Psychological egoism and altruism
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Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Understanding our circle of concern may help us understand what a “self” is.
We won’t be saying much about egotism with a “t.” Psychological egoism is a technical phrase in philosophy. Egoism is not necessarily the same nasty character trait we point out when we accuse someone of being “egotistical.” Psychological egoism is a theory in moral psychology which claims that, unless pathologically irrational, people always act in their self-interest. It is, in fact, assumed by major theories in ethics such as utilitarianism and Kantianism.1
A story, likely apocryphal, goes that Abraham Lincoln, riding in a coach between towns to give campaign speeches, was having an argument with a companion about whether people always act in self-interest. Lincoln took the side that they do. In the middle of the discussion, as they were crossing a stream, they saw pig struggling in the mud on the bank, apparently unable to get free. Lincoln ordered the coach to stop. He waded into the mud to help the pig, soiling his formal attire. Back in the coach, his companion called out this seeming hypocritical behavior on Lincoln’s part. Didn’t he blatantly put the interest of the pig before his own?
“No,” said Lincoln, “I wouldn’t be able to live with the thought of not helping the pig. I took minor pains to avoid the greater distress I know it would cause me not to help the pig. In what way is that not looking out for my well-being?”
Psychological egoism asserts that, assuming we know what we are doing and are not mentally indisposed, whenever we act, we act so as to minimize our own distress or optimize our welfare. Even when it might appear that others are the target of concern, the controlling concern is ours. Certainly, we may make sacrifices for others, but it is because their distress would cause our distress that we act. It always comes back to us.
But this theory is questioned by some since it seems to deny the possibility that a rational human act can be solely concerned with another. It seems to deny the possibility of altruism, the idea that pure other-regard is possible. Indeed, psychological egoism seems, as defined, to be vacuously true: true, but not very enlightening, a bit like saying the Pope is Catholic. We want, sometimes, to say that some acts can be somewhat or utterly selfless – acts where the motivation in little or no way includes self-interest. (Maybe these are rare, but they don’t seem impossible.)
To get a clearer picture of moral psychology, we will also look at counter-theories to psychological egoism – theories that suggest that there is more to human motivation than self-interest. Self-interest alone doesn’t explain much of our evolutionary success (such as it is), nor explain our reaction to disasters that do not implicate us directly except through a capacity to transcend ourselves and, not only ourselves, but the interests of larger communities, even everyone – even everything alive.2
But first, what would it take not to be an egoist?
Suppose an agent acts in such a way that greatly benefits another but the agent in this case actually gains nothing, may even know they will feel guilt for having helped the other in this apparently benevolent way. Suppose you come to learn that someone you absolutely detest and whom you wish nothing good has a rare blood type and will die without a transfusion, and you also have this rare blood-type, and, at little cost to you, could donate your blood and save their life. Suppose, this person is a recognized blight on humanity and whose continued existence would be an evil, an evil you would be complicit in bringing about. Your community fully supports this judgment… Still, in spite of this, you donate blood to them. Are you insane?
You stand to gain nothing from your act, have every reason to know you will regret it, but do it anyway. Would this be an act of altruism? An utterly selfless act?
Something like this is what it would take to falsify psychological egoism...
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We should make clear a further distinction around egoism. Psychological egoism, as we are using the phrase here, is the conceptual claim that rational human acts are self-interested. It is not the same as ethical egoism, which is not a descriptive, rather a moral, theory in its own right which enjoins that we should act in our self-interest. The first, if true, is a fact about the human world; the second is a normative claim about how we ought to act. Ayn Rand is a famous exponent of ethical egoism. She argued that even if our acts are not egoistic, they ought to be. Psychological egoism, in contrast, claims – to the extent we are not insane or ill, to the extent we are capable of having coherent motivations at all – we will be self-interested.
Beyond egoism – is it possible to be rational and not be self-centered?
If we can be rational and not self-centered at once, what does that entail about our moral relation to ourselves? Can we choose to count ourselves as less worthy of consideration than others? The interesting question is not is this required. Almost no moral theory suggests that, but, rather, is it permissible and still be rationally justified? Or would it risk being judged mentally disturbed? Or maybe the question should shift to what it means to be rational? Is there any tight relation between self-preservation and rationality?3 Or is rationality neutral on the matter?
In our recent discussion of the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia, it dawned on the protagonists that, within a few days, the world was going to end in a flash – completely, utterly, with no survivors – and there was nothing to be done about it. One of the characters, Justine, was psychologically prepared for the event by her debilitating depression. Depressed people often have a more lucid view of reality than the optimistically-biased “healthy” person. Though our species did not survive this long by throwing up our hands at every setback, there must have been some advantage in retaining the (perhaps) recessive trait of pessimism, as well. Or, if only optimism had survival value, its absence would long ago have been weeded out of the gene pool. It is seldom remarked, but too much optimism is very close to stupidity (a theory of which will be its own upcoming topic); it, too, can be toxic, like jumping off a cliff expecting to evolve wings on the way down.4
Justine, in the second part of Melancholia, seemed almost to check out from the panic swirling around her. Her life more or less ended in the final scenes of the first part. She seemed merely to be waiting for the world external to her psyche to confirm that her mental condition was tracking reality accurately. She seemed to be almost sleeping through the panic. She did wake from it when her desperate sister, Claire, tried to conjure up a bit of ceremony to give some kind of meaning to their fate – having a glass of wine on the terrace. Justine commented on her sister’s idea, saying it was “a piece of shit,” and that the world was evil, its disappearance a good riddance, and that nobody would miss it. She was, for all intents and purposes, resigned to the idea of her own extinction, except for one thing: her own illusions may have fled, but she was still capable of being moved by compassion for those who still needed their stories. So she contrived a little myth to console her still, too young, uncomprehending nephew, yet sufficiently transparent to dignify adult awareness better than a glass of wine: a magical cave made of eight sticks that would shield them from full consciousness until the moment when no shield would be needed, the post-extinction, post-consciousness moment. The adults, the sisters, had had a lifetime to prepare, only the boy needed the magic. The adults could only claim a need to hold each others’ hand.
The important part here is Justine’s final act of utter self-disinterestedness. She made it clear she would not share in her sister’s illusions, only, of course, in her fate. She, by this point, had already lost all claim to anything, her only excuse for further involvement was that she saw that she could do something for someone else. Psychologically, she predeceased her sister and nephew.
Samuel Scheffler’s thought experiment
We introduced, in the Melancholia writeup, Scheffler’s idea that we are constitutionally not as self-involved as psychological egoism seems to suggest. We are more complicated than that. If you somehow knew the world would end thirty days after your own life had taken its natural course, the quality and duration of your life in no material way affected, you would still be devastated to have this knowledge... It would undercut a pervasive continuity of identification with the history of your community, from friends and family all the way to that of your species, and maybe much of life, and all its artifacts, beyond that. The claim is that this is characteristic of conscious beings like us. Someone utterly immune to this identification and reaction would be an exception. We cannot, in the typical case, seal ourselves off from an affinity-based identification with the rest of social environment even if we wanted to.
Notes
1. These theories assume psychological egoism in order to pit themselves against it. At face value, two other important theories, Virtue Ethics and Moral Sense theory, seem less prone to the assumption; whether this is ultimately the case is controversial.
2. Even sometimes aspects, or the whole, of inanimate nature as in certain non-anthropocentric theories of environmental ethics, theories that suggest nature has value irrespective of whether we here to regard and value it.
3. The question can be asked both at the individual and at the community or species level.
4. Check out the Darwin Awards for examples.