IS EGOISM AN ETHICAL THEORY? H. Gene Blocker IN THIS READING H. GENE BLOCKER, of Ohio University, argues that egoism cannot be an ethical theory, not just that it is an unusual or controversial ethical theory, but that it does not qualify as an ethical theory at all. An ethical theory must specify public universal and objectively valid standards of conduct, and this means that the egoist must publicly advise everyone to do what is necessary to advance his or her interests. But why would an egoist want other people to advance their interests? That sounds more like the opposite of egoism, altruism. Moreover, by advancing their interests, especially in cases involving competition, they may well be impeding the egoist s interests. Most egoists prefer to encourage others to be altruistic, since this will create a more pleasant social environment and will in many ways help the egoist. But secretly the egoist has decided to look out for her own interests. By going public and advising everyone to become egoists, the egoist is working against her best interests and that simply makes no sense from an egoist perspective. Egoism may well be an individual s plan or strategy of life, but it cannot, according to Blocker, become a moral theory. As such, egoism, like cultural relativism, is a challenge to moral theory, not an example of it. As you read Blocker, consider other ways the egoist might respond perhaps to redefine egoism in such a way as to qualify as an ethical theory, or perhaps to give up the attempt to establish a moral theory in favor of developing a winning life plan for oneself. Do you think it is possible to adopt a neutral or disinterested stance, and to say of other people, You should all try as hard as you can to get ahead, in competition against one another, or do you think the egoist must always be one of these people? Even if ethical relativism were successfully refuted, a second challenge confronts ethics, that of ethical egoism. While it is fairly easy to define egoism, it is not so easy to clear away the tangle of ambiguities and confu-
sions surrounding it in order to get a clear sense of precisely what the theory asserts. Simply put, egoism is the view that the fundamental principle of morality is to do whatever is in one s own best interests. Look out for number one. But just as philosophers have argued that ethical relativism is not an ethical theory, but rather the rejection of any ethical theory, so philosophers have questioned whether egoism can qualify as a theory of ethics. We can define an ethical theory as one which seeks to establish universal and objectively valid moral principles. The relativist flatly denies that there are, or ever could be, any universal, objective moral principles. And so, as we have seen, relativism does not qualify as an ethical theory. The egoist, on the other hand, offers what looks very much like an ethical theory, although some philosophers, including Brian Medlin and Kurt Baier, argue that on closer examination, ethical egoism does not meet the minimum requirements demanded of any ethical theory. Why not? What s the problem? First of all, egoism would be an odd sort of moral theory in the sense that by promoting selfishness it seems to recommend as the morally right thing to do precisely what we normally regard as immoral. Moral questions arise in our lives most often as a conflict between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Whatever moral theory we are considering, from whatever part of the world or historical period, it seems to be pretty nearly universally true that moral doctrines are always couched in terms of inhibiting individual desires in order to promote the greater social good. If a young woman has been promised in marriage, then other young men should refrain from making sexual advances, even though she and they may desire to do so. In time of war the individual should inhibit personal fears and concerns for safety in order to fight courageously for one s country. And however angry you feel toward someone, most societies require that you not disturb the peace of the community by violent acts of revenge. If people were born with social instincts to place the good of the community before personal gain or individual desires, there would be no need for most of what we call morality, and so it probably would never arise, at least not as we most commonly know it. But anyone who has helped to raise young children knows that that is not the case. Because no social community is possible unless individual citizens adjust and modify their personal desires, reactions, and behavior to accommodate others in a spirit of social harmony, every society must institute a system of inhibitions of certain antisocial behavior and some kind of positive reinforcement of more socially
