Ethical egoism is the view that a person's only obligation is to promote his own best interest. It is sometimes claimed that psychological egoism, if true, lends support to ethical egoism. Specifically, it is supposed that the truth of ethical egoism follows from two premises: one asserting the truth of psychological egoism, and the other stating the principle that 'ought' implies 'can'. One can see that the argument has some intuitive appeal. The first premise says that it is impossible for a person to do anything but seek his own good.
After all, we typically do not experience pleasure upon getting something like food unless we want it. The pleasure that accompanies the fulfillment of our desires is often a mere byproduct of our prior desire for the thing that gave us pleasure. Often we feel pleasure upon getting what we want precisely because we wanted what gave us pleasure.
Consider, for example, getting second place in a race. That is, the premises, even if true, fail to establish the conclusion. The main problem is that such arguments tell us nothing about which desires are ultimate. Even if the experience of pleasure sometimes presupposes a desire for the pleasurable object, it is still left open whether the desire for what generated the pleasure is merely instrumental to a desire for pleasure or some other form of self-interest. According to Butler, the experience of pleasure upon eating some food allows us to infer the existence of a desire for food.
This is all the argument gets us. So, even if the premises are true, it does not follow that egoism is false. Butler would need a stronger premise, such as: pleasure presupposes an ultimate desire for what generated it, not for the resulting benefit.
But this revision would plausibly make the argument question-begging. The new premise seems to amount to nothing more than the denial of psychological egoism: sometimes people have an ultimate desire for something other than self-interest. At the very least, the argument is dialectically unhelpful —it offers premises in support of the conclusion that are as controversial as the conclusion is, and for similar reasons.
Psychological egoists cannot establish their view simply by pointing to the pleasure or self-benefit that accompanies so many actions. After all, often self-benefit only seems to be what we ultimately desire, though a closer look reveals benefits like pleasure are likely just byproducts while the proximate desire is for that which generates them. A simple argument against psychological egoism is that it seems obviously false.
To the most careless observer there appear to be such dispositions as benevolence and generosity; such affections as love, friendship, compassion, gratitude.
Here Hume is offering a burden-shifting argument. The idea is that psychological egoism is implausible on its face, offering strained accounts of apparently altruistic actions. Similarly, C. Given the arguments, it is still unclear why we should consider psychological egoism to be obviously untrue.
One might appeal to introspection or common sense; but neither is particularly powerful. First, the consensus among psychologists is that a great number of our mental states, even our motives, are not accessible to consciousness or cannot reliably be reported on through the use of introspection see, for example, Nisbett and Wilson While introspection, to some extent, may be a decent source of knowledge of our own minds, it is fairly suspect to reject an empirical claim about potentially unconscious motivations.
Besides, one might report universally egoistic motives based on introspection e. Mercer , pp. Second, shifting the burden of proof based on common sense is rather limited. Sober and Wilson , p. Even if we disagree with their claim and allow a larger role for shifting burdens of proof via common sense, it still may have limited use, especially when the common sense view might be reasonably cast as supporting either position in the egoism-altruism debate. Here, instead of appeals to common sense, it would be of greater use to employ more secure philosophical arguments and rigorous empirical evidence.
The worry for psychological egoism is that it will fail to meet this criterion if any commonly accepted altruistic action can be explained away as motivated by some sort of self-interest. Joel Feinberg, for example, writes:. This objection to psychological egoism has three substantial problems. First, falsification criteria for empirical theories are problematic and have come under heavy attack. After all, psychological altruism is a pluralistic thesis that includes both egoistic and altruistic motives.
Third, and most importantly, a charitable construal of psychological egoism renders it falsifiable. As we have seen, psychological egoists have a clear account of what would falsify it: an ultimate desire that is not egoistic.
While it may be difficult to detect the ultimate motives of people, the view is in principle falsifiable. In fact, it is empirically testable, as we shall see below. It is usually directed at psychological hedonism , but the problem can be extended to psychological egoism generally. Likewise, when directed at egoism generally, the idea is that we will tend not to benefit ourselves by focusing on our own benefit.
Two things will seemingly hold: a such a person would eventually lack friends, close relationships, etc. This seems problematic for a theory that says all of our ultimate desires are for our own well-being. Despite its popularity, this sort of objection to psychological egoism is quite questionable. But psychological egoism is a descriptive thesis. Even if egoistic ultimate desires lead to unhappiness, that would only show that egoistically motivated people will find this unfortunate.
However, the theses in this debate are ultimately empirical claims about human motivation. So we can also look to more empirical disciplines, such as biology and psychology, to advance the debate. Biology in particular contains an abundance of literature on altruism. But, as we will see, much of it is rather tangential to the thesis of psychological altruism. For example, sociobiologists, such as E. Wilson, often theorize about the biological basis of altruism by focusing on the behavior of non-human animals.
But this is altruism only in the sense of helpful behavior that seems to be at some cost to the helper. It says nothing about the motivations for such behavior, which is of interest to us here. Given the multiple uses of terms, discussion of altruism and self-interest in evolutionary theory can often seem directly relevant to the psychological egoism-altruism debate. Consider our desire for water.
And evolutionary theory plausibly uncovers this sort of gene-centered story for many features of organisms. Richard Dawkins offers us some ideas of this sort. But we should be careful not to let the self-centered origin of our traits overshadow the traits themselves. Even if all of our desires are due to evolutionary adaptations which is a strong claim , this is only the origin of them. Consider again the desire for water. The point is that we must avoid simple leaps from biology to psychology without substantial argument see also Stich et al.
Philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson have made careful and sophisticated arguments for the falsity of psychological egoism directly from considerations in evolutionary biology. To establish this, they focus on parental care, an other-regarding behavior in humans, whose mechanism is plausibly due to natural selection. Assuming such behavior is mediated by what the organism believes and desires, we can inquire into the kinds of mental mechanisms that could have evolved.
The crucial question becomes: Is it more likely that such a mechanism for parental care would, as psychological egoism holds, involve only egoistic ultimate desires? To answer this question, Sober and Wilson focus on just one version of egoism, and what they take to be the most difficult to refute: psychological hedonism p. The hedonistic mechanism always begins with the ultimate desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
The mechanism consistent with psychological altruism, however, is pluralistic : some ultimate desires are hedonistic, but others are altruistic. According to Sober and Wilson, there are three main factors that could affect the likelihood that a mechanism evolved: availability, reliability, and energetic efficiency pp. First, the genes that give rise to the mechanism must be available in the pool for selection. Sober and Wilson find no reason to believe that a hedonistic mechanism would be more or less available or energetically efficient.
Sober and Wilson make several arguments for the claim that the pluralistic mechanism is more reliable. The pluralistic model, however, is comparatively less complicated since it can just deploy an ultimate desire to help:. So yielding the fitness-enhancing outcome of parental care will be less vulnerable to disruption.
Sober and Wilson p. Each link in the chain is susceptible to error, which makes the mechanism less reliable at yielding the relevant outcome. Such arguments have not gone undisputed see, for example, Stich et al. Yet they still provide a sophisticated way to connect evolutionary considerations with psychological egoism.
Psychological egoism is an empirical claim; however, considerations from biology provide only one route to addressing the egoism-altruism debate empirically. Another, perhaps more direct, approach is to examine empirical work on the mind itself. In the 20th century, one of the earliest philosophical discussions of egoism as it relates to research in psychology comes from Michael Slote He argues that there is at least potentially a basis for psychological egoism in behavioristic theories of learning, championed especially by psychologists such as B.
Thus, all altruistic desires are merely instrumental to ultimately egoistic ones; we have merely learned through conditioning that benefiting others benefits ourselves. That, according to Slote, is what the behavioristic learning theory maintains. In any event, more recent empirical research is more apt and informative to this debate.
Philosopher Carolyn Morillo has defended a version of psychological hedonism based on more recent neuroscientific work primarily done on rats. Other empirical work that bears on the existence of altruistic motives can be found in the study of empathy-induced helping behavior. Beginning around the s, C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists addressed the debate head on by examining such phenomena.
In other words, the hypothesis states that empathy tends to induce in us ultimate desires for the well-being of someone other than ourselves. If true, this entails that psychological egoism is false. Batson comes to this conclusion by concentrating on a robust effect of empathy on helping behavior discovered in the s.
The empathy-helping relationship is the finding that the experience of relatively high empathy for another perceived to be in need causes people to help the other more than relatively low empathy. Given that there can be both egoistic and altruistic explanations of the empathy-helping relationship, Batson and others have devised experiments to test them. The general experimental approach involves placing ordinary people in situations in which they have an opportunity to help someone they think is in need while manipulating other variables in the situation.
The purpose is to provide circumstances in which egoistic versus altruistic explanations of empathy-induced helping behavior make different predictions about what people will do.
Different hypotheses then provide either egoistic or altruistic explanations of why the subjects ultimately chose to help or offer to help. For detailed discussions of the background assumptions involved here, see Batson , pp. Several egoistic explanations of the empathy-helping relationship are in competition with the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
However, the experiments seem to rule out all the plausible and some rather implausible egoistic explanations. For example, if those feeling higher amounts of empathy help only because they want to reduce the discomfort of the situation, then they should help less frequently when they know their task is over and they can simply leave the experiment without helping. Yet this prediction has been repeatedly disconfirmed Batson , ch.
A host of experiments have similarly disconfirmed a range of egoistic hypotheses. The cumulative results evidently show that the empathy-helping relationship is not put in place by egoistic ultimate desires to either:. Some have argued against Batson that there are plausible egoistic explanations not ruled out by the data collected thus far e.
A self-interested action is one that is motivated to serve your own interest. You drink water because you have an interest in quenching your own thirst. You show up for work because you have an interest in being paid. Psychological egoists think they can explain actions that do not seem self-interested.
A motorist who stops to help someone who has broken down may believe that they too may need help one day. The most obvious objection to psychological egoism is that there are numerous clear examples of people putting others' interests before their own. Although psychological egoists think they can explain seemingly virtuous actions, their theory rests on a false account of human motivation.
The fact that someone feels virtuous after performing a good deed may be true, but it is often just a side effect of their action. They didn't necessarily do it in order to get those feelings. Deepstash helps you become inspired, wiser and productive, through bite-sized ideas from the best articles, books and videos out there. Many of us have been in a situation where our emotions prevent us from responding appropriately and seeing the big picture. For example, in cases where we feel extreme anger, stress, anxiety, and sadness.
The best way to handle these emotionally charged situations is to step away to create psychological distance between you and the situation.
Sign Up for free Sign In. Why psychological egoism is appealing It satisfies our preference for simplicity.
0コメント