Psychological Egoism
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- čas přidán 3. 07. 2024
- According to psychological egoism, all people are ultimately motivated by their own self-interest. Genuine altruism is impossible. This video outlines the case for and against psychological egoism.
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0:00 - Egoism vs pluralism
4:52 - Altruistic behaviour
11:38 - Falsifiability
18:50 - Desire ownership
24:55 - The pursuit of pleasure
32:09 - Parsimony
36:33 - An evolutionary argument
Me watching this video is purely motivated by self interest
This all confusion goes back to descartes' mind body dualism shenanigans. There no transcendental you(mind) in charge of the corporeal you(body/sense perceptions/agency). It is all just one, the you. It is all a biological trick whenever you feel someone is holding the steering wheel in your skull. Our body has a lot of random(mathematically random) and chaotic and casually connected stuff going on all the time. We by definition cannot observe our "mind". No one has ever observed a mind.
There is no free will, but its illusion. It becomes more clearer when you start from single cellular organisms, and you can clearly see their consciousness is purely chemical, a causal chain of chemical reactions, governing their movement and behavior. Some fungi show exceptionally complex behavior, but purely driven by chemical reactions. Same goes for multicellular organisms albeit in a more convoluted manner.
Me writing this comment was not in my control, when i stop writing it, that too is not in my control, because I cannot control me. X by definition cannot control X, you need something non-X to control X.
This was one of my favorite concepts as a teenager because I came up with it on my own (and then found information about it). It sucks that in reality, selfishness and altruism are rather terms that describe what benefits your actions bring and there is little point in labeling everything as “selfishness.” I only use this when someone says things like "it's selfish not to have children" or something like that, because the best method to destroy such a statement is to use the psychological selfishness argument.
I discovered it the same way!
My PhD thesis is on this topic and I can say that this video is a very good summary of the debate.
If you watched this and want to read more about it, here are three suggestions:
1. The book Unto Others, by Elliott Sober and D. S Wilson (here you find the evolutionary argument for the existence of altruistic motivation)
2. Daniel Batson's 2011 "Altruism in Humans" (here you find the empirical research in social psychology that tries to make a case for psychological altruism)
3. Stephen Stich's work on this topic (he offers the best criticism of Sober's argument - worth checking!)
Extra suggestion: the work of Armin Schulz on the topic offers a new sort of evolutionary argument for psychological altruism -- it is the most recent development in the debate.
In case anyone is interested, my thesis also offers an overview of many aspects of the debate in an accessible language. It is called "Altruistic Motivation Beyond Ultimate Desires", and is available online. I argue that this way of conceptualizing altruism and egoism are problematic and should be changed (so it is not an argument for or against p. altruism, but a proposal of changing our way of thinking about it).
@@jorgemendoncajunior6961 That Thesis sounds interesting, I personally felt throughout the entire video as if I was watching two groups, standing perpendicularly to one another and about a straight line, arguing whether the line before them was vertical or horizontal
Wanting to be a hero, pride, sacrifice and hubris that comes with it can be very egoistical as well as irrational. Nietzsche touched this subject when explaining why soldiers sacrificing their life for the homeland and mothers sacrificing for their child are all selfless acts because they see and value child/homeland as part of their own self identity. Overall it’s sad that today we have such narrow minded frame work for egoism and selfish acts when we should be able to distinguish between moral and immoral egoism.
Yes, "selfish" just has a negative connotation as much as "selling" has. Both are necessary. Someone can't buy without someone else selling and the other is selling because they don't want what they have as much as they want the others' money. One sells their money, the other sells their product. Everyone is selling something all the time. This perpetually sinful view of man has led us to these conclusions. Every act must be somehow tainted with a "bad". And there's also this "balancing instinct" people have. If you feel good eating a candy bar, there has to be necessarily something bad about it or take anything else. We can perhaps see how things like self pleasure and indulgence all became sins because of this 'balancing instinct'. What's excess for one may be the primer for the other. Who decides?
@@ItsMeChillTymeImmanuel Kant decides that.
Surely the idea of egoism depends on how we define ego, just like selfishness depends on what is considered self. In the context of biological evolution, it is commonplace to see parents sacrifice themselves for their offspring, and this is described by evolutionary theorists as 'beneficial' to the organism. But if reproductive fitness is what this individual organism is trying to maximize, what defines self in that case? It seems 'the organism and their relatives (specifically offspring, in this case)' is the self. If we're willing to let 'self' be flexible (I think this is the only possible way 'self' can even make sense) then we're forced to conclude that just about anything can be selfish. One of the most altruistic acts (sacrificing yourself for your children) is selfish if the 'self' is the organism's germ line. See? The self is just benefiting the self.
