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Psychological Egoism Presentation
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Psychological Egoism: Are We in the Bad Place?
What is psychological
egoism?
What is it?
- All of our actions are motivated by selfish desires.
- Everyone acts in their own self-interest.
Everybody has one ultimate motive in all their voluntary behavior.
Psychological egoistic
hedonism
The one ultimate motive is a selfish one -- a desire for one's own pleasure.
Psychological egoistic hedonism
- Jeremy Bentham
- Most common version of psychological egoism
"The only kind of ultimate desire is the desire to get or to prolong pleasant experiences, and to avoid or to cut short unpleasant experiences for oneself."
Question
Are all our actions motivated by selfish desires?
Why does it matter?
Why does it matter?
Reevaluates the way we view our relationships (e.g. friends, family)
Reevaluates
Reexamine how we treat other people and the way we treat other people
Reexamines
Redefine the words “selfish” and “unselfish”
Redefines
Claims
Claims
Motives
Whenever we act, we are always pursuing our own desires.
Pleasure
When we get what we want, we feel pleasure.
Self-Deception
We often deceive ourselves that we desire something noble when our real motives are selfish.
Moral Education
When we teach about what is right and wrong, we base it off of pleasure and pain.
Our Criticisms
Our Criticisms
- A descriptive claim
- Empirical hypothesis
- Need to be able to be proven false by evidence
Ex: All chili have Peeps and M&Ms.
Clarifying the Claims
What does it mean to say "all of my actions are motivated by self-interest"?
Counter
Counter
But the psychological egoists will say that those chili dishes (the ones without Peeps and M&Ms) are not actually chili.
Ex: Saving a dog from being hit by a car.
→
We could then point out other selfless deeds, such as sacrificing yourself.
However, if the psychological egoist refuses to acknowledge any of these examples of unselfish behavior...
Then, psychologist egoists are no longer making a descriptive claim, but rather an analytic statement.
→
Analytic statement: statement whose truth is determined solely by the meanings of the word.
Ex: All squares are four-sided.
Then, there really isn't a point to this question.
Psychological egoism would not help us morally. It only redefines what we understand as "selfish".
Redefining the Meaning of "Selfish"
If they agree that they were not trying to make an descriptive claim, but rather an analytic statement...
Redefining Selfish
→
Now, the main question is: would it be useful to redefine "selfish" in the way the psychological egoist recommends?
- If we describe "selfish" and "unselfish" actions with the same word ("selfish") because they have noticed that those two types of actions are alike, then it makes it impossible to describe how they differ.
- And if we tried to differentiate the two, we are right back to where we started.