All Your Actions Are Selfish

Acts of kindness exist all around us. From the stranger holding the door open for you to the person giving up their seat on the bus for a pregnant woman, kindness is everywhere. But are these people really being kind, or are they truly just selfish?

Maybe that person holding the door open just wants to hear a ‘thank you’ and feel important, so they hold doors open because they know they’ll get that reward. Or perhaps the person giving up their seat just wants to look good to the others around them on the bus — they get some sort of social high from doing good deeds. In these cases, we wouldn’t call these acts kind; we would call them selfish.

Psychological egoism takes these ideas to an extreme. It is the theory that every single voluntary action, when examined closely enough, will turn out to be a selfish one. This was a prevalent theory in the 1900s and early 2000s among psychologists and economists and is even assumed to be the case today when explaining human choices in economic terms.

Unlike ethical theories, which I’ve written about before, psychological egoism isn’t a prescription about how we should act or what is right and wrong. Instead, it is a way of explaining the world as it is now. It is a theory that claims that this is the way we already act, whether we know it or not.

But why did this theory take off so strongly? Let’s take a look at some of the biggest arguments in its favour, and some arguments against them outlined by philosopher Joel Feinberg.

Argument 1: Every voluntary action of yours is prompted by motives from within you. Therefore, all your actions just aim to satisfy your desires, which is another way of saying you do things only for yourself.

It is obvious that every voluntary action you do — be it holding the door open or making a cup of tea — is motivated by something from with you. That statement is a fact and extremely difficult to disprove. The egoist then says that, because all of these desires are yours, and every action you do goes towards satisfying them, you are just selfish and always working for your benefit.

At first glance, this is a pretty intuitive and convincing argument. We can’t deny that every action is motivated from within us. And it looks quite obvious then that everything we do just satisfies those wishes. If that isn’t being selfish, then what is?

Looking at the argument closer, though, it is an invalid one. An invalid argument is one in which the conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the premises. In this case, the premise that ‘all actions come from motivations within you’ doesn’t prove the conclusion that ‘all actions are selfish.’

While the psychological egoist is right that every action one commits voluntarily does come from motives and desires within them, this does not prove that the motives behind all actions are selfish. Selfish desires that the egoist claims are our true goal are simply a subset of all other motives we may have, and the egoist has not proved that it is this subset that prompts all actions.

Argument 2: When you get what you want, you feel pleasure in the form of satisfaction. Thus, everyone is truly aiming towards that pleasure when working towards any other goal, i.e., anything besides the pleasure is a means to that end.

Again, this seems like a pretty solid and intuitive argument. When you get something done, be it finishing an assignment or finally cleaning out your room after a month of procrastinating it (not speaking from personal experience), you do feel some sort of satisfaction. So it isn’t too big of a jump to say that every action is done just because we enjoy that feeling.

One issue that Feinberg raises with this argument is that it isn’t always the case that you get satisfaction from completing a task. More often than not, we feel nothing after completing it and just move on to the next task. But even in cases where we do get this satisfaction, this argument still doesn’t work.

Consider an ocean liner ship, for example. On a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, it burns around 250 tons of fuel per day. Does that mean, then, that burning fuel is its main purpose and its voyage is just a means to that end? No, of course not! Its main purpose is still to cross the ocean, it just ends up burning all that fuel in the process. Similarly, just because pleasure is produced when completing a task, that does not mean it is the main purpose.

Argument 3: Moral Education is taught through pleasure and pain.

Good manners and morality are teachable things that we learn from our parental figures, teachers, and more. Psychological egoists point out that children learn this good behaviour through pleasure and pain mechanisms; they’re rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad behaviour. Even as adults, some people only act well when there’s something in it for them, not just because it’s the right thing to do.

The issue with this argument appears in something known as the paradox of hedonism. Think of a person whose primary goal in life is to be happy. Every time they make a decision, they make it so that they will get happier from it. Do you think they’d get much happiness? Probably not, right?

If anything, they’d have fewer moments of happiness than someone who was just living their life regularly. This is the paradox of hedonism. The more you look for happiness, the less you seem to get it, and the same is true of the pleasure you get from moral acts. If your only goal is happiness, you won’t get it at all, so it just can’t be the case that you only do the right thing because of the pleasure it gives you.

But if psychological egoism gives good results in things like economics and psychology, why is it so important to disprove?

To understand that, let’s consider a world in which psychological egoism is indeed true. In such a world, there would be no such thing as an ethical judgement or the right thing to do, because everyone would just do what’s best for them alone.

For the study of ethics or justice to exist, psychological egoism must be false, and I believe that it is an unreasonable theory from a philosophical standpoint.

This story was first published on Medium