The AntiChris

bd-from-kg
Yes, you're quite right - I did quote Pryor.

However, Pryor's use of the word "pleasure" was in the context of two, specific, examples in which the use of "pleasure" didn't appear inappropriate. It seemed to me that the main thrust of Pryor's argument was his interpretation of the hierarchy of motivations - it never occurred to me that his use of the term "pleasure" (in his examples) had any other significance than as an illustrative device. I thought it was clear that I was disagreeing with his interpretation of the hierarchy of motivations - nothing more.

In retrospect I can see that this might not have been as obvious as I thought. I apologise for any confusion.
(My emphasis)

I think this shows where the confusion/disagreement lies. The "emotional payback" that I've been referring to is not the same as the emotional satisfaction that one may or may not experience at having accomplished a task.

In this example, the expected emotional payback, which at the most fundamental level motivates the mother to act, would be the avoidance of the undoubted pain she would experience if her child were injured or died. To say that the mother's motive was solely to save the child is exactly the same as saying her motive was to avoid the pain of losing her child - they're fundamentally one and the same.

Do you disagree?

Chris

Mr. Sammi

bd-from-kg,

you seemed to have missed some obvious real life examples. The first of which are the Nuns in Calcutta, Mother Theresa and her gang of helps. I hope you don't expect me to believe the reward of heaven was/is their selfish motivating principles...

The next series of points concerns parenting. Do you think this must necessarily be altruistic, cos IF not we would never have gotten to this disCUSSion board. Then would you agree with me that women may TEND TO BE more altruistic rather than men SEEING THAT women are more often associated with unselfish caring for their babies, over the history of our Earth. As such it may be possible that human nature may be basically altruistic due to apriori conditioning BUT society re-conditions humans towards selfish acts...

What can you say now?


Sammi Na Boodie ()

bd-from-kg

Mr. Sammi:

How are these more obvious than the example of a soldier falling on a live grenade to save his buddies? This is a real-life example; it's happened many, many times. Anyone who doesn't accept that as an example of an altruistic act isn't going to accept anything else either. At that point we're simply faced with a stubborn refusal to look at evidence; there's no point in adducing other examples - at least not real-life ones.

Probably, but such questions are irrelevant to the present discussion.

Mr. Sammi

bd-from-kg,

again you miss the obvious. Workers in Calcutta are alive. Fathers and mothers are alive. Those who jump on the grenades are dead. They may have been a one-time altruistic phenomena. They cannot answer questions. They MAY have lost the right to run from grenades in their nightly poker games, thus they were impelled to jump on the grenade due to a debt. This makes your example uncertifiable. Mothers and fathers are alive. The workers in Calcutta are alive.

The main point here is the 1 time event, even though performed by different persons. Each could have had their own reason, purely selfish to get out of the HELL OF WAR.

My example is a life long series of events. Which has more clout in looking at the for all existential qualifier clause? Not your example, because it has been shown as weak in the light of my example. Thank you for conceding this point.


Secondly, to evade the example of altruism as possibly witnessed amoung our society would not be irrelevant to this discussion. It is only irrelevant because you want it to be irrelevant, because in the face of good sense, you have failed to properly qualify irrelevance. Your statements were irrelevant.

Finally there is no sound reason where definitive examples of altruism in the real world should be ignored because you wish it, because you deem one example is enough. That is, contrarily those examples should be embraced because it is so difficult to find sound examples.

Sammi Na Boodie (waiting for your concession)

jpbrooks

Hi bd.

I am late in commenting on this topic because I was "banned" for not having a working e-mail address.

I agree that PE fails for the reason you gave above because it is usually presented as an empirical claim that can be confirmed directly by observation.
But what if PE is presented at the outset only as a "theory" that may have some plausibility? In that case, I'm not so sure that the "unfalsifiability" argument would really constitute a refutation of PE. PE's plausibility, like that of Carl Jung's theory of "Archetypes" (which Jung admittedly did claim to be based on empirical observation), could be then judged by its consistency with(in) the framework of more general psychological theories. In other words, depending on how PE is presented, it is not so clear that PE can be so easily dismissed.