I feel that the discussion on psychological egoism, like that on free will, soon devolves into the incoherent demand that *we* be the authors of our feelings and our desires, just as the determinist would demand that we be the authors of our own soul and mind, in order to grant that we are "free" to act.
In other words, it is never considered enough evidence for altruism that I have demonstrably altruistic desires, sentiments or motives; so long as the egoist can claim that "this is the way we're wired", these qualities no longer "count". And yet, it's literally impossible to go against the way we're wired, as impossible as it is to produce a square circle: not because of any limitation, but simply because a square circle is a _meaningless_ term.
As Stanislaw Lem put it in his _Cyberiad_ :
"No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!"
We love you and don't care if you're just uploading videos for selfish reasons.
The highest moral statement was the sermon on the mount. The success of the species as whole is more important than the succes of the individual. Altruism is best for the species.
love this video, the order of the topics introduced was good and i kept waiting for u to address my thoughts on the matter, which you eventually did, then you continued on topics i hadnt thought of
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
I had to comment for the "it may be in your self interest" comment. A+
I love you please never stop
First, a small correction. You said “actions are underdetermined by motives”. If I’m not mistaken, you mean “motives are underdetermined by actions”. IOW, you can’t necessarily determine a motive by the action.
Second, the view of motivation I hold to is BDI+ICA. This is: belief + desire = intent. Intent + circumstance = act.
Therefore, all intentional actions are done to fulfill one’s own internal desires. However, the desire can be for virtually any proposition including *purely other-concerning* desires. Desires are an impetus, but it’s not necessarily true that the fulfillment of a desire will make us happy or give us pleasure. We don’t need these tortured stories of “they’ll remember my legacy”.
Oh boy, can't wait to put on my "assume consciousness and self are contained in individual persons" hat for this one!!
Just offering food for thought!
- mutual aid is evolutionary. Suring-up the health of one's siblings' children and the human group as a whole, advantages all the genes you share with others of your species. Who is to say that the genes housed in your body make up "you" more than the same genes dispersed throughout other bodies? Not Darwin!
- cognitive capacity, down to the ability to even hold a thought in your head for any length of time, is dramatically lowered when we are NOT in face to face conversation. You could argue that a human alone experiences only partial consciousness, and that full selfhood only exists in communication.
- language is critical to forming and ordering memory, which is critical to having the notion of a selfhood that is made up of one's knowledge and experiences. Language is something we do not invent by ourselves, but intuitively absorb from others. To even think the thought "I am a solipsistic individual", requires that your linguistic brain was imprinted with all the patterns of other peoples' thoughts that give the empty symbols of letters and words external meaning.
- people develop physically diagnostic brain damage from isolation. To me that's a strong demonstration that a model of individuals as cells in a greater social organism is superior to models like "homo economicus". We have to suspend disbelief to make use of the rational self interest model of human behavior- but the communal consciousness model asserts itself, even when we try acting contrary.
I've been saying a lot of this since I learnt about what happens to human consciousness in isolation. We aren't pills of consciousness strictly inside bodies of meat, and a lot of entry level philosophy rests on that assumption. A "fundamental human" doesn't exist because a human in a void isn't a conscious thing that we can evaluate, so questions like "are humans fundamentally good/evil?" go down the drain immediately.
I always assumed there were areas of philosophy going down that path but I couldn't even find a name for it. Do you know if it's a field of study or something like that?
there was a period of time where i thought about psychological egoism. thank you for this video
I think it would be great to discuss whether motive is something that's actually observable, or if it even exists. Do plant have motives when they bloom and grow fruits? Is motive inherently psychologically? Or is motive merely something that humans assign based on what's observable? Plants don't have consciousness, and thus don't have altruistic motive, but at the same time, providing food for the ecosystems and thus altruistic.
Another point to make is that when a robot is benefiting another, its action probably won't be considered as altruistic, because its action is automatic. Hence, altruistic motive must come from a conscious mind.
And we can dive deeper into what constitutes a mind, i.e. physicalism dualism etc
“Doing good is it’s own reward” so they say
Often reckless soldiers are suicidal. For others, their life lost its value. Some just want to find some utility in their deaths. Other just dont thin thoroughly. Everything fits in this psychological egoism theory.
Some soldiers are suicidal and suffer from pathological altruism.
I have an unrelated question : is there any progress in philosophy? I feel like there's always a multitude of competing theories and people just pick the ones that they like best.
I feel like philosophy is not rigid enough for "progress" to even be an applicable concept. If something became measurable and testably falsifiable, it would be regarded as science and not philosophy.
