| Egoism | |
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Recommended Reading |
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Rand,
A. (1964) The Virtue of Selfishness NY: New American Library. Nietzsche,
F. (1844-1900) On the Genealogy
of Morals Rachels,
J. (1999) The Elements of Moral Philosophy Darwall,
S. (1998) Philosophical Ethics Boulder, CO:Westview Press. DeMarco,
J. P. (1996) Moral Theory: A
Contemporary Overview
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Text of Hobbes |
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Hobbes,
T., 1968, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, chs. 14-15,
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/
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Hobbes |
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Born 1588 Wiltshire. Son of a vicar. Tutor and pamphleteer. Died 1679.
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Introduction |
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The
point of ethics, as I said before, is to tell us what to do.
One of the very first assumptions about what we do is that we act in our
own interest. It’s easy to see why we might think such a thing; after
all, when someone asks you why you are listening to this lecture, you’ll
say because I want to hear what the lecturer has to say, And when pressed
further you’ll say, because I want to do well in the course. Because I
want to get a good degree. Because I want a job. Because, etc. This is a
perfectly standard series of responses, and you’d see something similar
if you questioned almost any of your normal behaviours. What is remarkable
is that all the reasons seem to be directed at the satisfaction of our own
desires, no matter how significant or how trivial. Perhaps, we might be
tempted to think, that is the case for all of our actions without
exception? And then, we might further think, what other motivation could
there possibly be for our actions? Why would I act, or how could
I act other than in my own interest? And so we begin to consider the
attractions of a philosophical doctrine that goes by the name of Egoism,
which is Latin for ‘It’s all about me.’ That’s
what we’re going to be talking about now. And the first thing we will
point out is that the way that I’ve talked about the supposed doctrine
is pretty vague so far; and, in fact, there are at least two different
propositions which can be read into those remarks. These two identifiable
propositions are as follows: 1.
Psychological
Egoism: As a matter of fact, we always do
act in our own interest. 2.
Ethical
Egoism: As a matter of principle, we always ought
to act in our own interest.
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Psychological Egoism |
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Thomas
Hobbes is probably the most respected philosopher whom we could safely
accuse of psychological egoism. In his book Leviathan,
a treatise on politics, he makes comments such as: No
man giveth but with intention of good to himself; because gift is
voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object to every man is his own
pleasure. Hobbes used this assumption of selfishness when drawing a picture of the so called 'state of nature' that would exist without the firm hand of government. There he described a situation where every man's hand would be raised against every other man, because we each have interests that we would follow without compunction if it were not for the fear of punishment by a superior power.
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Problems |
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The
Existence of Altruism The
first response to this as a simple description of our behaviour is that it
can’t possibly be correct. There is plenty of evidence, isn’t there,
that we can act act against our interests. Consider the staple example of
Mother Theresa, who was an nun who spent her entire life looking after the
diseased and dying in Or
you can look at the heroic soldier who lays down his life to save his
comrades in arms. What interest of his is being served? It doesn’t seem
that anyone can be advantaged by letting themselves be killed. That would
be a bit of an own-goal in the self-interest stakes surely? And we can’t
assume that all such soldiers believed they’d be rewarded in the
afterlife – that’s not a credible proposition. In the first place,
many of these heroic actions take place in the heat of battle where no
calculation of benefits can be plausibly supposed to have occurred. And in
the second place, soldiers who have survived after brave actions that they
surely expected would lead to their death report that they don’t make
those calculations. They just do what they think is the right thing to do.
Which turns out to be self-sacrificing. The
other standard explanation for that sort of behaviour is that the soldier
would feel bad if he didn’t do the altruistic thing. He’d feel guilty.
