Exploring Ethical Egoism and Altruism

...philosophical term in this particular context. So what is ethical egoism? A good definition of ethical egoism is that it is the belief that one ought to do what is in one's own self-interest. And I'm sure that doesn't seem to be too terribly far-fetched for most of us, but the word I want to concentrate on is ethical egoism. on here is ought. This means that ethical egoism is indeed a theory, a normative prescriptive theory about the kind of conduct that we should be engaging in. That is to say, what we ought to do. do. Ethical egoism is usually contrasted with the other doctrine which is contradictory to it and that is altruism. Altruism holds that individuals have an ethical obligation to help or serve others. Ethical egoism in its extreme form seems to ignore what altruism promotes and that is that we have an obligation to help or serve other people. So in its extreme form ethical egoism is very much about the self and very much about looking out for number one. one or numero uno. In all things philosophical, we do like to provide critiques of what people propound as their pet or favorite theories, and ethical egoism, as described in a previous slide, is a theory about how it is that we ought to behave. But is there an inconsistency? After all, if an ethical egoism is a theory, then it is a theory. If an ethical egoism is thoroughgoing and must look out for his or herself in the numero uno sense, then he or she may have to, in fact, treat others as if they were at least ethically and morally equal to the egoist, his or herself. herself. In doing so, it seems like there's a kind of a paradox that arises because to actually extract what the ethical egoist needs to get from his interactions with other people, he might have to treat other people in a somewhat more altruistic looking way in order to achieve those ends. An ethical egoist might assert that furthering ends of others is sometimes the best means of furthering one's own ends or that by simply lying on liberty, it benefits one's self-interest. That is to say, it furthers one's self-interest. one sense of being number one and the most important being, so to speak, morally. You have to think about all of these theories that we're proffering here in this course and run them through your own common sense and experience in order to determine whether or not you've ever discovered anybody who actually measures up to any of the standards or criteria that each of these theories seem to advocate. So I ask you the question, do you know anybody who is an ethical egoist? That is to say, do you know anybody you think who actually consciously measures up to any of the standards? or otherwise believes that he or she ought to put their own best interests first and perhaps end up treating others and making it appear as though that one is treating others with great respect. Think about what it would be like if a person were actually that way and then you can see how perhaps ethical egoism could get you in a little bit of a further inconsistency. So who is a good example of an ethical egoist? Well, I hope that at some point in time you might have come across at least a reference to Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th, latter 19th, early 20th century philosopher. Certainly ethical egoism is present in his writings, at least in the later Nietzsche. Nietzsche got famous and perhaps achieved a kind of celebrity status because of his nihilism, his ethical egoism, and the claim that he asserts, namely that God is... is dead, but that is often taken out of context, that claim, and it would be important to study his works in order to try to understand exactly what he meant by that. But primarily, Nietzsche thought that we had no real moral obligation to anyone else but ourselves, and that we should ultimately become what in German is referred to as the Übermensch, the Superman. And in his sense, the Superman is an individual who has transcended the bounds of mere morality. It is to be noted that... And religious traditions such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are opposed to ethical egoism because they primarily promote the idea that we should actually treat others with respect and dignity. Buddhism, for example, claims that we are actually inherently altruistic. Once again, any of the claims that are made, you need to subject to your own common sense scrutiny. Now, psychological egoism perhaps seems at first glance rather like ethical egoism, but it is a little bit different. Psychological egoism is the theoretical view that humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism, which is a way of stating that we are hard-wired, actually, to be self-interested. That if we ever were to become altruists, we'd actually have to learn that behavior. And this is a bit of a different view than ethical egoism. Ethical egoism is an ethical theory that says we ought to behave in a certain way. Psychological egoism says we are just so into our own selfishness that we have no alternative but to be that way because that's the way nature created us. Psychological egoism claims that when sane people choose to help others, it's because of the personal benefits they themselves obtain or expect to obtain, directly or indirectly from doing so. So, it could even be that at some level the psychological egoist would maintain that even if we are unconscious of our true motives, that they are nevertheless there. The problem, of course, becomes how do you prove such a theory? And this is why we have a critique of psychological egoism. For one thing, taken as a theory, psychological egoism is not falsifiable. That is, you couldn't ever find out if there's any circumstance in which it is not true. theory of relativity, it is imaginable, might be false. Perhaps the theory of operant conditioning poised by B. F. Skinner. Perhaps it, there is a circumstance under which you can imagine it is not. true. But in this particular case, the problem that is an indictment really against the theory of psychological egoism is that we would never know under what circumstances it is falsifiable. And good theories allow that there may be a possibility of falsification, and of course we'd know then what