I know that the very concept of "progress" is problematic.. I guess what I'm really asking is (and maybe I'm moving the goalpost) : Does it often happen that new arguments are created and that their logic moves a significant number of philosophers? EDIT: nvm found this czcams.com/video/1r1Tje-G7UI/video.html
I have a couple of videos that explore different conceptions of philosophical progress:
(1) czcams.com/video/1r1Tje-G7UI/video.html
(2) czcams.com/video/wbjbVDjiXt4/video.html
My own view is that (a) there is no philosophical progress in any interesting or substantive sense but that (b) this is not a problem; philosophy doesn't need to progress in order to be worthwhile.
@@KaneB Thank you
I purposely do things out of my hedonist interest all the time. It's just dumb to. As someone who helps others and hates doing it, it's hilarious that some people don't think I exist.
44:39 That's a huge difference lmao. The pleasure-pain response may well be the definition biological decision making and thus to have another cause is to be a different thing than decision making.
I was an egoist until I watched this video. Now I’m not sure 😅
General question: when you say "P just in case Q", does that mean P if and only if Q? You say it a lot and I just want clarification, thanks
Yes.
Thanks for your efforts in presenting these clear and pithy videos. This one is no different, Kane.
I have to say I’m not moved by the pluralist responses to the egoist arguments from desire or pleasure seeking. The pluralist wants to say that it’s weird to think of someone who neither feels the desire nor the pleasure of having to sacrifice for a certain cause as altruistic, but I think, on the contrary, this is exactly what we need of “true” or “genuine” or “ultimate” altruistic behavior. Otherwise it seems that altruistic behavior is just a subtype of egoistic behavior where the pleasure of the person just happens to coincide with a certain cause that’ll require some sort of sacrifice in the process. I just can’t see how that’s in any way “truly” altruistic. Maybe we just don’t need to value what “truly” is the case, maybe all we need is apparent altruistic behavior and that’s it, I can see an argument for that. But Psychological Egoism to me always amounted to something more substantial; namely that our actions are always self-serving in some sort, that ultimately speaking, there is no action that will bring about a sacrifice from an individual in exchange for absolutely zero pleasure (or positive feelings) plus some amount of pain.
"Otherwise it seems that altruistic behavior is just a subtype of egoistic behavior where the pleasure of the person just happens to coincide with a certain cause that’ll require some sort of sacrifice in the process."
The issue with that sort of reasoning is that psychological egoism is a claim about motivations and desires, not a claim about states of affair. Even if it *were* the case that every single action is self-serving (which I do find plausible from an evolutionary standpoint; organisms without reinforcing feedback loops would end up sitting there doing nothing, rather than doing egoistic OR altruistic actions) that doesn't change the fact that sequentially speaking, what happens internally in the person is first the desire to do the thing and then the realization that it felt good to do the thing. Since there isn't always an acknowledgement that the feel-good will happen as the prosocial action is selected, the feel-good cannot always be the *reason* why the action was selected. So, sure, on the whole what happened was an exchange, but psychologically speaking, the person did not know they were doing an exchange.
Unless we're arguing that the subconscious is always performing that calculus, and the subconscious is persistently more coherent than the reasoning, but that in itself is a harder claim to defend than psychological egoism.
In fact, I personally think that may be the *strongest* argument against psychological egoism. Psychological egoism requires more deliberation and weighing from brains than brains are actually capable of carrying out at all times.
Hypothetically a person could knowingly take the action of pushing a button which eliminates all future pleasure, and causes them some amount of pain. Why does there need to be pleasure embedded in an action such as this? Not being rude, actually curious if I'm missing something.
@@imheremijo6068 Well, to be fair, psychological egoism is not dependent on psychological hedonism being true, so that hypothetical isn't a defeater either way. I would assume OP is aware of this himself, and his last sentence was an overgeneralization about cost-benefit rather than *literally* talking about pleasure.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 The hypothetical is only directed at psychological hedonism, and I take the hypothetical to be a defeater for that. I think psychological egoism if true, is trivially true. However, what you're saying is fair enough. I just see a lot of people conflate the two.
@@tudornaconecinii3609All desire is a bet on some outcome. Without that bet, a desire is like the desire of a wind up toy as it would see its own. The bet itself feels good over other bets. Imagine you jump off a cliff with a wingsuit to deploy and you feel an itch on your forehead, you can ignore this itch and deploy the wingsuit or scratch this itch and may fail or will fail to deploy, what you do is purely motivated by the bet on future satisfaction of either action. Also, acknowledgement is purely esoteric, interior. You know what you did that you can be certain of so the most proximate center for satisfaction generation is you first. Anything external is further adding to the emotions. I also don't know what you're saying with more or less deliberation. Body language is psychological, yet there's no deliberation on it. You may deliberate, yet the feeling invoked is pre-grammatical in nature.