This is an excellent move because any altruistic action at all can be made
an egoistic action by the simple expedient of justifying it on the grounds
that it makes one feel better to do the altruistic thing. Unfortunately,
in this case it will only work if the soldier thinks there is something he
ought to feel guilty about when he acts egoistically or
non-altruistically; but, of course, that’s just the same as saying that
the soldier is operating according to an altruistic moral code. Hidden
Motives? This
might appear to make it simply unbelievable that our motivations are
invariably self interested, but the psychological egoist may say that all
these counterarguments only apply to the motivations and desires of which we are conscious. There are, he claims, motivations and
desires of which we are not conscious,
and these are the selfish motivations on which we act – no matter how it
may appear, or what we might claim to the contrary. I
think it’s doubtless true that there are such things as motivations of
which we are unaware. You don’t have to buy into the Freudian
superstition in order to believe this: you will see the same sort of thing
described well enough in literature through the ages – Jane Austen’s
‘Emma’ springs to mind – and even before Freud no one was mystified
by what those authors were describing. We can also accept that in some
cases, there will be hidden motivations that are indeed selfish. But that
is not the whole strength of the claim, because it states that our motives
are always selfish, and if in
any particular instance we wish to deny this, then that just means that
our motives are both selfish and
invisible. But isn’t this rather like claiming that all leaves fall
from trees because pixies pluck them off, and if you think you saw a leaf
falling because of the wind that just goes to show that sometimes the
pixies are invisible? The point is that this appeal to real, possibly
hidden, motives makes the claim unfalsifiable. So although it claims to be
an empirical scientific claim, it fails a well-regarded test for
scientific content. It is empirically vacuous. Sometimes
the claim is made that we always do what we want to do, otherwise we would
not do it. And of course that’s true, but just because it’s what we
want to do doesn’t mean that it’s in our interests, or even that
it’s conceived to be in our interests, unless ‘in our interests’ is
now going to be treated as synonymous with ‘what I want’. But who
would believe that? Certainly not the sort of person who is typically
making the claim for psychological egoism, because the whole point of
psychological egoism is that our self interest must be the motivator, not
our desires. To say we are motivated by our desires is not a thesis but a
tautology. Thus, a claim of this sort cannot save psychological egoism,
because it just makes the egotism part of their psychological egoism
empty.
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Ethical Egoism |
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A
more interesting claim is that, never mind what we actually do, we ought
to act in our own interest. This has been a perennial temptation for a
minority of philosophers, in much the same way that hedonism has been. And
the reaction of the mainstream has been equally hostile. Everyone just knows that selfishness is not good morality! Or rather, everyone
knows now that selfishness is
not good morality. The reason I have to make that correction is because
when ethics first became a topic of philosophical enquiry in the West, it
wasn’t at all assumed that what was good was necessarily that which
looked to the benefit of other people. Aristotle’s ethics, for example,
is almost entirely one of self-interest. We’ll look at that later in
this course. Altruism didn’t begin to become identified with ethics (or vice
versa) until the very late antique period; and of course the rise of
Christianity gave a great impetus to this change as well. There
are various ways of understanding the simple claim that pursuit of one’s
self-interest is a moral duty, and this gives rise to three possible
varieties of ethical egoism: 1.
Personal
Ethical Egoism: I ought to act in my own interest. 2.
Individual
Ethical Egoism: Everyone ought to act in my own interest. 3.
Universal
Ethical Egoism: Everyone ought to act in their own interest. I
think it’s pretty clear that Individual Ethical Egoism is going to be
pretty hard to motivate. You might try to motivate this claim by noting
that you are the only creature of whose moral worth you can be absolutely
certain. (For all you know, everyone else could be mere zombies or robots,
just pretending to be sentient.) So you could argue that since only the
interest of the self-aware is morally relevant it follows that as a
general principle all actions of yourself (of course) and of others
(because they have no certain moral worth) ought to be directed to your
own interests. As I say, however, you will have difficulty arguing this
case to others. So you probably won’t bother. It’s
much more plausible that you will be able to argue that you ought to act
in your own interest; but if you refuse to adopt a solipsistic point of
view, and you admit that other people are going to be able to make the
same arguments as yourself, then you will naturally gravitate towards the
third claim, that everyone should act selfishly for themselves. That’s
the version we’re going to talk about now. Arguments
Pro The
fundamental reason for adopting egoism must be that it tells you to do
what you want to do anyway. Why wouldn’t it be reasonable for the egoist
to say that if you think that he shouldn’t do what he wants to do, then you
have to give the reasons why not. On this view, the egoist’s position is
the default position and the anti-egoist should have to defend their
claims, not the other way around. Nevertheless, arguments for egoism are
generally mixed up with a variety of claims that are intended to reinforce
their position. We’ll look at some of these. Against
a Slave Morality Any
non-egoistic ethics has to put the interests of others ahead of one’s
own interests at least some of the time – that’s just what it means to
be a non-egoistic ethics. But if this is to be interpreted as saying that,
at least sometimes, the moral worth of others is greater than the moral
worth of oneself, then the non-egoistic position might seem to be a bit
degrading. How could it not be degrading to act according to an assumption
that you are unworthy of your own best efforts. And, of course, most
non-egoistic ethical systems are avowedly altruistic, so they will claim that, in principle, at all times you
must value others – any others – above yourself. This is
self-degradation taken as a principle of life, and is impossible
for any self-respecting rational being to accept. Nietzsche
is the name which is most often associated with this idea. He thought that
the altruistic ethics supported by Christianity in particular was a type
of ‘Slave Morality’ because it could only appeal to those who were
powerless and who had to looked to others for benefits to themselves. (He
meant this very much as a criticism.) He contrasted this with the egoistic
‘Master Morality’ which was characteristic of the Heroic Age of
Homer’s poem, and to a lesser extent of the Classical world. Slave
morality arose as a reaction to this and was an attempt to do two things:
first, by replacing the Master morality, to make the Masters agree that
they were the moral inferiors of their slaves and were obliged to be nice
to them; and second, to make the slaves comfortable with their
predicament, by replacing superiority in the world as the measure of value
with superiority of the spirit – which the slave morality gives to them.