it would be like for the theory to be false. Even if it turns out that it's never false, we'd certainly know what it would be like to be false. But you see, when somebody claims that we have these kinds of motives, and they claim it's based on observation, well certainly there are some reasons for that. some counter observations. Certainly there are some instances which don't jive terribly well with the idea that we are all psychological egoists. So in order to save the theory you might have to go one step further and say well you know you may not be aware of the fact or any of us for that matter that in ourselves our true motives are always ulterior and we are always self-serving. But how would we ever know that? That's really the main question about talking about non-falsifiability. How would we ever know that that's always completely true in every single case? If it's really treated as a theory then presumably it's going to be universalizable enough to the point where it covers every case. So that is a somewhat semi-professional critique of psychological egoism. And now let's flip over to the other side of the spectrum, altruism. Altruism can be defined as an unselfish concern for the welfare of others, which, again, seems to be very contradictory to either ethical egoism or psychological egoism. If you're thinking about an example, well, how about Mother Teresa? I think in many of the classes that I've conducted where I've ever... asked people who is the most virtuous people that they are aware of that has been in the news or perhaps achieved something like celebrity status, Mother Teresa is usually almost exactly right on top of the list. Typically the other people that I get as examples that students will mention and other people with whom I speak, people like the Pope, people like Billy Graham, most of them seem to be religious figures, but if you know what the term altruism means, try to think of some somebody in your experience, either in your family or perhaps in your relationships at the workplace, certainly not on the freeway, who are altruists. How do we know that Mother Teresa qualifies as a fairly good example of altruism? Well, just for example, this is one of many, many instances, but in 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constituted a threat to peace. And she was given a monetary... prize for that and she turned it down and asked that it be given to the poor in India, I believe, with whom she had been working. Now it wasn't an enormous amount of money as I recall at the time, but still the very idea that she would refuse to do this. And time and time and time again when Mother Teresa was in a similar circumstance where she could have been awarded a monetary sum or perhaps could have been treated very specially, and even though there may be some controversy surrounding her following. if you will, her order. Nevertheless, it does seem that by and large it would be very difficult to accuse Mother Teresa of being anything other than mostly an altruist. And surely she, being a human being like any of us, may have fallen into a lapse in which perhaps she might have become somewhat self-interested. But I ask you, when you start trying to really characterize somebody's life with any of the terms that we're utilizing here, whether they're egoists or altruists, do you think that altruism fits better than maybe psychological egoism? or psychological hedonism? Do you think that perhaps Mother Teresa really got tremendous amounts of joy and that's the only thing or the primary thing that motivated her to do this altruistic looking work? I suppose we can never know for sure, but that's the way life is as a human being. We don't know for sure, but what seems to be the most likely descriptor, if you will, of somebody like Mother Teresa's behavior, particularly over a lifetime? As always, there are some problems with even altruism, particularly from the camp of those people who support egoism. Philosophers who do support egoism have suggested that altruism is demeaning. The book term in your textbook is self-effacing. It's demeaning to the individual and that no moral... obligation to help others actually exists. You see how so much of this is up for grabs. It depends upon our perspective. It depends upon how we argue rationally. Remember that rational argumentation is what ultimately should win the day in almost anything when it comes to philosophical pursuits, and moral discussion is no exception to that. Ayn Rand herself, famous for having embraced a form of enlightened self-interest, at the very least, if not selfishness, argued that altruism is a willful sacrifice of one's values and represents a reversal of morality, because only rational selfishness will allow one to pursue the values required for human life. So, rightly or wrongly, Ayn Rand certainly was suggesting that the problem with altruism was very much like what is stated up here, and that is that it's really demeaning. to be too much of an altruist is demeaning to put other people way ahead of yourself. But what about the concept of enlightened self-interest? Enlightened self-interest is the ethical principle that when persons act to further the interests of others or at least the interests of the group or groups to which they belong, such persons ultimately serve their own interests. And... people will argue that this is what might be the honesty, so to speak, in a capitalistic system. That when we engage in capitalism, I suppose, in its full-blown sense, and we do so, let us say, honestly in our transactions. that we are actually promoting the concept of enlightened self-interest. So everybody working together, serving their own self-interest in a community that in fact endorses this idea, will benefit by that. In all such cases, when it comes to philosophical issues that concern our lives, how we're to act, how we're to think, how we're to conduct ourselves, it is really up to you, the individual, ultimately to try to master the vocabulary and the understanding and develop an orientation, a healthy... skepticism towards what anybody says. So always analyze these things thoroughly for yourself and see whether or not they can apply. Thank you so much for joining me. See you next time.