conducive forms of behavior. And this is a large part of every person s social adjustment and growing up. It is also a large part of what we call morality. Thus, practically all forms of morality urge us not to be selfish but to work for the greater good and to do our duty even when we don t really feel like it. What is odd, then, about egoism is that it encourages us to be selfish as the morally right thing to do! This is an oddity for egoism, but it is not devastating. After all, it is possible that all traditional moral theories are wrong and egoism is right. Perhaps selfishness is the correct moral position to adopt. A more serious objection to egoism, however, is that it cannot provide universal moral principles applicable to everyone in every situation. If this is true, then egoism cannot be an ethical theory, since this is precisely what we expect an ethical theory to provide. Before we can decide whether a moral theory is a good or correct theory, we must first decide whether it is a moral theory at all. In order to qualify as a moral theory, a theory must specify universal and objectively valid standards of conduct. If it cannot do that, then it is not an ethical theory, good or bad. But what is to prevent egoism s providing universal moral principles? Why can t the egoist offer as the highest-order moral principle, Everyone should always act in his or her own individual interest? But there are problems in this formulation as a moral principle. Suppose you and I are competing for the same job and we go to an egoist for advice. Suppose I go first. What will he tell me? If he is an egoist he may tell me what he thinks is in his best interests. Perhaps he thinks that you are in a better position to help him than I will be, and so he advises me to look for another job and leave the present position for you to fill. But suppose he urges me to act as an egoist and so advises me to falsify my vita with prestigious but fictitious qualifications, or to start an ugly rumor about you, that you are a heroin addict and cannot hold down a steady job. But then you go to him asking for advice. What will he tell you? Again, he may either act out of his own best interests, or he may advise you to act according to egoist principles and create damaging and false rumors about me. Can he come up with a single and consistent policy for each of us to follow? What if we went in to see him together? What would he say? When we say that an ethical theory should provide us with universal moral standards, we mean to imply that these standards should be open to public inspection and debate. Some rules of conduct will work only if kept secret from the general public. Cheating or lying, for example, will work only if most people
don t cheat and don t expect others to cheat. An egoist could advise a particular individual that it was in his best interest to cheat in a particular situation, but if the egoist goes public with this kind of recommendation, urging everyone to cheat on everyone else, we will all become more guarded and it will become more and more difficult to successfully cheat anyone. Can the egoist openly recommend to the general public the universal adoption of egoism? As an egoist I urge each of you to do whatever is in your own best interest. Does that blow his cover, or is that sensible moral advice? Imagine, now, a different case. Suppose you are a landlord and I am one of your tenants. I am having trouble paying the rent, so, having checked through the Yellow Pages, I consult an egoist for advice. He says, don t pay: write a letter promising to pay next month. but when the time comes just keep stalling. Now it is your turn to seek his advice, and he advises you to start eviction proceedings immediately, put my things out on the street, change the locks, and rent the room to someone else. Now, suppose we go to see him together. What can he say to us? It seems difficult for him to tell us in general what is the right thing to do in such a situation. All he can say is that each of us should do whatever is necessary to further our own interests, admitting that this will vary among different individuals depending on their different and often competing interests. The morally right thing for me is to do what I can to remain in the apartment as long as I can without paying rent, and the morally right thing for you is to do whatever you can either to get the rent from me or get me out in favor of someone who can pay the rent. Does this count as an appeal to a universal moral principle? In one sense. perhaps it does. There is one universal moral principle for the egoist everyone should always act in his or her own best interest. But in another sense it clearly does not provide clear-cut and detailed policy guidelines that everyone in the society can follow keep your promises, tell the truth, avoid unnecessarily harming anyone, and so on. Thus, it is debatable whether egoism is a proper ethical theory, though it is not as clearly and obviously not a moral theory as in the case of relativism, which flatly and openly denies the possibility of any ethical theory. We should try to get a clearer picture of just what egoism is. First of all, it is important to distinguish what are traditionally called psychological egoism and ethical egoism. Psychological egoism is the view that all human actions are necessarily and in fact selfishly motivated. It does not tell us that this is what we ought to do, but only that this is what we in fact do and what we cannot avoid doing even if we wanted to. Ethical egoism, by
