Psychological egoism: the empirical claim that each person ultimately just aims at her own welfare
Note that this requires an operationalisation of welfare – e.g., satisfaction of self-regarding desires
Ethical egoism: the normative claim that I morally ought to perform some action iff & because it maximises my self-interest.
Rational egoism: the claim that I ought all-things-considered to perform some action iff & because it maximises my self-interest.
Psychological egoism
If internalism about reasons is true, then psychological egoism would be worrying for morality.
This is because the only reasons anyone could have would be self-interested ones – so morality would be rationally inert / have no motivational power.
Psychological egoism seems to fail, although a weakened version of “predominant egoism” might be true (we act unselfishly only rarely, and then typically only when sacrifices are small & gains to others large or to our favourites).
One attempted argument in support of it: We always do what we most want, so we’re aiming at our own welfare.
But the premiss seems superficially false: e.g. a soldier who jumps onto a grenade to save many comrades.
You could argue that self-interest just is the satisfaction of all of one’s preferences, and the soldier really did want that most (e.g. to avoid guilt).
Then psychological egoism is true, but trivially so: all intentional action is self-interested (assuming intentional actions are explained with regard to preferences).
Moreover, even if what you do is what you most want, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it because of your own welfare.
In assessing whether an action is self-interested, we need to look at the kind of desire it’s based on (e.g., perhaps an altruistic desire).
Compare the soldier who jumped onto the grenade with one who pushed another soldier onto the grenade. The latter seems significantly more selfish. But psychological egoism says they’re the same.
Another argument: We always do what makes us feel good
But again, the satisfaction might be a happy by-product of aiming towards actually helping people
Butler tries to reject psychological egoism by arguing that we need desires for particular things besides my own welfare, in order to get welfare.
E.g., the desire to play hockey.
But this isn’t a big problem for the psychological egoist: it seems fine if people adopt instrumental desires.
There’s also just a bunch of experimental evidence that people do act altruistically (Batson 2011).
Increased empathy leads to increased helping behaviour, and even when there are ways to avoid unpleasantness of not helping / make failure to help be secret / reduce guilt on oneself.
Ethical egoism
How different in practice are the moral verdicts of ethical egoism from other-regarding moral theories?
One argument: not especially different, because in order to maximise my long-run self-interest, I’d need to act cooperatively with others.
But this clearly doesn’t generate the same moral obligations as other theories – e.g., helping disabled people when nobody else would observe; helping people towards the end of your life; etc.
Another argument: egoism would be self-effacing, i.e. you’d optimally adopt another moral theory, on egoist grounds. But this just seems false in practice.
In terms of capturing the benefits of cooperation, surely it’s just as good to pretend to follow another moral theory – others can’t see your motivation.
And then, being an adherent to egoism means that on occasions where you can defect against others at small cost to yourself, you’re actually able to capture that value (rather than it being impermissible because you converted).
Note that you can formulate egoistic versions of virtue ethics and Kantianism – so rejecting welfarism doesn’t mean you must reject egoism (Hills).
Arguments for ethical egoism
To some extent, it’s compatible with commonsense morality / our intuitions.
E.g. Hobbes: we should do unto others simply because if we do, they will be more likely to do unto us.
But there are limits to this: suppose you could secretly defraud an elderly neighbour of her home. Intuitively, that is wrong.
If psychological egoism were true, then only moral judgements based on egoism could be capable of motivating people – and often we think that moral reasons must be capable of motivation.
But psychological egoism seems false. So this doesn’t go very far.
Even granting psychological egoism, there are problems. Suppose I believe some action is not in my self-interest, when in fact it is. Then ethical egoism says I ought to do it, even though I can’t (because I’m only capable of being motivated by self-interested reasons).
Some other bad (false) arguments:
Altruism is self-defeating, so we should adopt egoist policies. But this conflates what you do instrumentally with your ultimate moral goals, i.e. in this example we’re (by hypothesis!) aiming for altruism with egoistic means.
Ayn Rand: the individual is the source of meaning and we ought to take seriously its value; altruistic ethics demands sacrifices for others and thus doesn’t take this seriously. But this neglects the fact that we can have moral theories which allow us to balance some regard for others with our own interests.