...philosophical term in this particular context. So what is ethical egoism? A good definition of ethical egoism is that it is the belief that one ought to do what is in one's own self-interest.

And I'm sure that doesn't seem to be too terribly far-fetched for most of us, but the word I want to concentrate on is ethical egoism. on here is ought. This means that ethical egoism is indeed a theory, a normative prescriptive theory about the kind of conduct that we should be engaging in. That is to say, what we ought to do. do.

Ethical egoism is usually contrasted with the other doctrine which is contradictory to it and that is altruism. Altruism holds that individuals have an ethical obligation to help or serve others. Ethical egoism in its extreme form seems to ignore what altruism promotes and that is that we have an obligation to help or serve other people.

So in its extreme form ethical egoism is very much about the self and very much about looking out for number one. one or numero uno. In all things philosophical, we do like to provide critiques of what people propound as their pet or favorite theories, and ethical egoism, as described in a previous slide, is a theory about how it is that we ought to behave. But is there an inconsistency?

After all, if an ethical egoism is a theory, then it is a theory. If an ethical egoism is thoroughgoing and must look out for his or herself in the numero uno sense, then he or she may have to, in fact, treat others as if they were at least ethically and morally equal to the egoist, his or herself. herself.

In doing so, it seems like there's a kind of a paradox that arises because to actually extract what the ethical egoist needs to get from his interactions with other people, he might have to treat other people in a somewhat more altruistic looking way in order to achieve those ends. An ethical egoist might assert that furthering ends of others is sometimes the best means of furthering one's own ends or that by simply lying on liberty, it benefits one's self-interest. That is to say, it furthers one's self-interest. one sense of being number one and the most important being, so to speak, morally. You have to think about all of these theories that we're proffering here in this course and run them through your own common sense and experience in order to determine whether or not you've ever discovered anybody who actually measures up to any of the standards or criteria that each of these theories seem to advocate.

So I ask you the question, do you know anybody who is an ethical egoist? That is to say, do you know anybody you think who actually consciously measures up to any of the standards? or otherwise believes that he or she ought to put their own best interests first and perhaps end up treating others and making it appear as though that one is treating others with great respect.

Think about what it would be like if a person were actually that way and then you can see how perhaps ethical egoism could get you in a little bit of a further inconsistency. So who is a good example of an ethical egoist? Well, I hope that at some point in time you might have come across at least a reference to Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th, latter 19th, early 20th century philosopher. Certainly ethical egoism is present in his writings, at least in the later Nietzsche. Nietzsche got famous and perhaps achieved a kind of celebrity status because of his nihilism, his ethical egoism, and the claim that he asserts, namely that God is...

is dead, but that is often taken out of context, that claim, and it would be important to study his works in order to try to understand exactly what he meant by that. But primarily, Nietzsche thought that we had no real moral obligation to anyone else but ourselves, and that we should ultimately become what in German is referred to as the Übermensch, the Superman. And in his sense, the Superman is an individual who has transcended the bounds of mere morality. It is to be noted that... And religious traditions such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are opposed to ethical egoism because they primarily promote the idea that we should actually treat others with respect and dignity.

Buddhism, for example, claims that we are actually inherently altruistic. Once again, any of the claims that are made, you need to subject to your own common sense scrutiny. Now, psychological egoism perhaps seems at first glance rather like ethical egoism, but it is a little bit different. Psychological egoism is the theoretical view that humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism, which is a way of stating that we are hard-wired, actually, to be self-interested.

That if we ever were to become altruists, we'd actually have to learn that behavior. And this is a bit of a different view than ethical egoism. Ethical egoism is an ethical theory that says we ought to behave in a certain way.

Psychological egoism says we are just so into our own selfishness that we have no alternative but to be that way because that's the way nature created us. Psychological egoism claims that when sane people choose to help others, it's because of the personal benefits they themselves obtain or expect to obtain, directly or indirectly from doing so. So, it could even be that at some level the psychological egoist would maintain that even if we are unconscious of our true motives, that they are nevertheless there. The problem, of course, becomes how do you prove such a theory?

And this is why we have a critique of psychological egoism. For one thing, taken as a theory, psychological egoism is not falsifiable. That is, you couldn't ever find out if there's any circumstance in which it is not true. theory of relativity, it is imaginable, might be false.

Perhaps the theory of operant conditioning poised by B. F. Skinner. Perhaps it, there is a circumstance under which you can imagine it is not. true.