contrast, allows that actions can be selfishly or unselfishly motivated, but insists that the only morally correct actions are those which are selfishly motivated. Ethical egoism, in other words, says that we ought to be selfish. This parallels the distinction we drew earlier between the descriptive claims of the relativist and the prescriptive claims of the relativist. With egoism, as with relativism, ethics is concerned only with the prescriptive, normative claims, since this is what ethics is all about. But unlike the descriptive claims of relativism, which are obviously true and therefore uncontroversial and uncontested, the descriptive claims of psychological egoism are highly debatable and controversial. Since ethics is concerned only with ethical egoism, we could simply ignore psychological egoism, but, while not an ethical theory itself, psychological egoism is so closely connected with ethical egoism that it cannot simply be dismissed. Just as the relativist uses the descriptive claims as evidence for the prescriptive claims of relativism, so one of the main arguments for ethical egoism is the presumed truth of psychological egoism. Strictly speaking, of course, this does not make any sense. If we cannot do anything but be selfish, what sense does it make to advise us that we ought to act more selfishly? That assumes that we could act otherwise, which the psychological egoist denies. More generally it is part of the meaning of ought that we are free to accept or reject the advice. Ought, in other words, implies can. It makes sense to give moral advice, then, as we normally do, when the individual has a clear choice between alternatives, either of which he or she could do. The point of giving moral advice is to help the person decide which of several possibilities to adopt. If only one course of action is open to us, then it is inappropriate and senseless to offer moral advice. If my car keys are locked inside my car, it is appropriate to advise me that I ought to call a mechanic, or find a piece of wire and try to unlock the door, but it doesn t make any sense for you to advise me that I ought to take my keys and open the door. So, if the psychological egoist holds that all human actions are necessarily selfishly motivated, then it makes no sense to say that we ought to act from self-centered motives. In a similar way, Marxists often argue that we ought to overthrow capitalism because it is inevitably doomed to fall anyway. If capitalism is necessarily destined to fall, why do anything but wait for that to happen? Nonetheless, psychological egoism has traditionally acted as an inducement to adopt ethical egoism. Part of this psychological inducement may be
based on the idea of accepting the inevitable. There s nothing you can do to prevent it, so you might as well go along with it. There may also be an element that selfishness is acceptable because it is so universal and therefore so natural. There s nothing wrong with it: it s human nature. Part of the persuasion may be the advice not to be a sucker. Don t kid yourself: all your unselfish acts are really nothing more than cleverly disguised acts of selfishness. And, finally, there may be the injunction to be honest with ourselves. Don t be a hypocrite, always pretending you are doing things for others: admit the truth that you are only out for yourself. All of this would make considerably more sense if the psychological egoist would modify his claim to the more modest assertion that most human actions are selfishly motivated, or that there is always a natural tendency for people to act selfishly. Then it would be more inviting to conclude that we might as well go a step further and embrace egoism as a universal rule of conduct. But is either the strong or the weak version of psychological egoism true? There are two main arguments for psychological egoism resulting in two different versions of the doctrine. The first is a kind of hedonistic determinism, that the only thing which causes us to act is the impulse to satisfy a particular desire. This is a simple stimulus-response theory of human action similar to Hobbes s. Suppose I am thirsty and I see a glass of water in front of me. The sight of the water creates within me a strong desire to drink it, and this, in turn, causes my hand to grab the glass and bring it to my lips. This, in turn, creates a feeling of pleasure within me (or the feeling of pain if I fail to get the water). Generalizing, the ultimate cause of every human action, therefore, is the desire for the immediately pleasurable gratification of impulse. At first glance, this seems to contradict our everyday experience. Suppose you have been told that the water in the foreign country you are visiting is contaminated. Will you go ahead and drink the water? No; you will more likely order a bottled drink, or wait until you get back to your hotel where you think the water is safe to drink. Thus, reason or common sense has overcome your impulse for the immediate gratification of drinking the water placed before you. Sometimes we act on the impulse of the moment, but sometimes we resist it. Why? Perhaps because we realize that it would be wrong to strike out in anger, for example, or to steal the umbrella left behind. But it may also be that we realize, when we reflect on it more rationally, that it would not be in our interest to satisfy this immediate desire. I am angry with someone and feel within me the impulse to strike out at that person, but