Arguments against ethical egoism
First, it seems to go very strongly against our moral intuitions in cases of wickedness – e.g., it just seems wrong for Joe to rape Sally, regardless of whether he wants to / it’s in his long-term self-interest.
You might object that this assumes a non-egoistic conception of wickedness. But we do have to start somewhere.
Moore tries to argue that ethical egoism is self-contradictory.
Idea: when I say “X is my good”, I mean that my possessing X is good. So others ought to maximise my possession of it. But that’s a contradiction: others should maximise their good, not mine.
This argument doesn’t go through if we analyse “my good” as “good-for-me” (linked to agent-relative reasons). It doesn’t follow from “my possession of X is good-for-me” that others ought to maximize what is good-for-me.
But maybe something close to this argument works: e.g., the impersonal badness of pain is what gives me reason to alleviate it, not any special connection between me and the pain. So then I have reason to alleviate others’ pain. [this seems like a weird argument to me, I don’t really buy it]
Maybe it simply doesn’t qualify as a moral theory. But in this case, the egoist might retreat to rational egoism.
E.g., it fails the commonsensical principle that “if I ought to do X, that is a consideration in favour of others not preventing me from doing X” (Baier 1958).
And it doesn’t provide a neutral ranking of states of affairs – it can say what A ought to do and what B ought to do, but these might be incompatible with each other.
And downstream of this, it fails the “public” nature of morality: an ethical egoist wouldn’t recommend ethical egoism to others, or to blame others for violations of ethical-egoist obligations, or to justify herself based on ethical egoism, etc.
Moral reasons vs prudential reasons
One challenge is to explain whether morality comes apart from self-interest.
It’s easy to generate thought-experiments where our intuition is that these come apart, but they need careful specification of the theory of welfare.
E.g. where an activity seems morally bad (or suboptimal) but prudentially good.
Cecil contentedly spending all his time counting grass.
Does satisfied pointless desire constitute welfare? One challenge to this is that on objective list theories he actually has very limited welfare.
Pablo the painter abandoning his family to make art (Williams)
His life goes well, but the moral cost falls on his abandoned family. (maybe his creating the paintings is so morally good that it nets out morally good overall though)
If you’re an internalist, then maybe Pablo has no reason to stay with his family, since his motivational set pulls him towards art.
Likewise, sacrifices that are morally good to make but bad for yourself
e.g. soldier on grenade.
If you believe in divine retribution, or more generally some mechanism such that acting immorally is necessarily punished sufficiently harshly, then it’s prudent to act morally.
But the belief that “egoism doesn’t pay” seems adaptive.
So to some extent, we should be wary of arguments that claim to show that it’s in our self-interest to act morally
Sidgwick’s position is that there’s a dualism of practical reason: both rational egoism and impartial benevolence (utilitarianism) are self-evident rational principles.
Neither can be derived from the other, and there’s no rational way to adjudicate between them when they conflict.
He argues that the distinction between me and everyone else is a real, non-arbitrary one: I have a unique relationship to my own experiences & projects.
And of course this has intuitive force.
Joseph Raz argues that the morality/self-interest problem can be dissolved, because it rests on a false separation of relational and non-relational value.
[maybe review this for errors & think about it more]
The standard picture, which Raz rejects, is that morality is a different domain to practical reason. Raz thinks that X being relationally good [i.e. good for me] presupposes it being non-relationally good [i.e. a good thing] and vice versa.
For example, playing piano is good for Johnny because (a) engaging with music is good [non-relational judgement] and (b) Johnny is able to engage with music by piano-playing.
And an activity/object can’t be non-relationally good unless it’s at least potentially good for some valuer who could engage with them
Explanatorily, value comes before wellbeing – but ontologically neither class can exist without the other.
This means that wellbeing is not a reason for action; it’s an evaluative verdict on how things went after the fact.
You shouldn’t deliberate by asking “what will maximise my wellbeing?”, but rather “what is most worth doing?”, since that determines how it contributes to your wellbeing.
