
people suffering to gain and keep fame and risking their lives for revenge is
supposed to prove the falsity of psychological egoism is a mystery! If people
risk their lives for revenge and are extreme egoists then why can’t they risk
their lives in a good way as well and still be egoists, though not extreme ones?
14 If psychological egoism is true then the moral theory of ethical egoism is
true. Though it is true that ethical egoism does not require belief in
psychological egoism it is true that psychological egoism demands belief in
ethical egoism. If we can’t be other than self-interested then it follows that
we ought to be self-interested for we cannot do anything different. But even if
altruism is possible, the ethical egoist says that egoism is right, it is what
ought to be done. Ethical egoism is bad. It says that Hitler didn’t do wrong by
hurting the Jews but by degrading himself to do such things. Had he been a man
with good self-esteem and self-respect he wouldn’t have carried out such
actions. He didn’t have a strong and noble ego. He didn’t see that to love
himself properly he had to love other people.
Reply to 14
Even if ethical egoism is indeed bad, that does not give anybody the right to
condemn psychological egoism. Just because a truth has bad results doesn’t mean
it is not a truth. The logic in the argument is otherwise correct.
There is nothing wrong with saying Hitler should have used his ego or
self-esteem to appreciate other people when he couldn’t help it.
If we are naturally egoists, it seems stupid to say we should be ethical egoists
for we have no choice but to be egoists. Unless you believe that free will is an
illusion, we do have a choice. The choice is between egoism and egotism.
Ethical egoism when correctly understood, tells you that you find your happiness
in helping others. Virtue is its own reward. The egoist wants others to be
selfish all the time but in the wisest way for that benefits all.
Ethical egoism does not say that there is necessarily a conflict between my
happiness and that of others. If you are truly well-balanced you will make
others happier which in turn makes you feel safer and makes you happier. If
altruism were true, it would tell you to welcome suffering to help others. That
can only make you fear goodness and others. It takes away your sense of safety.
Does the egoist assume that her or his interests come before everybody else’s?
Is that not her or him claiming to matter more than other people even if he or
she treats others in an excellent way all the time? This would be the case if
the egoist only helped the sick in order to feel good afterwards. But if the
egoist finds joy and fulfilment in simply doing the act regardless of what may
come after be it happiness or disappointment the egoist in practice is treating
others as equals. He might not be able to think it but who cares? The person who
refuses to take what is best in life to let others have it is still putting his
or her own interests first in her or his own way. It depends on what he or she
wants out of life.
The advice problem. Egoist John wants you to give him a loan. You are an egoist
too and don’t want to give the loan. He can’t advise you to not give the loan
for it is best for him if you do. He does therefore psychological egoism is
untrue.
The solution to the problem is that John will feel he demeans himself if he gets
the loan against your will. He wants to honour himself by doing the right thing.
It is egoistic to honour yourself.
15 The egoists who say that egoism is simply doing what you want to do only
imagine they are espousing egoism. That is not egoism. You can want to do things
for reasons that have nothing to do with your interests. If you do things
because of your interests that is egoism. If you do things for reasons, that
could be altruism. For example, “I want to get John’s medicine for him because I
want him to get well though it won’t do me any good”, that is altruism.
Reply to 15
If John is a good person John will want me to get something out of what I do for
him. He will want me to feel good about it. He will not want me to be doing
anything for him for the sake of being selfless. So it only looks like I am
honouring John when I behave altruistically towards him. My altruism is really a
refusal to honour him. The girlfriend doesn’t want a boyfriend who doesn’t care
about the good feelings and the benefits he gets out of being with her and
loving her.
Reasons are only reasons because you fulfil yourself by having them. The writer
who has no interest in authoring children’s books and who hands in a romantic
novel to the publisher will never have the desire to write children’s books as a
reason for having become a writer. Your desires cause your reasons. If you want
to be rational you listen to reason and you think. If you want to be deluded you
will be deluded.
You might say that that you want to be a pilot for it is exciting. Desire makes it
seem exciting to you. The desire gives you the reason.
Desire is behind it all. The existence of reasons has nothing whatsoever to do
with supporting the idea that we can be other than egoistic or egotistic. And
that is because acceptance of the reasons by us is based on how attractive and
pleasing we find that acceptance.
Last of all
Psychological egoism is incapable of any refutation. Not only that, but the
nature of desire proves that it is true and that altruism and egotism are to be
rejected.
Not only that if psychological egoism were refuted that would not be much of a
consolation. We would still have the suspicion that that we never are really
free from selfish motives to contend with.
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AWARENESS, Anthony de Mello, Fount, London, 1997
ETHICS, AC Ewing, English Universities Press Ltd, 102 Newgate Street, London,
1964
AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS, John Hospers, Routledge, London, 1992
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1996
RUNAWAY WORLD, Michael Green, IVP, London, 1974
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969
