draft of 10-8-03
PHIL 13: Ethics; Fall 2003
David O. Brink; UCSD
Handout #3: Psychological Egoism

Though moral theories differ in how much altruism they require, nearly all require at least limited altruism in which agents are required to help others lead better lives if they can do so at little cost to themselves.  But even limited altruism seems to presuppose that people are capable of setting aside their own interests and acting for the sake of someone else’s interests.  This assumption is challenged by psychologicalegoism, which claims that all human motivation aims at the agent's own happiness.

WHAT PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM IS
No one denies that people act on desires for specific things or to benefit other people.  What the psychological egoist claims is that when one acts on desires for specific things or to benefit other people one does so because one believes that doing so will be instrumental to promoting one’s own happiness.  We can distinguish between one’s ultimate aims – what one desires for its own sake – and one’s instrumental aims – what one desires as a means of bringing about something else that one’s desires.  We can then characterize psychological egoism as the claim an agent’s ultimate aim is always his own happiness or self-interest.

Egoism says that this is no accident; this is how agents must act.

We can get different conceptions of psychological egoism depending on the way in which we understand happiness or self-interest.  Hedonism is one common conception of happiness.  It says that the one intrinsic or ultimate good is pleasure and that the one intrinsic or ultimate evil is pain.  All other things have only extrinsic or instrumental value; they are good or bad, not in themselves, but insofar as they produce pleasure or pain.  If we combine psychological egoism with hedonism, we get psychological hedonism.  For instance, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) famously says “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure” (Principles of Morals and Legislation i1).

HOW PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM THREATENS MORALITY
Egoistic agents may benefit others but only in ways that are expected to benefit them.  In particular, egoists will only benefit others when the expected gains of altruism outweigh the expected costs.  To see what egoism implies about altruism, we might distinguish different kinds of altruism.

Selfless Altruism includes both acts of pure concern for others undiluted by any sort of self-concern and (perhaps more commonly) acts in which the agent displays both other-regarding concern and self-concern but in which she allows greater benefit to another to trump a smaller benefit to herself.
Psychological egoism need not threaten Profitable Altruism, but it does threaten Selfless Altruism, for it claims that agents can’t act as selfless altruists.  Psychological egoism would show at least that part of morality to be irrelevant.

If we accept the voluntarist principle that ought implies can, then psychological egoism implies that we can have no duties to engage in Selfless Altruism.

THE PRIMA FACIE IMPLAUSIBILITY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM
Psychological egoism is a counter-intuitive doctrine.  We ordinarily assume that, even if some people are pleasure maximizers, many people act on personal ideals independently of, or in spite of, the expected utility of their actions.  But appearances may be deceiving.

THE APPEAL TO DOING WHAT ONE WANTS
One reason that is sometimes given for accepting psychological egoism is that agents are always and necessarily trying to satisfy themselves when they act.  Each of us has his own ideas about what is important in life, and these ideas shape our desires.  When we act, we attempt to satisfy our desires.  In this way, each of us always does what he wants.  Even when we don’t like the way things turn out, it’s still true that we acted in the way that we wanted to at that time.  This argument starts with a truism – that we always act on our own desires.  It goes on to a substantive conclusion about the nature or content of human motivation – that we always act to benefit ourselves.  We might reconstruct it as follows.

  1. An agent always acts on her own desires.
  2. Hence, an agent always acts to satisfy herself.
  3. Hence, an agent always acts so as to benefit herself.
The argument illicitly moves from a truism about the ownership of desires to a substantive thesis about the content of desires.  The fallacy can be hard to spot, because of a potential equivocation in (2).  (2) can be understood in two ways.
(2a) Hence, an agent always acts to satisfy her desires, whatever they are.
(2b) Hence, an agent always acts so as to cause herself satisfaction or pleasure.
On the one hand, we can read (2) as (2a).  We can see how (2a) might follow from (1), but (3) will not follow from (2a).  The fact that the agent acts on her own desires, to satisfy them, tells us nothing about their content.  On the other hand, we could read (2) as (2b).  (2b) has the virtue of providing much better support for (3).   Unfortunately, (2b) clearly does not follow from (1).  This analysis leads to a familiar dilemma.  The argument only seems valid and sound because of a tacit equivocation.  The inference from (1) to (2a) looks good, and the inference from (2b) to (3) looks good.  But for the argument to be valid, the premises must have the same sense throughout.  There’s no one interpretation of (2) that makes both inferences valid.  Where we locate the gap between the ownership and content of desires depends on how we understand (2).  But whichever way we understand it, there is a gap that cannot be bridged.

THE APPEAL TO ANTICIPATED PLEASURE FROM DOING WHAT ONE WANTS
Another argument for psychological egoism focuses specifically on psychological hedonism.  This argument appeals to the fact that people enjoy doing what they want.  This is true not only of the person with obviously self-regarding concerns but also of people with apparently other-regarding concerns.  We might try to reconstruct this argument as follows.

  1. Everyone acts on his own desires.
  2. Hence, everyone does what he wants to.
  3. Everyone expects to get pleasure from doing what he wants to.
  4. Hence, everyone acts so as to experience pleasure.
Is this argument sound?  We might question whether (3) is really true.  We might not always expect to get pleasure from doing things that we desire to do.  The more important problem with the argument is the inference from (3) to (4).  We may anticipate being pleased with accomplishing what we set out to do without it being true that this pleasure is the reason we do it.  Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) considered a similar defense of psychological egoism and claimed that it rests on a fallacy.
That all particular appetites and passions are toward external things themselves, distinct from the pleasure arising from them, is manifested from hence -- that there could not be this pleasure were it not for that prior suitableness between the object and the passion; there could be no enjoyment or delight from one thing more than another, from eating food more than swallowing a stone, if there were not an affection or appetite to one thing more than another [Sermons xi 6].
Butler is making two related points here, I think.  First, he’s claiming that the pleasure one gets from doing what one wants presupposes desires for things other than pleasure, on which one’s pleasure in satisfying the desire is then consequential. Butler’s other point is that it is a fallacy to suppose that we aim at the pleasure that we expect to accompany the satisfaction of our desires.  The pleasure in getting x (P1) is predicated on the prior desire for x (D1); the desire is not predicated on that pleasure.  And even if the anticipation of P1 produces a new desire for x (D2), that gives no reason to think that the original desire for x (D1) is predicated on the expectation of pleasure.

THE PLURALITY OF ULTIMATE AIMS
Exposure of this fallacy does not imply that psychological hedonism is false.  Rather, it undermines one common source of support for that doctrine.  When psychological egoism is stripped of fallacious defenses, it will just seem implausible.  Life is replete with examples of people choosing courses of action for the sake of ideals despite the expectation of securing the lesser pleasure.  This is true whether the ideals are noble (personal sacrifices for the sake of justice, duty, friendship, family) and when they may not be (the miser's self-destructive obssession with money or the Mafioso's self-destructive obssession with revenge).