That’s a problem for the egoist, who needs relational goods to be exclusively prior, so that self-interest comes first.
This connects to eudaimonia; Raz calls his position “the classical view”.
Wellbeing just is living well, where “well” means “in accordance with what’s actually valuable”.
Rational egoism
The move to rational egoism lets you sidestep questions about what’s morally right entirely, and focus on what one has most reason to do.
The rational egoist might have nothing to say about “moral reasons”, because she doesn’t see them as a very meaningful category.
Or, she might acknowledge they exist but don’t have any special rational authority – i.e., they only matter insofar as they coincide with self-interest.
Either way, the rational egoist challenges the claim that moral reasons are overriding / uniquely authoritative.
Arguments in favour of rational egoism
One approach (analogous to the one for ethical egoism): look at our intuitive judgements about rational action and claim that rational egoism best fits these.
But this seems to fail: the instrumental theory of rationality (I ought to do X iff & because doing X maximises preference-satisfaction) looks like it accounts for our intuitions better.
In particular, since psychological egoism seems false, it may be rational for me to make uncompensated sacrifices, given that this might best satisfy my preferences.
(Of course, conflict with instrumental theory of rationality is also a problem for ethical theories which claim to give an account of the ought all-things-considered.)
Maybe it’s just the most minimal theory: morality adds extra demands beyond the basic idea of “pursue your own welfare”.
But this fails: a more minimal theory would be the present-aim theory, where you ought to do whatever maximally satisfies your present desires.
Rational egoism is more demanding – e.g., it requires you to save for a pension even if you’d rather consume now.
And, even worse: if egoists try to argue that time should be ignored, then why shouldn’t distinctions between people be ignored too? (see Parfit on identity below).
Arguments against rational egoism
It looks like it arbitrarily divides up the world between me and everyone else, when specifying whose welfare I ought to maximise – especially because given the falsity of psychological egoism, I might lack a preference for my own welfare.
But you can reply that rational egoism relies on a non-arbitrary distinction. See Sidgwick.
Maybe you object: why should my point of view and an impartial point of view be non-arbitrary, while anything in between (e.g. my family’s point of view, my country’s) is arbitrary?
But a natural response is just that these are the two ends of the spectrum, so clearly they have some special significance.
Personal identity and incoherence because of the rational egoist’s attitude to time (Parfit).
Note that the rational egoist is time-neutral: they’re willing to sacrifice a small present gain for a larger future gain.
But then on Parfit’s Reductionism (i.e. psychological connectedness view of personal identity), surely you should also be willing to make sacrifices for present people who’re relevantly psychologically-connected to you, even if non-identical (e.g., family).
An egoist can claim that continuity alone matters for special care, but it’s not clear that’s sufficient.
Maybe continuity and connection are jointly necessary & sufficient, in which case the egoist can escape incoherence (since she isn’t continuous with present non-identical people).
Evolutionary debunking: egoism plausibly differentially increases reproductive fitness, so we should discount our belief in it accordingly.
Note that it’s important here that other, non-egoistic beliefs don’t increase reproductive fitness as much. But actually, plausibly kin altruism is the view that would most maximise fitness, and moreover many people do believe it (suggesting it was in fact selected for).
Also, it’s unclear that the belief would need to be selected for, rather than just the practice of egoism. Compare: I needn’t believe that pain is bad to have sufficient motivation to avoid it.
Asymmetric epistemology (Hills)
To non-egoists, it’s counterintuitive that the egoist claims that (by itself) the fact that a child will drown gives me no reason to save her. But rather than suspending judgement in light of the disagreement, it might be that we can actually come down on the moralist’s side.
In particular, the moralist can give an argument starting from a premiss like [H]: “I have a reason to help regardless of whether doing so contributes to my self-interest”, provided it’s not inferred from the falsity of rational egoism (e.g., maybe it’s a self-evident truth).
And disagreement about [H] doesn’t require the moralist to suspend judgement, because rational egoists aim at knowledge, while moralists aim at drawing true moral conclusions from the evidence on their own – so they don’t have to suspend belief in cases of disagreement.