The evolutionary argument is clear: positive reinforcement or if you like, egoism, is the vehicle for favouring behaviour that promotes survival. From this point of view the herd that encompasses the gene pool and the genes themselves are more important than the individual. This being so, the inevitable consequence is self-sacrifice. It is seen in many species, though often anthropomorphic concepts of ego and even pleasure are not really considered: in any case we do not really have such concepts for ants, for example, in an ant colony.
Of course it can be said, by definition, that any action anyone does, or for that matter any creature does, has to be motivated by some kind of reinforcement mechanism, so to deny altruism on this basis is a rather trivial observation and a teleological error. A similar error to claims that we eat particular foods because they have a pleasurable taste. The pleasurable taste of particular foods is a consequence of evolutionary selection pressures.
Unless I missed it I notice that you did not give a passing reference to Kant's claims that morally virtuous actions were those which are abstracted from egotism. He seemed to think such actions are possible and that any personal satisfaction was an incidental bonus. Presumably psychological egoism completely denies Kant's deontology. Unwittingly Kant may have had a point in that from a more modern perspective it is likely that evolution has favoured a sense of duty that is beneficial for the species, though arguably also with an egotistical albeit evolved sense that responding to this sense of duty (such as sacrificing oneself by protecting others from a bomb) is the right thing to do.
This view relates to my comments about determinism and moral realism in your recent 'ask me anything' video.
You know if youre trying to play the youtube game "Theres no such thing as altruism" or "No one can TRULY be altruistic" would be some good candidates for titles or thumbnails.
Really glad you did this video! Very important for economics, this is almost a blanket underlying assumption within the present dominant paradigm.
Would you care to do one exploring "rationality" at some point as well? There was a really interesting discussion about this during the socialist calculation debate which largely drew on Weber's 4 forms of rationality. Thomas Uebel does a couple of really good papers summarising the debates and positions of some of the key players (Kapp, Neurath, Mises) which I found really good as a jumping off point into it if you were potentially interested
I believe since all experience is equally yours (as it is anyone else's) that "I" (this particular organism writing this) always acts egoistically, even if "I" act for the sake of some other organism (which is also always me).
Hello doc! Why can't sober's criticism be that even the act of saving the child is egoistic as it is so embedded in our psyche to take our genes forward that we don't have to think before acting in that case? Like we don't try to rationalize it at that moment but it's like a short circuit and our sub concious makes that decision?
Since you said you have never encountered a defence of psychological altruism, let me acquaint you with one in this very comment. It is pretty simple, really. You see, we, human beings, are mortal. As much as we may act in our own interest in the course of our lifetimes, all these actions are pointless in the long run, unless we recognise that they eventually serve higher aims, the attainment of which happens, if they are attained at all, after we die. Such aims are effectively altruistic by definition. Hence human beings, even the most self-centered egoists among them, are all ultimately motivated by altruistic goals.
I'm struggling to understand how self-interest and desires are separable. If you (the self) desire something (hold an interest in it) surely that is just another way to describe self-interest, no? Somebody smarter than me please explain this.
Well, if you define desire as just self-interest, naturally they're inseparable.
If I desire that after I and all my progeny are dead, that the human species flourish and live well.....how is that in my self-interest?
I have been waiting for this since the ethical egoism video dropped
Imagine how the folks waiting for the final part of "Quine's objections to modal logic" feel.
There are only two types of action, I guess. Those that align with your desires and those that are involuntary.
Those are not mutually exclusive and all-encompassing categories.
There may be actions that are involuntary and yet desirable. I desire that my heart continue to beat, yet it is entirely beyond the powers of my conscious control to beat my own heart.
A mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of categories would be to say something like "there are two types of actions, voluntary and involuntary" or "there are two types of actions, those which seek to satisfy desires and those which don't."
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep You're correct. What I really meant was that if an action doesn't align with your desires, then it is involuntary.
@@IntegralDeLinha What if I voluntarily choose to act against my desires?
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep That just means you have another preexisting desire that is also stronger than the one you are acting against.
As I see it, there are no other motivational mental states, only desires. It's the simpler explanation of how we function psychologically. You are always acting on behalf of some desire, in a way that is compatible with your beliefs.
I believe psychological egoism is indicative of morality more generally. All moral acts can be reduced to personal pleasure or pain
How do I get any pleasure out of the thought that the world is filled with suffering and I hope it is reduced in the future, even long after I and my bloodline are gone?
@@PhilSophia-ox7ep if that thought weren’t pleasurable in some way to you, you wouldn’t be holding it long term. Perhaps the pleasure in this case resides in your word ‘hope’, or, as I’d suspect, the aphorism ‘life is suffering’ - although it seems saddening on the outside - likely brings comfort via pessimism. (We can often experience pleasure in pain… cynicism about women, for instance, can feel good after a breakup with a woman. Negative thoughts can function as a protective mechanism).