But in this particular case, the problem that is an indictment really against the theory of psychological egoism is that we would never know under what circumstances it is falsifiable. And good theories allow that there may be a possibility of falsification, and of course we'd know then what it would be like for the theory to be false. Even if it turns out that it's never false, we'd certainly know what it would be like to be false. But you see, when somebody claims that we have these kinds of motives, and they claim it's based on observation, well certainly there are some reasons for that.

some counter observations. Certainly there are some instances which don't jive terribly well with the idea that we are all psychological egoists. So in order to save the theory you might have to go one step further and say well you know you may not be aware of the fact or any of us for that matter that in ourselves our true motives are always ulterior and we are always self-serving. But how would we ever know that?

That's really the main question about talking about non-falsifiability. How would we ever know that that's always completely true in every single case? If it's really treated as a theory then presumably it's going to be universalizable enough to the point where it covers every case.

So that is a somewhat semi-professional critique of psychological egoism. And now let's flip over to the other side of the spectrum, altruism. Altruism can be defined as an unselfish concern for the welfare of others, which, again, seems to be very contradictory to either ethical egoism or psychological egoism. If you're thinking about an example, well, how about Mother Teresa? I think in many of the classes that I've conducted where I've ever...

asked people who is the most virtuous people that they are aware of that has been in the news or perhaps achieved something like celebrity status, Mother Teresa is usually almost exactly right on top of the list. Typically the other people that I get as examples that students will mention and other people with whom I speak, people like the Pope, people like Billy Graham, most of them seem to be religious figures, but if you know what the term altruism means, try to think of some somebody in your experience, either in your family or perhaps in your relationships at the workplace, certainly not on the freeway, who are altruists. How do we know that Mother Teresa qualifies as a fairly good example of altruism?

Well, just for example, this is one of many, many instances, but in 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constituted a threat to peace. And she was given a monetary... prize for that and she turned it down and asked that it be given to the poor in India, I believe, with whom she had been working.

Now it wasn't an enormous amount of money as I recall at the time, but still the very idea that she would refuse to do this. And time and time and time again when Mother Teresa was in a similar circumstance where she could have been awarded a monetary sum or perhaps could have been treated very specially, and even though there may be some controversy surrounding her following. if you will, her order. Nevertheless, it does seem that by and large it would be very difficult to accuse Mother Teresa of being anything other than mostly an altruist.

And surely she, being a human being like any of us, may have fallen into a lapse in which perhaps she might have become somewhat self-interested. But I ask you, when you start trying to really characterize somebody's life with any of the terms that we're utilizing here, whether they're egoists or altruists, do you think that altruism fits better than maybe psychological egoism? or psychological hedonism?

Do you think that perhaps Mother Teresa really got tremendous amounts of joy and that's the only thing or the primary thing that motivated her to do this altruistic looking work? I suppose we can never know for sure, but that's the way life is as a human being. We don't know for sure, but what seems to be the most likely descriptor, if you will, of somebody like Mother Teresa's behavior, particularly over a lifetime?

As always, there are some problems with even altruism, particularly from the camp of those people who support egoism. Philosophers who do support egoism have suggested that altruism is demeaning. The book term in your textbook is self-effacing. It's demeaning to the individual and that no moral... obligation to help others actually exists.

You see how so much of this is up for grabs. It depends upon our perspective. It depends upon how we argue rationally.

Remember that rational argumentation is what ultimately should win the day in almost anything when it comes to philosophical pursuits, and moral discussion is no exception to that. Ayn Rand herself, famous for having embraced a form of enlightened self-interest, at the very least, if not selfishness, argued that altruism is a willful sacrifice of one's values and represents a reversal of morality, because only rational selfishness will allow one to pursue the values required for human life. So, rightly or wrongly, Ayn Rand certainly was suggesting that the problem with altruism was very much like what is stated up here, and that is that it's really demeaning.

to be too much of an altruist is demeaning to put other people way ahead of yourself. But what about the concept of enlightened self-interest? Enlightened self-interest is the ethical principle that when persons act to further the interests of others or at least the interests of the group or groups to which they belong, such persons ultimately serve their own interests. And...

people will argue that this is what might be the honesty, so to speak, in a capitalistic system. That when we engage in capitalism, I suppose, in its full-blown sense, and we do so, let us say, honestly in our transactions. that we are actually promoting the concept of enlightened self-interest. So everybody working together, serving their own self-interest in a community that in fact endorses this idea, will benefit by that. In all such cases, when it comes to philosophical issues that concern our lives, how we're to act, how we're to think, how we're to conduct ourselves, it is really up to you, the individual, ultimately to try to master the vocabulary and the understanding and develop an orientation, a healthy...

skepticism towards what anybody says. So always analyze these things thoroughly for yourself and see whether or not they can apply. Thank you so much for joining me.

See you next time.

Transcript for:Exploring Ethical Egoism and Altruism

Transcript for:
Exploring Ethical Egoism and Altruism