Cretinist

WARNING: I haven't read every post in this thread. Forgive me if I state something that has already been said.

I have to agree with Biff, you are misunderstanding tronvillian bd-from-kg.

You seem to think tronvillian is advocating the view that people only act altruistically because they consciously know it will make them feel good. If tronvillian was actually asserting that, I would agree that his view is wrong. Obviously no one goes into a philosophical analysis of every thing they do, and when the option to do something altruistic comes up, says to themselves "I'll do that to make myself feel good". That is totally unrealistic.

What tronvillian does appear to believe is that people act 'altruistic' because it makes them feel good, whether they are conscious of it or not before they make the decision. Heck, even the very thought of helping others makes people feel good. Just imagine inventing a cure for AIDS for a few minutes, and see if it makes you feel good.

Now imagine the opposite. Imagine how bad you would feel if you, say, accidentally ran over a baby. Now imagine if this is how you felt every time you performed an 'altruistic' act. Obviously, no one would ever perform such acts.

I think this misunderstanding is the result that this forum is largely dedicated to prescriptive ethical systems rather than descriptions of human behavior. In the scenarios you made up, they do refute the idea that people consciously consider their actions and only chose those that benefit them emotionally. However, they have nothing to do with whether those decisions do reflect unconscious motivations.

bd-from-kg

Cretinist:

Nope. I didn’t understand him to be saying that.

Yes, that’s what he appears to believe. That’s the view known as psychological egoism, and it’s widely discredited among philosophers. Unless, of course, you mean “because” in some sense other than that this is their motivation. In that case I really don’t understand what you’re saying. Ordinarily when someone says “so-and-so did this intentional act because...”, he’s referring to a motivation (conscious or unconscious) for the act.

Certainly if I felt bad in this way whenever I acted altruistically I would rarely do it. However, I can certainly imagine feeling bad in other ways every time I did something altruistic and still continuing to do it. For example, one of my friends gets sick every time she donates blood, but she continues to do it. Why do you suppose that is?

The difference, of course, is that “feeling bad” from running over a baby is a very different kind of thing from “feeling bad” from getting sick. It seems to me that the reasons I’d feel bad about running over a baby are something like this:

(1) I have a strong desire that the baby should live. Running over it violates one of my stronger desires.

(2) I desire that the parents and others who love the child be happy.

(3) I have a strong desire not to be responsible for killing someone. This is basically a special case of my desire to be responsible, trustworthy, etc. This can easily be demonstrated by observing that I’d feel much less bad if I were absolutely sure that the accident was not a result of any kind of negligence on my part. For example, if it were clear that someone had pushed the child into the path of my car when it was too late to swerve, I’d still feel bad, but nowhere near as bad as I would if I thought that I might have avoided the accident if I had been more vigilant and observant.

Thus my desire not to be responsible is a desire to live up to an external standard. I can’t change the standard; it is what it is for good, objective reasons. A desire to live up to such a standard cannot reasonably be considered self-interested. (Unless you define all desires as self-interested, in which case it is trivially true that all acts are motivated by what you call self-interest. But when psychological egoism is interpreted in this way it ceases to be of any interest.)

All of these are non-self-interested desires, and all of them would be massively violated by my running over a baby. Naturally I’d feel bad; I’d have done something that goes against several of my strongest desires.

If my performing an “altruistic” act consistently violated many of my strongest non-self-interested desires in the way that running over a baby would, certainly I wouldn’t do it, since my motive in doing such things is to fulfill such desires, not to thwart them. Indeed, it would be self-contradictory to call such an act “altruistic” if I believed that it would thwart more altruistic desires than it would fulfill.

The examples were designed to show that not all desires are self-interested, not that all desires are conscious. Actions that cannot be reasonably explained in terms of self-interested desires (conscious or unconscious) are strong evidence against psychological egoism.

One more point. If you want to argue that all motivations are ultimately self-interested, you’re making a positive claim, and therefore you have the burden of proof. It’s not enough to show that all acts can be explained (however implausibly) in terms of self-interested motives; you have to show that this is the best explanation. Do you have any evidence for this claim? I have yet to encounter a psychological egoist who is even prepared to discuss evidence, much less to present evidence in favor of his theory. They seem to think that it is sufficient to show that the theory cannot be definitively disproved. But this puts the burden of proof in the wrong place. Opponents of the theory do not have the burden of disproving it; proponents have the burden of proving it.

At any rate, I’ve started a thread on this subject in the Philosophy forum, where it belongs, since this is not really a moral question. If you want to continue this discussion, please join the debate in progress there.