@@bigol7169 I'm not so sure it holds in the case offered. I have no reasonable expectation the future will be all that much different from the past. The misfortunes of life bring me no comfort. The prospect that they may (although not likely) be resolved in the future gives me no pleasure.
Altruistic mechanism is not more effective. Humans as other animals react the quickest on instinct i.e. Anxiety for others in trouble is immediate as you don't decide to eat, you eat on instinct of hunger.
The concept of altruism only applies as to how others see you and whether they like your behavior.
All desires are equal for the subject and are all egoistic but different desires are percieved differently by the group and it is simpler/quicker for others to see what you did than to analyse why so naming actions that benefit others altruistic is the more practical way for the group to encourage or discourage individual behavior. This however doesn't change the fact that it is impossible for an individual behavior not be egoistic
Not to give too much weight to the argument of Parsimony, but proposing that Psychological Altruism has 100s, if not 1000s (or even a near-infinite amount) of "terminal ends" (T-E) which it uses to drive altruistic behavior sounds biologically infeasible. Note that i'm not criticizing any individual T-E as unfeasible, but rather asking how even a complex organism would decide how to act when there are multitudes rather than just a few? Is there a hierarchy between T-E where some are allowed to override others? Is it simply random, where some neurons associated with some T-E happened to fire before others?
Is self-interest synonymous with selfishness?
no
I think not.
Adam Smith distinguished self-interest from selfishness, as did Mill. I think they both offer good reasons to draw such a distinction. Adam Smith calls the pursuit of self-interest under the guidance of the virtues, especially prudence, to be morally praiseworthy.
The word for an unfalsifiable theory is "useless". It doesn't mean it's useless to think about it, but it's useless as a theory that predicts something.
can you please do a video on euthanasia?
Couldn't you say Psychological Egoism is falsifiable, if we could prove that free will exists?
I’m pretty sympathetic to psychological egoism, having arrived at it from the arguments against value pluralism.
It seems difficult to argue that we have multiple incommensurable values which each have motivational force. To judge that one would prefer to do A rather than B seems to require some common unit of measurement between the two. It’s like how we can’t say which is worth more between 10 apples or 5 oranges unless we knew how much each is worth in a common currency.
It seems to me that in order to explain our ability to made decisions and be motivated to do one thing over the other, we need a single motivational “currency” at the ground level which makes all of our (instrumental) values commensurable.
To Sober’s argument, I think this is a plausible explanation for why an altruistic mechanism is simply not possible, at least so long as we also have an egoistic mechanism. There’s no way for our brains to direct our behavior if there are multiple incommensurable values/motivations.
I personally do not think that emotions can just have numbers put on them like that. While people have the ability to make moral judgments and prefer certain actions/outcomes, at a certain point, the difference between good and bad is like trying to decide when a mound becomes a hill. It’s why we have moral dilemmas in the first place. We can only figure out something's value relative to other things. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the financial value of anything is also completely arbitrary. There's no practical reason that people should value things that are scarce. Yes, if food runs low, it's important to get your share in interest of self-preservation. But gold doesn't fight off starvation. The fear of missing out and judgment of those who do does not appear to have benefits.
Egoism is not an empirical claim--its essentially defining all human actions as egoistic. How then can we say if someone is not being egoistic? Psychological egoism clearly just misuses the term 'egoism'-which is obvious if it yields a result that there is no altruism, when we often distinguish between egoistic and altruistic actions. Psychological egoism is attempting to explain away our concepts by misusing them.
Have you considered that framing literally every interesting question as a "misuse" of words is a misuse of "misuse"? 😉
As it happens though, I agree in this particular case. I see psychological egoism as pretty much just stipulating a rather unusual technical meaning for words like "altruism", "desire", etc.
@@KaneB I would agree .... for interesting questions!! 😎
and yep agreed. a common occurrence, those sneaky hidden neologisms! leads people to believe crazy things like everyone is an egoist, we cannot act freely, nothing can be possible or necessary, etc etc
I feel like these kind of questions gets lost in the assumption that Plato's world of ideas is a thing and end up headbutting into the expected fallacies stemming from the arbitrary set of beliefs that serve as axioms for our train of thought. There's no reason to believe that a fundamental concept of "altruism" to be judged in an absolute manner even exists, yet the issue is always presented as if everyone on board is taking the question as valid.
