Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism is the claim that people always act selfishly, to foster their own self-interest or happiness. Psychological hedonism is the claim that people always act to attain their own pleasure and avoid pain. Psychological hedonism is also called the “pleasure principle.”

In these notes, I’ll give arguments against psychological egoism. However, the same arguments apply against psychological hedonism. 

Is psychological egoism a fact (a true claim)? If it is true, ethics is in trouble, because most traditional ethical systems demand at least occasional altruism (unselfish behavior). If psychological egoism were true, altruism would not be possible. We would have to explain apparent (what appears as) altruism as self-interest. For example, we wouldn’t say Mother Teresa is altruistic; we’d say that she’s self-interested. She’s using the poor to attain her own long-term spiritual goals.

In fact, people who think psychological egoism is true (such as Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand) often use it as a premise in an argument to deny the validity of traditional ethics altogether:

1. (Psychological egoism): People always and invariably act to foster their own self-interest.

2.  Traditional ethical systems demand at least occasional altruism (non-self-interested behavior).

3.  In demanding altruism, traditional ethical systems are demanding the impossible. (They might as well demand that people fly.)

4. Any ethical systems that demands the impossible is silly and stupid.

5. Traditional ethical systems are silly and stupid.

6. We should adopt a more realistic system, ethical egoism, which demands that we pursue self-interest.

But psychological egoism is a surprisingly weak claim. If it is false, then the above argument against ethics is unsound. Here are some reasons not to take psychological egoism seriously.

Critique #1: Psychological egoism is not true, on face value, in a simple, naive sense. That is, it's easy to think of counterexamples — cases that falsify the generalization that all human acts are selfish, i.e., cases of people acting unselfishly. It certainly appears that people sometimes act in ways that are not in accord with their own interests: the soldier who falls on the grenade to save his buddies, the person who runs into the busy street to save a child about to be run over, etc. Psychological egoism is only true if you adopt what Rachels calls the strategy of redefining motives. That is, you insist on claiming that people are “really” acting selfishly even when they appear to be acting unselfishly.

But this strategy has two problems. First, if all human actions are self-interested, then “self-interested actions” become, by definition, identical with “actions”. That is, these two expressions denote exactly the same set of actions, and thus are substitutable for each other. It then becomes impossible to disprove the claim that all human actions are self-interested, because the claim, after substitution, becomes a vacuous tautology: “All human actions are human actions.”

Try to imagine what it would take to disprove the claim that all human actions are self-interested. The claim would be definitely disproved if we could come up with one human action that wasn't self-interested, i.e., a counterexample. But if by definition all human actions are self-interested, there can be no possible counterexample. If there are no possible counterexamples, then the claim “all human acts are self-interested” is not falsifiable. If the claim is not falsifiable, then according to the verificationist criterion, the claim is meaningless.

So the claim “all human acts are self-interested” is either tautologous (true by definition, and therefore uninteresting, like “All circles are round”) or unfalsifiable (and therefore meaningless).

Besides, even if the egoist still insists on claiming that all human acts are self-interested, the egoist must deal with the puzzling fact that some acts appear to be non-self-interested. Now the anti-egoist could say, “Okay, I still think you egoists are wrong to say there are no unselfish acts. But even if there aren’t any, your position is no threat to ethics. There are still the self-interested selfish acts and the self-interested acts that appear to be unselfish. Saying all human acts are self-interested doesn't make that empirical distinction go away. And that empirical distinction is where ethics can start. We’ll grant for the sake of argument that all human acts are self-interested, and then simply say that ethics sometimes demands that people perform those self-interested but seemingly unselfish acts.” The claim that all human acts are self-interested is no problem, as long as some acts appear altruistic. And they do.

Critique #2: Self-interest and interest in the welfare of others aren't necessarily incompatible. One might be perfectly self-interested and look out for the interests of others — e.g., a shopkeeper who never cheats his customers simply because he knows honesty is good for business.

Critique #3: Psychological egoism relies on an oversimplified conception of human motives. Of course it is true that we often get satisfaction or good feelings from acting unselfishly. But it is not necessarily true that we perform unselfish acts solely for the sake of that satisfaction. P1 commits a fallacy — assuming that given two events E1 and E2, E2 occurring after E1, that E2 was the intended result of E1. But everyone knows the following argument is not valid; it’s a kind of post hoc fallacy:

P1: E2 happens after E1

C: E2 is the intended result of E1. 

Suppose, for example, that you are a soldier and you save your friend's life in combat, and you also happen to receive a medal for that. Call E2 your receiving the medal, E1 your act of saving your friend's life. It does not follow from the fact that you received the medal (or self-satisfaction, or good feelings, or whatever) after saving your friend's life that your intention in saving him was to get the medal. Similarly, it doesn't follow that if you get some good feelings or self-satisfaction after saving your friend's life that you saved his life in order to get those good feelings. You didn’t save your friend in order to feel good; rather, you feel good because you saved your friend.

Another example: you see your child run into a busy street. A car is driving very fast toward the child. You see that you can save the child’s life if you run out into the street and grab the child in your arms. Realizing this, do you now stop and calculate how much happiness you’ll receive if you save the child? Do you say to yourself, “Gee, it would make me feel really good to save my child. So I guess I’ll do it!” No. You feel good after saving the child because you saved the child. You didn’t save the child in order to feel good.

In general, you feel good when you get things you already value. You don’t derive the value of something by estimating how good you’d feel if you had it. Its goodness doesn’t come from that; rather, your good feelings about having it come from the fact that you think it’s good, independently of whether you have it.

Ethical Egoism