However, even if PE in any form can be refuted, this would not automatically refute Psychological Hedonism (PH) because it could still be the case (as was suggested earlier) that happiness is a basic (but "unconscious") motivation, which seems to carry the implication that all of our conscious motivations need not be selfish. That is, PH is true even if PE isn't. Of course, this would mean that there can be some kind of psychological theory of unselfish acts, but I'm not familiar enough with psychology to formulate such a theory.

I'll be back later.

-John Phillip Brooks

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Although the phenomema of healthy people willingly sacrificing themselves for others is interesting--

--I find it much more interesting to refute the arguments of those who claim that it is one's duty to sacrifice for others.

Altruism isn't only about people who willingly choose to help others. (It's their life, after all--if they wish to sacrifice themselves, they are free to do so.)

Often, altruism is advocated by a first party to try to persuade a second party to sacrifice for a third party, believing that sacrifice is moral, and self-interest is not.

Keith.

bd-from-kg

Mr. Sammi:

The point is presumably that we can just ask them what their motives are. But this doesn't work. People are often not aware of their real motives, and people often lie about their true motives even when they're aware of them. Oddly enough, when we're not aware of our real motives they are amost always less altruistic than the ones we think we have. The same goes for lying about motives.

Our motives are private: others do not have access to them, and often we ourselves do not have access to them. Thus any story about a person's motives is uncertifiable. All that we can do is assess conflicting stories in the light of our knowledge of human nature. In many cases it is also helpful to look at "thought experiments", especially when two outcomes (such as getting what one desires and experiencing satisfaction from getting what one desires) almost always go together in "real life". Thought experiments allow us to imagine situations where they do not go together, which is helpful in assessing what is the real motivation, or which of two motivations is the more important.

Sure, that's possible. So let's look at the possibility. How many of them were actually in hellish situations? How many had nothing much to live for? And so forth. There are reasonable ways to assess the likelihood of this kind of motive. Why don't PE advocates ever even consider doing this kind of empirical research?

We might also ask why, if they were so desperate to escape a hellish situation, they didn't just shoot themselves. It's not as though they didn't have access to guns.

Sure. And they may have thought that the grenades were chocolate Easter bunnies that the enemy was throwing to them in a fit of generosity. Let's get real.

I didn't say that your example is irrelevant, I just said that in my judgment it's not among the best evidence.

It's not a matter of what I wish, it's a matter of judging what examples provide the best evidence. Mother Theresa and the nuns who followed her are not the best evidence, much less "definitive examples". It's ridiculously easy to think of possible self-interested motives for their actions. You already mentioned an obvious candidate (Heaven/Hell). Whether I think it's plausible is irrelevant. Lots of people do think it's plausible. Heck, the Church itself has often exhorted people to act virtuously in order to get to Heaven and avoid Hell, so it must think this is a pretty plausible motivation. Who am I to argue with the Church?

Anyway, this is a strange form of argument. You're not criticizing my argument, you're just saying that I could do better. Well, if you think you can do better, go ahead. Use Mother Theresa as an example of altruism. You use your examples, I'll use mine. I wouldn't mind having an ally here. (Several would be even better.)

bd-from-kg

99Percent:

On the contrary, it’s clear that you haven’t the least idea what I was saying.

As we shall see in a moment, what you really suggest is to obliterate the difference by defining “self-interest” in exactly the way I warned against: a way that makes all actions self-interested by definition.

Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re defining yourself to be correct. You define the “self-interest” of the agent as anything that he’s interested in achieving. You then observe that if someone tries to achieve something, he must be interested in achieving it (which is certainly true) and therefore achieving it is in his self-interest. This is the very thing that I warned against.