then I realize that this is my boss and that punching him in the nose will probably cost me my job. Is it worth it? No; so I smile stiffly and turn to a different topic of conversation. But, clearly, this position is fully compatible with psychological egoism, at least in a more sophisticated version of egoism, and so the egoist is likely at this point to shift his ground slightly, abandoning the more primitive stimulus-response, deterministic model of human action in favor of a more complex model in which immediate impulse, common sense, and reason all compete for gratification, all guided, nonetheless, by self love. Clearly, this is a much more plausible position for the egoist to take. First, because it is more in line with our ordinary views about human action, and second, because it is in much greater accord with our ordinary notions of morality in everyday life. As we saw earlier, part of the ordinary notion of morality involves a conflict between what we want to do and what we feel we ought to do. Our more primitive, stimulus-response deterministic egoist could not account for this common moral experience, but our more sophisticated egoist can. He simply interprets what we want to do as our desire for immediate gratification and what we ought to do as our perception of long-range self-interest. In the short run I would like to drink the water in front of me and take a swing at my boss, but I refrain from engaging in these activities because I realize that these actions will hurt me in the long run. I am still acting in a self-interested way, but I am looking toward long-range rather than short-range goals. This more sophisticated version of egoism is also very much in line at many points with our ordinary sense of what is right and wrong. A moral person, common sense tells us, is able to resist the temptation of the moment, and to listen instead to the voice of reason. But this is precisely what the sophisticated egoist does when he rejects short-term gratification for long-term benefits. Very often in everyday life the mistakes we feel people make in life are precisely that they do not have enough self-love. When we see our roommate flunking out of school because she is out drinking every night, our advice is apt to be very much that of the egoist. You re hurting yourself. If you don t study for the final, you ll surely flunk geology, and, since you re already on probation, that means you ll be asked to leave the university. But you can t pursue the career you want without a degree in geology, so, you re blowing your big chance. Nor would the sophisticated egoist s actions be very different in other ways from those of the traditionally moral individual. If the egoist is sophis-
ticated and intelligent, he or she will want to be well-liked, respected, and trusted in the community, and will understand that the only way to achieve this is to conform, at least in public, with customary morality. The sophisticated, intelligent egoist, then, will not behave either like an animal which can t control its desires, nor even in an overtly selfish or self-centered way. If the egoist in our earlier examples is smart, he will not falsify his vita because he knows that the consequences of getting caught could be much more damaging than the short-term gains of getting the new job. Nor will he tell vicious lies about his competitors, since in the long run this could give him a damaging reputation of being backbiting, untruthful, and unreliable. Indeed, since he realizes that the best way to get the most out of life is to have friends and a good reputation, therefore, to all outward appearances, the egoist will be indistinguishable from the traditionally moral person. He will tend to keep his promises, generally tell the truth, and to show occasional acts of kindness and generosity. What, then, is the difference between the egoist and the traditionally moral person? The only difference is in the intention with which the acts are performed. The moral person will do all these good deeds because he feels it is the right thing to do, whereas the egoist will perform the same good deeds simply and solely to benefit himself and to get ahead in life. But is it true, in our second, more sophisticated version of egoism, that all human actions are necessarily motivated from self-love? Normally, we distinguish between selfish acts and benevolent or altruistic acts. That is, we customarily distinguish between certain actions in which the agent acts for his own personal, selfish good and those in which the agent acts for the good of others. The person who gets up at three in the morning to be the first in line to purchase tickets for the rock concert or who studies hard to get good grades is someone we ordinarily understand to be acting primarily out of selfish motives. But the person who enters a burning building to save someone or who stops to give a stranger a ride into town we normally understand as motivated out of consideration for other people. Thus, egoism appears to contradict some of our fundamental perceptions of everyday life, and that would seem to count against egoism. Can the egoist reconcile these apparent discrepancies with everyday moral intuitions? Can the egoist, in other words, explain how what seem to be altruistic acts, acts done solely or primarily for the sake of other people, are really nothing but self-interested acts? We ve already seen how this might be done. What if we found that the person who ran into the burning building to save