Nietzsche thought this a contemptible trick and campaigned against it, but
without much success in his own time. For
a Better World Another
justification for egoism claims that things would turn out much better in
the world if people looked after their own interest and left the
benefitting of other people to those other people. The fundamental reason
to think that this is true is simply that everyone knows their own
interests best, and if you try to do the right thing for others you are
likely to go wrong. You can see why this might be thought to be the case:
the nineteenth century was the century when the lessons of Adam Smith’s
(1776) Wealth of Nations were
learned, and every man was aware of the claim that the ‘invisible
hand’ works providentially to make the free market economy far more
effective than any other style of economy that Man has ever invented. (And
note that in the modern neo-classical version of economics, the
hypothetical ‘rational agent’ on which the mathematical models are
based is a fundamentally egoistic person.) It has been well observed that
we do not rely on the kind heart of the baker to supply us with our daily
bread; we rely upon his self-interest to provide the efficient bakery
services that others will pay to patronise. And that reliance is
well-justified. However,
whether you believe that this claim is correct or not is almost entirely
beside the point. If that’s how you’re going to justify egoism then
you are accepting that the welfare of others is the appropriate criterion
against which to judge the permissibility of actions. That makes you an
altruist – or, at least, a non-egoist. Arguments
Contra The
arguments against egoism are generally not much better than those
arguments for it. Generally speaking people will look at what an egoist
tells you is the right thing to do in some situation and simply declare
that that is not a moral thing to do. So: should I save the old lady by
pushing her off the railroad tracks? That would involve me putting myself
in danger of death or certain injury. What is the benefit to me as against
that cost? Nothing. Therefore it is not my duty to act to save her. The
non-egoist says: that’s appalling! If that’s what egoism tells you is
the right thing to do then egoism is immoral. Now at first sight this
doesn’t seem to be a particularly powerful objection, but actually, that
sort of argument (if you can call it that) is not as silly as I make it
sound. How else do you think we make judgements about ethical theories?
What other evidence do we usually have of what is really right or wrong
than our intuitions on the matter? We seem to have an intuition about what
counts as moral and our ethical theories are good or bad just in so far as
they are largely consistent with our most certain intuitions. For example,
if I had a theory that said ‘if the old lady is in danger then you
should punt to the 5 yard line,’ you’d say that wasn’t an ethical
rule, that’s a football rule. The case is supposedly similar with the
rules that the ethicist comes up with: you’ll say that’s not an
ethical rule, that’s a safety rule. That’s a different game entirely. Philosophers
tend to be a bit embarrassed about that sort of argument. An appeal to
bare intuition is just going to invite accusations of subjectivism and
relativism and other bad things. More often what you’ll find is that a
set of conditions are described that any moral system has to satisfy if it
is even to qualify as a moral system, and then it will be ‘shown’ that
egoism fails on one or more of those conditions. Of course, that leaves it
open to the philosopher to declare that a system of rules of behaviour is
only a system of morality if it calls for self-sacrifices to be made in
some circumstances, and look! Egoism doesn’t do that, so it’s not
moral. Well, without some arguments for that condition beyond mere
preference, you’d have to say that that’s just begging the question. A
much more respectable condition would be that the rules have to be
universalisable; they have to be able to apply to everyone. But in the
case of egoism it is claimed that this leads to conflicts that don’t
seem to be resolvable. For example, if there’s one ticket to an opera
left and I want to go, then I ought to get the ticket. But if you want to
go then the egoist principle will say that you ought to get the ticket.
How is this to be resolved? This is said to be a big problem. In
fact there are plenty of ways of solving that problem. Just one of them is
to say that the egoist principle doesn’t say what the outcome
ought to be of such a dispute, it only says what it is right for the two
people to attempt to achieve. Nor does it say that all means whatsoever
are appropriate to the achievement of this end (thus inviting the
Hobbesian war of all against all,) it only says that all means consistent
with the egoist principle are appropriate, which may or may not be in
accord with the prescriptions of other moral systems.
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In
Conclusion |
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In general, the egoist philosopher, is hampered by the inability of his opponent to even conceive of egoism as a moral system so that his arguments are systematically misunderstood and represented. When you are considering this position yourself, just bear in mind that you can’t simply say that the egoist is arguing for something that is immoral, because he is claiming that it is the egoist principle that defines what is immoral. To argue against it you will need to find some independent evidence that it cannot be the basis of a system of morality, which is not as easy as just expressing your distaste for it. |
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