When you say that a person who acts to achieve a goal is “by its act itself taking it for his own happiness”, there are two possible interpretations: (1) You’re defining the happiness of the agent as consisting of achieving a goal that he has, or (2) You’re asserting the agent’s ultimate goal is necessarily his own happiness (in the ordinary sense). But in the first case you’re simply defining terms in such a way as to make PH true by definition. It would be true in any possible world, and therefore is has nothing to say about how people actually behave or what their motivations actually are. And in the second you’re simply assuming the very thing at issue, a classic case of circular reasoning.

Once again you’re making PE true by definition, thereby rendering it trivial and uninteresting. To see that you’re not really making a factual assertion, just try to imagine what would have to be true in order for it to be false. Surely you can see that, under your definition, no imaginable facts would render it false.

As far as I can make out, you’re saying that an altruistic desire is a desire and therefore is not an altruistic desire – i.e., that by definition there can be no such thing as an altruistic desire; that it’s an oxymoron , like “square circle” or “married bachelor”. Once again you’re simply defining altruism in such a way that it cannot possibly exist, for the same reason that a square circle cannot exist. This is boring. It’s not that you’re wrong, but that given your definitions of “self-interest”, “altruism”, etc., one can announce in advance, without having to consider any empirical evidence whatever, that all acts are self-interested and no acts are altruistic.

Surely it’s obvious that this is just a verbal trick? You might just as well argue that airplanes can’t fly because by (your) definition anything that can fly is not an airplane but a bird.

People are not idiots. If most people meant what you mean by “self-interest” and “altruism” it would be just as obvious to them as it is to you that all acts are self-interested and no acts are altruistic; after all, the logic involved is elementary. So all that you’re doing is redefining terms so that you can say something that at first sight sounds rather shocking (or at least controversial) but turns out to be a dull truism once one understands how you’re using the terms involved.

Only in the sense that I indicated possible motives for a self-sacrificing act. Since you regard the existence of any motives at all to be enough to show that an act isn’t altruistic, I suppose that to you this really is enough to show that it isn’t altruistic.

However, while we’re on the subject, I see on rereading it that I didn’t make my position very clear regarding the motives of our self-sacrificing soldier. It’s true that it might seem at first sight that he might be acting to avoid living a miserable (because guilt-ridden) life. But in reality this is absurdly improbable, for several reasons:

(1) Practically no one would in fact be plagued by guilt under these circumstances, because no one is expected to be capable of the kind of almost superhuman heroism exhibited by falling on a live grenade. Those who do so are given the highest possible honors (posthumously of course), but no one criticizes or thinks badly of the ordinary mortals who don’t.

(2) It’s highly implausible (to put in mildly) that it would occur to him under such circumstances (even subconsciously) to worry about what the remainder of his life might be like if he doesn’t fall on the grenade. This is necessarily a split-second decision. It’s pretty obvious that the only possible consequences that are going to occur to an ordinary person in this situation are (a) if I do it I’ll die, but (b) if I don’t do it my buddies will die. These aren’t the only possible considerations that might occur to him; for example, he might also think of duty, honor, and the like. But that’s not the same thing as thinking about consequences – i.e., what his future will be like.

We can also see that fear of being wracked by guilt ordinarily plays little or no role in such a decision by conducting a simple “thought experiment”. What if the soldier knew that he could take a “memory pill” immediately after the incident (if he chose to live) that will give him a false memory of it – one in which he was too far from the grenade to fall on it, and therefore could not have saved his buddies anyway. (We’ll also assume that there are no survivors to contradict this version of events.) How many people who actually did this do you think would have made a different decision under these conditions? A few, possibly, but all of them? This is way too much to swallow. It seems far more likely that the vast majority of them would have rejected the possibility of taking such a pill with contempt, even before making the irrevocable decision to sacrifice themselves. Heck, even the vast majority of those who have chosen to live under such conditions would have rejected such an offer. This would seem to show that what most people who sacrificed themselves really desired was the real-world result of saving their buddies, not merely avoiding the subjective experience of guilt.