Of course, you can rebut this by arguing that moralists don’t aim solely at this: if I could guarantee doing the right act by relying on a Moral Answers Machine, then surely I ought to do that.
The amoralist’s challenge
The amoralist is different from an immoralist (and from an ethical egoist): they claim that moral reasons simply don’t apply to them.
An immoralist recognises moral reasons and defies them.
An ethical egoist recognises moral reasons, but claims that these are just to act in their self-interest.
This is prima facie a challenge to the authority of morality.
But it’s not clear that the authority of morality really relies on being rationally demonstrable to someone who doesn’t care; who is “outside the moral plane” as Williams puts it.
Cf Sidgwick on duality.
If moral and prudential reasons are equally fundamental and irreducible, the amoralist can’t be rationally compelled to accept moral reasons.
But equally, it’s not the case that prudential reasons have a more secure rational foundation.
The amoralist is much more of a challenge to morality if you’re an internalist (like Williams) than an externalist.
Internalists say that reasons must connect to agent’s existing motivational set (desires, projects, commitments).
Since an amoralist genuinely doesn’t care about other people, they don’t have any moral reasons – these couldn’t connect to their motivational set.
So moral reasons are not universal, and only apply to people with the right motivational profile.
Externalists claim moral reasons exist regardless of motivation.
So the amoralist does have moral reasons, and just fails to recognise them.
She’s making a mistake, not revealing a gap in morality’s authority.
But Raz’s view offers a way of bypassing this entirely, arguing that the amoralist/moralist confrontation is “bogus” and the gap is much narrower than it seems.
He wants to attack the amoralist’s presupposition that morality is a separate domain from practical reason, and therefore that she can ignore those reasons.
His strategy is to show that paradigmatically non-moral goods (especially friendship) cannot be enjoyed without committing the agent to the “moralist’s principle”
This principle is that other persons have value in themselves.
Consider an amoralist Ava, who values her friendship with Ben.
Genuine friendship requires valuing friends for their own sake.
So Ava must think that Ben is valuable independently of the fact that he is her friend.
On Raz’s view, since relational value presupposes non-relational value, this implies that Ben must have non-relational qualities that make him worthy of being valued as an end.
Anyone with similar qualities would also be worthy of friendship, and Ava is committed to this regardless of whether she actually wants to be friends with them.
So she’s committed to the intrinsic value of persons apart from herself, which is exactly what the moralist asserts.
Note that this turns on whether there’s a kind of “full” friendship that provides more value to Ava than “limited”, extractive friendship. Raz claims there is.
On his view, the egoism debate ultimately collapses to a debate about the good life.
Since the morality/prudence distinction is mistaken, then what’s left is just the question of what genuinely valuable activities consist in.
Raz admits that this argument doesn’t go quite as far as he’d like: it covers at most those with friendship-meriting qualities, plus those with whom someone could have personal relationships.
But this doesn’t stretch to Ava valuing every person qua person.
Edward (2013) offers three interpretations of Raz’s argument and raises objections to each.
Raz might be trying to dissolve the amoralist altogether, i.e. say that no such person can exist.
The claim here is that an amoralist is possible only if morality is a separate domain, i.e. all non-moral practical interests can be pursued without morality.
But that’s too strong. There just need to be some non-moral practical interests pursuable without morality. Maybe friendship can’t be, but there are plenty of others which do not presuppose morality!
Maybe Raz is saying that the amoralist’s life is severely limited, because she lacks genuine friendship.
So Raz relies on a premiss like: the relevant amoralist (one who can challenge the rationality of morality) must have a non-severely-limited life.
But why should she need to have a non-severely-limited life to call into question the rationality of morality? Sure, maybe she can’t defend her life as the better one, but she’s still able to argumentatively defend her belief.
I do think although this doesn’t show the amoralist can’t exist, it’s not that reassuring for her. i.e., Raz’s argument holds up quite well: Ava will have to be self-effacing, if we grant that (1) true friendship is required for a good life, and (2) friendship requires valuing others intrinsically.
This is because otherwise she’s stubbornly insisting on denying moral reasons even when she admits that believing in them would lead her to have a better life.
So Ava does end up at something close to the moralist’s view.