the occupants had actually started the fire earlier and was now worried that he might be held responsible if anyone should die in the fire. In that case we would probably say that the man had not acted out of concern for others after all, but had acted simply to save himself from enormous guilt, alienation from friends, and a lengthy jail sentence. Or, suppose we later discover that the person donating money for charity is running for public office and believes this will enhance his or her reputation as a concerned citizen. Again, with our new information we would surely retract our earlier claim that the person had acted altruistically and judge, instead, that the charitable works had been performed out of largely selfish motives. And so the egoist can begin to whittle away at cases of supposed altruism, explaining more and more of what appeared to be selfless actions as in reality selfishly motivated. But can everything be explained in this way? What is the egoist to say about the soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies, or other acts of kindness or heroism in which no ulterior motives can be found? So far the egoist has simply called our attention to the quite ordinary, commonsense recognition that many human actions which appear to be performed out of concern for others are, upon closer examination, selfishly motivated. But that sort of explanation won t cover every kind of case. So now the egoist must shift his ground if he is to preserve his claim that all human actions are selfishly motivated. The egoists usual strategy at this point is to move away from the commonsense explanation he has been using so far in favor of a psychological theory of human action which goes well beyond common sense. Any action freely performed, the egoist argues, is one which the agent has chosen and, therefore, the one which he most wanted to perform in preference to all the other possible options open to him at the time. Therefore, according to the egoist, every human action is done because the agent himself wanted it, not because it might benefit someone else, even in the case of the soldier who falls on the grenade to save his buddies. He wouldn t have done this if this had not been precisely what he wanted. People always and necessarily do what they want and therefore all human actions are done out of self-interest. Now the egoist has the kind of explanation he needs, for this explanation, unlike the earlier one, covers all human actions universally and necessarily. It is part of the meaning of the words we use to describe human action that an action is one the agent chooses to do, and it follows, logically and linguistically, that if he chooses to do it then he selected the action he wanted
over all the other actions he could have done but decided not to do. But this doesn t help the egoist as much as it might seem to. He has proved too much, but not precisely what he needs to prove his case. Because he has now moved very far from the ordinary, commonsense notion with which he began, the egoist has actually weakened his argument. He has shifted from an ordinary sense of selfish actions that everyone understands to a new technical sense that doesn t prove quite the same thing. Instead of finding out, in our earlier examples, what we didn t know before, that the agent s motives were in fact selfish in the ordinary sense of the word, we are now told that this action, like all human actions, is one which the agent has freely chosen. In the first sort of case there was a clear distinction between actions which were selfishly motivated and those which were selfless. Selfish actions were those in which the agent believes that the outcome of the action will ultimately be good for him, whereas a selfless action is one in which the agent believes that the outcome of the action will be good for other people but not for himself (and indeed may even be detrimental to himself). In these sorts of cases, the egoist is using ordinary language and is simply claiming that all human actions are of the first sort and that no human actions of the second sort actually exist. That would indeed be an interesting and shocking claim to be able to prove. But the egoist has not proved this. What he has shown in the second stage of the argument is the rather trivial and obvious claim that people do what they want to do when they are free to choose what to do. To see how trivial this claim actually is, consider again the example of the soldier falling on the grenade. When the egoist says that the soldier did this because he wanted to do it, it sounds like the soldier likes grenades exploding inside him, that this is somehow what turns him on. But, of course, that is not at all what is meant in ordinary English when we say that this is what the soldier wanted. All we mean is that the soldier wanted to save his buddies, that he chose to sacrifice his life in order to save theirs. But this is fully compatible with altruism. The altruist must freely choose altruistic acts. He or she must perform these acts because the agent wants to do them. Otherwise the altruist would be forced to perform these acts, but then they wouldn t be the acts of that agent. They wouldn t be altruistic acts. An altruistic act, like any act, must be freely chosen by the agent because it is the one the agent most wants out of all the possible alternatives. Once again we see the importance of careful attention to language in clarifying philosophical confusions. The