Note: Similar thought experiments can be constructed to show that it is quite often the case that people are really motivated by a desire to bring about or avoid some real-world outcome(s) rather than a desire to experience or avoid experiencing some mental state(s). This point will be developed more thoroughly in a later post.

So what was the point of my exploration of reasons why it might seem plausible at first sight that the sacrificer’s motive was to avoid guilt? Well, it was to use this idea to “point to” the real motivations that such people most likely have – motivations such as honor and a desire to save their buddies, which are clearly not self-interested.

bd-from-kg

The AntiChris:

OK, but it would be helpful to try to eliminate the confusion. What you said in full was:

Are you or are you not saying that what motivates altruistic behavior is the perception of a potential emotional payoff? If not, we might as well stop talking, because I am apparently totally incapable of understanding you. If you are saying that, what’s your quarrel with the statement “All acts are necessarily motivated by an expected emotional payoff”? And if you don’t have a quarrel with that statement, then you’re a psychological hedonist, since this is pretty much a pure statement of the doctrine of PH. In which case, what’s all the shouting about?

First off, the emotional satisfaction I’m talking about isn’t the satisfaction of having accomplished a task, but the satisfaction of seeing a desired state of affairs come about. Certainly fulfilling a desire usually produces this kind of satisfaction; the question is whether the motivation for the act is the desire to experience it.

Second, it’s perfectly true that there are also negative desires that a certain state of affairs not come about. And fulfilling such desires isn’t necessarily expected to produce positive happiness; rather, it’s typically expected to avoid the unhappiness that one anticipates will result from that state of affairs’ coming to pass. In that case the question is whether the motivation for an act that avoids an undesired state of affairs is simply to avoid having that state of affairs come about, or whether it’s a desire to avoid the unhappiness that one expects to result from its coming about. As I explained early on in the “murder for gain” thread, I was avoiding discussing such cases because taking them into account would just make the discussion longer, and they don’t seem to add anything new. Your explanation of the mother’s behavior is as good an example as any. If you’re saying (as you appear to be) that the motivation for any act is always either the desire to experience pleasure (i.e., some emotional state that one finds desirable) or the desire to avoid pain (i.e., some undesirable emotional state), this is still psychological hedonism. The latter clause is just usually omitted for the sake of simplicity.

I most certainly do disagree. Desiring a certain real-world outcome is not the same thing as desiring to experience a certain emotional state. How is it even possible to confuse the two? They’re as different as the city of Chicago and the experience of being in Chicago. Indeed, the most bizarre thing about PH is that it claims that we never desire real-world outcomes for their own sake; that the only thing that we ever really desire for its own sake is a mental state (happiness). If we desire that some real-world state of affairs come to pass, it is always (according to PH) because we expect it to produce some desired mental state. I honestly find it hard to comprehend a mindset that is capable of finding this even remotely plausible.

The AntiChris

bd-from-kg
I'm confused at your confusion. My apology for possible confusion was purely with regard to my use of Pryor's quote which used the word "pleasure" to describe 'emotional payoff'. I only wanted to make it clear that I did not equate "pleasure" (as commonly understood) with the term 'emotional payoff'. That's all.
Well, since I've consistently said exactly this (with the proviso that it may not be the only motivation and that the perception may be at a subconscious level) - yes.
You're clearly labouring under the illusion that I'm actually attempting to defend myself against the accusation of "psychological hedonism" (sounds like some sort of appalling perversion the way you portray it). I wouldn't know a "psychological hedonist" if one came up and bit me. However, if your considered opinion is that my views make me a psychological hedonist, then so be it. I'll just have to learn to live with the shame. Well I thought the mother and child example was a pretty clear-cut one of well-understood evolved emotions. When a mother sees her child in danger, she experiences the dread of losing her child and instinctively acts to save the child. The primary reason the mother wants a "real world outcome" is because of the dread she experiences at that moment.
I find it bizarre to claim that to "desire" something for its "own sake" requires no further explanation.
Yeah, I amaze myself sometimes.

Chris