This thread turns me on. I LOVE PHILOSOPHY.
"The theory is that when we act, we act out of self-love, or self-interest. Sometimes, more fashionably, the idea is that we only ever act of what is in the interest of our genes, but I shall consider the more traditional view first. This view goes under the heading of
psychological egoism. It has a tremendous emotional power. If we believe it, we know the world, we are nobody's fool. We are not taken in by cant and hypocrisy; like conspiracy theorists, we have penetrated below the surface; like Freud finding sex everywhere or Marx finding economics everywhere, we see the real face of human beings behind the mask.
It is true that this view is not very popular among philosophers, but everyone acknowledges that it is one of those hardy perennials that never die, however thoroughly philosophers believe they have dug up the roots. The standard attempt to dig them up is due to Bishop Butler, and has been accepted and repeated in various forms by Bradley, Sidgwick, Broad, and many others. Butler begins with a powerful a priori point: even if there is a principle of self-interest, it has to be true that as well as acting on it in the abstract, we aim at particular external things. We want, on occasions, drink, food, warmth, exercise, and so on. These, the psychological egoist says, are desired as a means to our happiness or ease or content, it is in his interest that these particular desires are met, and it is because it is in his interests that the desires exist. But at any rate, says Butler,
that all particular appetites and passions are towards external things themselves, distinct from the pleasure arising from them, is manifested from hence; that there could not be this pleasure, were itnot for that prior suitableness between the object and the passion:there could be no enjoyment or delight from one thing more than another, from eating food more than swallowing a stone, if there were not an affection or appetite to one thing more than another.
The point being that we have to admit that we have a desire
for the water or food or whatever, since it were not so, there would be no 'pleasure' arising from satisfaction of the desire. The desire for water or food Butler calls a particular affection, and his first point is to distinguish having such a particular affection from having an interest in the 'pleasure arising' from its fulfillment.
What Butler is doing is forcing the distinction between:
(1) The object of my 'particular' desire, which might equally be for water, food, of the happiness of my neighbor...
on the one hand, and:
(2) The pleasure that will accrue to me upon the satisfaction of that desire
on the other hand. Inevitably the pleasure mentioned in (2) is my pleasure, because it is my desire that we are talking about. But, Butler argues, we should not conclude from that fact alone that the
principle of my action is always self love. . .
The fallacy [of psychological egoism] turns on ambiguity in English constructions with the word 'pleasant'. If I am concerned for the survival of the whales, we might say that I find their survival pleasant to contemplate, and by confusion we might go on to say that this identifies a pleasure for the sake of which I am campaigning.
Why is this a confusion?. . .Not all desires seem to bring 'pleasure' upon being gratified. I may want to go for a run, not because I find it enjoyable or expect it to be pleasant, but because I believe it is good for my health, and I want to be healthy. Or, I might have a sudden craving for some special food, even though I don't much like its taste, and don't expect to get much pleasure from eating it. Psychologists sometimes talk of satisfaction of desire in terms of release of tension rather than onset of pleasure. . .[But] 'I want a paper and 'I want to be released from the pressure of wanting a paper' are two different things. . .If someone hurled me onto a couch and psychoanlyzed me out of my desire, and thereby released me from the pressure, I would not have got what I wanted--that is, a paper.
I might be satisfied with this way of removing the desire, but only if at some level I did not really 'identify' with the desire. . .If I want the destruction of my enemy, or the health and happines of my children, I don't want to live in a fool's paradise, in which I believe wrongly that my enemy has been destroyed or my children live in health and happiness. I want these things to be
really so. My own states of mind are incidental.
[HERE COMES THE CLINCHER]
Egoism rightly notices that there is a subjective change: a change from a state of desire to a state of fulfillment. This is the change occurring when the subject has a desire gratified. Then the present suggestion of the egoist is that this change, whether we describe it in terms of a pleasure, or release of a pressure, or in some other way, is always the real object of desire. But Butler's a priori point is that this cannot possibly be true. From this change from 'having a desire to having no desire' can only itself be a
parasitic object of desire. It is a change that presupposes a preceding desire--what Butler calls the particular appetite or passion, such as the desire for a paper or the well-being of my children in these examples--that is gratified or goes away. The desire to 'be someone who has his desires gone' is a second-order desire: it presupposes others. The egoist cannot simply pretend that the second-order desire is all there is. . .
Seeking revenge, perhaps I 'run upon certain ruin' to do harm to my enemy. Here the object of my particular desire is my enemy's harm. I do not act for the sake of my own pleasure, nor, obviously, for the sake of my own ruin. I concentrate my efforts on my enemy. Such examples exist, empirically, and they seem to be enough to refute any psychological egoist who believes that self-interest is
always one of our objects, even if Butler has shown that it cannot be the only one. Butler shrewdly offers us the bad case as well as the good, presumably since the example of malice or revenge is perhaps more apt to appeal to the cynic, who prides himself on detecting self-interest under the bland mask of goodness. . .
Concern for my neighbor's good is just that--a concern. It is no more opposed to my own interst than resentment, or ambition, or concern for an inanimate object or pet."
That is taken from Simon Blackburn's book
Ruling Passions, Chapter 5, "Looking out for yourself". He also goes on to refute genetic/biological arguments about the same topic. Pretty much represents what I believe...
That was a helluva lot to type. I'm almost embarassed to post it but now that I've typed it up I'm sure not wasting it.
Altruism?
Linear Mode