We've recently had experiments showing that our consciousness can begin to disappear if we're deprived from external inputs for long enough. The implication, that our consciousness isn't a fundamental part of our "self" and it relies on the interaction with an external world, is a very powerful tool to explore these questions and I wonder if there is an already established wing of philosophy that already describes that. Personally, it ended up making me see these questions as tantamount to asking whether Hulk or Thor is stronger. And I don't mean it to say discussing them is useless, I know I enjoyed talking about stuff like that from time to time, but I feel like they get an air of academic seriousness that they don't deserve.
Underrated comment
I think we can agree that a pluralist cannot claim that altruism is some stance independent event. People perform altruistic acts because they satisfy their desires.
One unmentioned defense of egoism is that it is used as a useful fiction axiom for econ science. Economics has progressed pretty well in terms of predicting behaviour. This is evidence that it's assumptions, including egoism, are true.
It isn't relying on "reinterpreting motives". The egoist isn't saying that there are "real" or "hidden" motives in place of the altruistic one. It's relying on the fact that motive itself is inherently egoistic. Without self interest, one can't be motivated at all. The pluralist wants to redefine and frame things where his position is the center, and the egoist is the radical opinion. It is the pluralist that is "reinterpreting motives" in a rhetorical attempt to justify a spook like altruism. The egoist actually agrees with the pluralist on the facts, but the egoist position allows one to better analyze his motives (consciousness of egoism), where the pluralist is blind.
And that argument about the simplest explanation is laughably bad. Brushing the argument off with "it's called being a decent person!" is not an argument. It's not a problem for the egoist in the slightest lol.
Those last arguments are so bad. Appealing to the existence of instinct or reflex (which is what he's doing) has nothing to do with the debate. Reflexes aren't motivated, voluntary actions.
Like it or not, the strategy of reinterpreting motives is in fact how egoists often proceed. Of course, there are other approaches to egoism, but then I did talk about those in the video, as when I discussed the desire ownership argument, which appears to be what you're getting at with the idea that "motive itself is inherently egoistic." This strikes me as far weaker than reinterpreting motives, since it pretty much amounts to just defining "self-interest" in an unconventional way. It saves egoism at the cost of turning the debate between egoists and altruists into a mere verbal dispute.
>> Brushing the argument off with "it's called being a decent person!" is not an argument
I'm not sure what this is in reference to. The response to the simplicity argument is that egoism is not obviously simpler, since although it postulates only one ultimate desire, it (arguably) postulates various intermediary causal beliefs that the pluralist does not have to appeal to.
>> Appealing to the existence of instinct or reflex (which is what he's doing) has nothing to do with the debate. Reflexes aren't motivated, voluntary actions.
I don't see how it makes any difference whether the mechanisms in question operate as reflexes or via motivated, voluntary actions. In any case, insofar as instincts/reflexes evince one's ultimate desires, which seems plausible, they obviously do have a bearing on the debate.
You're literally reinterpreting motives in favour of psychological egoism whilst insisting that isn't what psychological egoism does. You assert that motives can only emerge from self-interest. That is a reinterpretation of motivation. If I want the human race to flourish long after my bloodline has died out, how does that in any way serve my self-interest in even the most broadly defined sense?
Great video. I find Egoism an interesting subject because almost all philosophers agree that it is wrong, yet many people are drawn to it anyway. Why is so popular? I think two of the reasons you covered in your video. 1: Since it is unfalsifiable, we don't have to do any real investigation (like asking people what their motives actually are). Instead, we just posit hypothetical motives and call this an "argument". 2: Since it is simple (along the lines of Okham's Razor), we don't need to do worry ourselves about it. We just stick to this one idea and use it to "explain everything". In short, I think that people believe in egoism because it gives them an excuse to stop thinking.
I haven't watched the video yet. I just glanced at it and I could swear the title was "pathological egoism". It would be funny if the video made a distinction between a healthy kind of self-interest and a pathological one
12 times a day probably isn't healthy, but I can't help myself.
imma just lay it on you but this philosophical position strictly and exclusively exists to justify actual egoism as a viable social policy by using a frankly obtuse argument to claim that actual egoism is functionally indistinguishable from actual altruism; it's as natural for the upper classes to buy into it as it for them to buy into the notion that God ordained them to be the rulers of society. It's only a position that makes sense to the already individualist-brained westerner as one of the asinine ways to justify the catastrophy that is global imperialist capitalism
How can it exist strictly and exclusively (your words) as a justification for global imperialist capitalism if the concepts of egoism and altruism are older than (western) global imperialist capitalism?
I won't be able to watch this until later so I apologize if this question is addressed in the video, but wouldn't a belief in materialism necessarily make altruism definitionally impossible? I just want to ask this now before I forget.
Why would it?