only interesting point for the egoist s case is whether what people want to do includes wanting to help other people as well as wanting to help oneself. Of course, it is true that few, if any, human actions are entirely selflessly motivated. Most, if not all, our actions are diluted by at least a partial mixture of selfish desires. When we help someone it makes us feel good, and we know at the back of our minds that this will make it more likely that the friend we have helped will come to our aid when we are in difficulty. Or, when we pick up a hitchhiker, we may be thinking that he or she may give someone else a lift who will, in turn, help someone else, setting up a chain reaction which will eventually come back full circle to us and our advantage. Finally, we may refrain from doing what we know is wrong partly to avoid the pain of guilt. But the egoist is claiming far more than this. The egoist is claiming that the only motivation for any action is self-love and, that is very difficult to show. Generally, egoist elements in the kinds of action described above are insufficient to explain fully the motivation for the action. The pleasure of knowing one has done the right thing, or the guilty pain of doing what is wrong, or the probability of being repaid for every act of kindness is too remote, weak, and generally insufficient to explain the action fully. Sometimes, even when we know that the benefits of a particular action can never match the costs, we carry out the action anyway, simply because we want to help someone or feel that it is the right thing to do, whatever the consequences for us. Bishop Joseph Butler, in his justly famous refutation of Hobbes s egoism in the early eighteenth century, argued that there are many things we hope to achieve in our actions besides the enhancement of self, and that these different objects of human action should not be confused with one another. As he once put it, Everything is what it is, and not another thing. Sometimes, to be sure, the object of our action is to benefit ourselves. This is not, as we saw earlier, necessarily the same as the immediate gratification of impulse. Nor is self-love necessarily or always a bad or immoral principle of behavior. As Butler points out, if everyone looked out for himself in a longterm, rational way, the world would be a better place for everyone. But our actions can also aim at other things as well more particular objectives, for example, such as finishing a five-mile race, going to a concert just to hear the music or reading a book in order to learn more about Italian history. And sometimes our actions are aimed at promoting the good of others. Butler is here following common sense and ordinary language. When we ask someone why he did what he did, it is perfectly appropriate to reply in
any of the following ways: because I felt like it at the moment (immediate impulse), because I thought it would help me in the long run (self-love), because I wanted to learn more about Italian history (a particular objective), or because I wanted to do something to help my sister (altruism). Of course, the egoist recognizes all these different objects of action, but he wants to reduce them all to one sort, those based on self-love. Part of Butler s argument is to challenge this impulse to reduce many different things to some one thing. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. Self-love is not the same as the immediate gratification of impulse, neither of which is identical with the desire for a particular object such as hearing a certain piece of music or learning more about Italian history, each of which is distinct from acts aimed at benevolence and kindness towards others. Rather than trying to reduce everything to some one principle, Butler urges it is more sensible and realistic to simply recognize the different kinds of motives we actually find in life for human action. Thus far we have considered the argument for and against psychological egoism, the view, you may recall, that all human action is in fact always and necessarily self-interested. What about the prescriptive claim of ethical egoism that we ought to be more selfish in our actions? We have already indicated some of the reasons used to support ethical egoism that it is superior to acting on short-term immediate impulse, that, if adopted by everyone and carried out intelligently, everyone would be better off and the world would be a better place in which to live, and that it is more honest, natural, and less hypocritical. We have also mentioned Baier s argument against ethical egoism, that it does not meet the minimal requirements to be an ethical theory in the first place that it is not a moral theory at all, good or bad. But one of the most powerful arguments against ethical egoism is one offered by Butler. If, as Butler insists, we sometimes act out of self-interest, sometimes on impulse, sometimes for particular objects, and sometimes out of concern for others, and if, as Butler argues, all of these are morally appropriate in the right circumstances, the question arises when should we act out of self-interest and when should we act out of concern for others, or for some other reason. By definition, a theory of ethics should provide a decision procedure at the highest level for selecting among legitimate but lower-order moral principles. Without such a highest-order principle for deciding among the lowerorder rules we really don t have a moral theory. In more commonsense terms, we know that it is sometimes good to act in our own self-interest, as when we study hard for an exam, and we also
know that it is sometimes good to sacrifice our own benefit for the greater good of other people, as when we agree to forgo a night on the town to help a friend prepare for an algebra exam. The point is, how do we know which principle to appeal to in a given situation the egoist principle encourages us to look out for number one, while the altruistic principle urges us always to come to the aid of the other person. Clearly, neither principle, by itself, can arbitrate between these competing principles, each of which is perfectly valid in its own right. What we need is a higher-order rule and this cannot be self-interest, since it is one of the lower-order principles over which arbitration is required.