_020 Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism is the claim that all actions are fundamentally motivated by one’s own self-interest. Even acts which are apparently altruistic have an underlying benefit for agent of the action. One supporter of this view was 18^th Century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (although he warped this view somewhat when it cam to his ethical theory).

This is a descriptive statement; it claims to be a scientific fact about human nature. It is only possible to be motivated by things that benefit us and we aren’t able to do otherwise. The only reason we get up and go to work or school is because we want money or education which will lead to money in the future, or possibly because it interests us. Regardless, we aren’t doing it for anyone but ourselves.

If it benefited us, we would even commit horrific acts such as murder. The main reason that we don’t is to avoid punishment, which would be bad for us. If we were completely certain that we would get away with it then we might be more inclined to do such an act.

Regarding moral acts, many psychological egoists believe that morality is itself just a social construct, created by the powerful to stop other people from doing things that they dislike. The pride of doing good things and the shame of doing bad things are what motivates us to do the “right” thing, not the apparent rightness of it.

What about soldiers who sacrifice their own lives in order to save a comrade in the war? Surely they cannot be acting in their own interest. For many this is a weakness in the theory but supporters of the theory would argue that the shame and guilt of allowing your comrade to die when you could have saved them would be so great that death would be a better option.

Weak psychological egoism is the claim that we are motivated by what we want to do. If we choose to help other people, an altruistic act, this still benefits us simply because we wanted to do it. Since we choose to do it, it is by definition something which we wanted to do. But many consider this to be mere tautology (the rephrasing of the same point) and thus useless in determining the true motive of someone’s actions.

One major problem is that strong egoism seems to be an empirical claim but there is no solid evidence for it. It is not falsifiable, which is necessary for it to be scientific. No evidence could possibly disprove the theory because it can always be twisted to fit any scenario. If the evidence is irrelevant then it can’t really be considered science, which relies wholly on empirical verification.

Instead this view is more of an internal examination of one’s self and cannot necessarily be assumed to be the same within others. After all, if evidence is meaningless then it is impossible to know if others act in the same way.

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Feinberg, Joel. “Psychological Egoism” in Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 1998