Material gives rise to the mind/motivations, and all motivations are determined by material. Any interaction necessitates an exchange/manipulation of material. As such, you can't detach motivation from the physical, which in turn implies "altruism" exists on a physical spectrum, and is not a binary. Therefore something cannot be definitionally "altruistic", in an absolute sense.@@FootnotesToPlato
I followed you until 'which in turn implies "altruism" exists on a physical spectrum, and is not a binary'. Why does physicalism mean there cannot be a binary of 'motivated by alturism' and 'not motivated by alturism' @@rollingr0ck
10:59
The self-adverts are getting better by the second 👀
Good video doctor B.
1. 42:29 I do not find the evolutionary argument compelling. You say that she says that the ALT route needs only one step; the belief that the child is in danger while the EGO route demands another causal step; a feeling of anxiety or fear plus the belief that the child is in danger. Does the philosopher assume the first mother can't have feelings and doesn’t have feelings along with the belief that her child is in danger? If so then the Egoist could say that she doesn't feel anxious about her child; and any negative feelings when it's in danger, and if those feelings are claimed that should be present during altruistic actions then the Egoist takes a point. Anyways, the point is that, given your info you gave of the philosopher's writing, she doesn’t think that beliefs cause emotions. In her sketch with the boxes, both ALT and EGO can be said to be...EGO: because in the first case as well the mother should feel anxiety or/and fear.
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2. Psychological Egoism has a massive appeal for me: in fact it seems like an indestructible view. I can't see a hard refutation (in this video). The fact that it's non-falsifiable; this could be said to be a problem as far as our desire to know abiut the human psyche is concerned. But it can't be said to be either true or false because of it. It's a waste of time for a philosopher to engage in this topic in my view. And yes I'm aware that you pointed out that with that Mercury example that it can be viewed as not a problem. Also, it's indestructible because of the interpretation of motivations.
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3. 36:00 I disagree with the last little paragraph that starts with 'Moreover,'.There doesn’t need to be self-awareness to weight up the pros and cons of every action about to be done. A person can act based on his desires even if he doesn't do this kind of calculation. He can just not know it and think...that he is being altruistic. Buddhist meditation can help; along with self-psychoanalysis.
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4. I really dislike the distinction of intrinsic and extrinsic value (instrumental) in axiology and here. The way I see there can't ever be intrinsic value and Psychological Egoism aligns with this view well. Whatever is done; whatever action, is done for the underlying feeling; thus instrumental. Even if a Pluralist says a desire can be said to be altruistic, it's still your desire: thus Psychological Egoism applies.
the egoist perspective on the evolutionary front seems totally myopic to me. I am of perspective that the genes really have the reins on our behavior on the species level, evolution doesn't do its "work" on the individual, that just doesn't make sense. There is the example of a prey bird, perhaps an older bird or parent, in a flock breaking from the flock to distract a predator, increasing the survival of the flock but decreasing their individual chance of survival. The egoist perspective does not make sense of this. This is altruistic behavior that is actively decreasing the bird's chance of survival, so why isn't it selected out? Genes don't care what we call them, if they reproduced, they succeeded, and from this gene's perspective it's doing great because it survives collectively in the flocks members. So the egoist claiming some set of genes cannot exist are either wrong against the supporting evidence or are playing language games ("it is actually selfish for the lone bird to protect its flock because it is simply trying to reduce the painful feelings in its circuity at the 'thought' of them being eaten" etc etc). Altruism and other pro-social behaviors clearly have their survival advantages, so it's not surprising at all they would emerge literally everywhere. I don't actually believe the egoist if they sidestep into the honestly more interesting technical questions of how our neurobiology actually works by linking 'egotism' with some sort of determinism, generally this all seems like cover to me to support some sort of Hobbesian or pessimistic worldview/bias.
Psychological egoists are marginalised by falling out of the cooperation loop that builds wealth in a social system if analysed through a version of game theory as iterated rounds of tit for tat through the lens of the nation state. Psychological egoists as peripheral actors often are socially categorised as a form of deviance. Prototypical ultraist are the public servants denoted by job title as devoted to citizen welfare but can even claim to be psychological egoists. All other citizens are on a spectrum as ultimate authentic psychological egoists. At the public service symbolic end is the altruistic business person (non-state actor) who hires persons to work for goods and services that are wanted by the public. So giving stuff is ultraistic even if for profit. The authentic psychological egoist are denoted as the poorest of the poor who are constrained maximisers of wealth to reductio absurdum psychological egoist states within the nation state. This is evident that even the altruistic business person rejects their only resource as labour let alone other citizens who may give them alms to render their core (ego) wellbeing (psychology) from further alienation from cooperation. So even their means of production if they do produce stuff like artefacts as object art are rejected if we can imagine as an intuition pump the scene of a deviant enterprising dumpster diver setting up a market stall selling recycled stuff for public consumption. Therefore a psychological egoist as a social category and even a self category if possible without doing it entails ultimate marginalisation due to being ostracised by society which functions on forms of stratified cooperation gained from evolutionary tit for tat in itinerant rounds for resources. The other form is found in sub cultures or deviant group structures where the sub group forms ideological extraction as periphery from the core as dominant society. Though within the group a member could compete for being prototypical psychological egoist as in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film A Clockwork Orange. The psychological egoist falls into a form of social death as reciprocation requires an in-group structure for altruism to be true. So a sub culture in a sense is a proxy for altruism where the society becomes the out-group to the detriment of members. This suggests a pain in being a psychological egoist which motivates humans towards in-group cooperation or else go for social isolation which is social death. However for the minority who can live with it then this can form for the begins into a quality hedonistic lifestyle and life of the mind.
Well i never considered genuine idealistic altruism as something feasible. Yes, you might have any degree of self interest or ego involved at any point before, during or after the act, but i don't think that makes the notion, or our understanding of altruism useless, and i don't think that altruistic acts have to fit these ideals to be useful.
First!
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@@KaneB The early bird catches the worm!
@@CelticMathemagician there's no need to call mr baker a worm
@@MrAdamo I like worms!
@@MrAdamo what is wrong with worms? You are not a bigoted wormist now. Are you?
I think Sober's evolutionary argument misses some nuances of selection, and I am very frustrated by this. Maybe depending on where the goal posts of altruism fall this may not be an issue, but it bugs me that promoting offspring fitness doesn't seem to be classified as self interest.
Why would it be classified as self-interest? Verity's child is not literally Verity, unless you have a very unconventional conception of personal identity. It seems like you might be hinting at something like the "selfish gene" model, which Sober's argument doesn't address and is simply a different question. The question here is whether there are any ultimately altruistic psychological motives, and it is possible that genes could promote their own replication by constructing vehicles with altruistic motives.
Maybe, but it's a terrible universal moral, because altruists need egoists to be able to act truly altruistic.
Uh, no they don't? The world could consist of a village of 10 people, all being altruist, all doing altruistic things for one another. Egoists existing makes up a good contrast for altruists to compare themselves to but egoists are _not_ necessary for there to be altruistic actions/people.
@@Craxxet Altruists live for other people. If those other people are altruists themselves, there is no point in giving them, as they only want to see others happy, which, since you are an altruist as well, would end in a stalemate of misery.
@@uzefulvideos3440No, it wouldn't end in a stalemate. If everyone is helping everyone, and everyone wants to see others happy, rejecting mutual aid and ending up in misery wouldn't realize that goal. The altruistic would be, in such a scenario, as willing to accept the charity and aid of others as they would be willing to offer it since only that realizes their end.
Comte created the term "Altruism." There is nothing good about altruism. As you note altruism is prized as a way to herd people to sacrifice themselves for a cause. Such behavior is nihilistic and quickly becomes a zero sum game.
It sounds overly pretentious and distracting when you discuss whether a soldier who throws HERself on a grenade is doing it for altruistic reasons (how many times has that happened?), but no doubt you are only using that pronoun out of altruistic concern for women :)
No, I'm using it because I'm attracted to women so I prefer to imagine them in my thought experiments. Sorry it triggers you.
@@KaneBmakes me wonder whether I have been gay all along
@@KaneB You are attracted to women, so you like to imagine them throwing themselves onto grenades? Hmm...
@@guppy9250 Yes. After all, I have to imagine *somebody* jumping onto the imaginary grenade. Only sexy cannon fodder is allowed in my head.
@@KaneB
KaneB has an amazonian fetish confirmed?
I don't think the dichotomy between psychological egoism and altruism is a true dichotomy. We're a social species. We evolved alongside other people. Anything done in my interest will be orthogonally related to something done in the interests of others. There's no real dichotomy here. We do thing with the social interest and our personal interests in mind, and those are bound up together and have always been bound up together.
“Maybe a female soldier jumped on a grenade” . . . Yeah, maybe that happened once. Did you get a psychological ego boost as a male feminist?
Why not just write "I'm a loser" on a post-it note and put it on your forehead? You'd communicate the same thing much more efficiently.
@@KaneB Perhaps you are underestimating your number of views.
In case you didn't know, it's a neutral 'she' that can refer to any gender/sex. This is quite common in philosophy.
schadenfreude. im more and more convinced that people are usually motivated by the self. one example is envy. it hink people are envious of the successes of others, especially those who they are close to and who share similar passions and interests. maybe they might not actively root for their failure, but they wont be happy with their success.