Joel Feinberg Psychological Egoism Pdf Download

Weak psychological egoism is the doctrine that anything an agent does intentionally, that agent does at least expecting thereby to realize one of her self-regarding ends. (Strong psychological egoism, by contrast, is the doctrine that agents act always intending thereby to realize a self-regarding end.) Though weak psychological egoism is a doctrine ultimately answerable to empirical evidence, we presently have excellent a priori reasons for accepting it and attempting to construct psychological theories that include it as an organizing principle. These reasons have mainly to do with the idea that to understand the motivation behind an action, we need to understand the force of the consideration that motivates the agent, and the way to do this is to find a self-regarding end associated in the agent's mind with acting on that consideration.

In this article I defend an unpopular, some might say discredited, position: psychological egoism, the thesis that we are always ultimately motivated by self-interest. (1) In the course of this article we shall see that people may be mistaken about what really is in their self-interest. (2) We will also see that people commonly rationalize the choice of a present good that turns out not to be in their self-interest. Perhaps most surprisingly, we will see that, thanks to the merging of self and other, I can see another's interests and my own as forming a larger whole.

Joel Feinberg Psychological Egoism Pdf Download

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I will argue that, understood properly, psychological egoism is conceptually, tautologically true, but that it is nonetheless interesting and nontrivial. Indeed, psychological egoism implies an important truth that is often obscured in moral discourse, namely, that pure altruism is an impossible ideal. Christianity and Immanuel Kant have bequeathed to us a legacy of impossible expectations. In the Christian "economics of salvation" we are called on to sacrifice for others with the promise of heavenly reward. (3) However, on at least some interpretations of Christianity, it is not just the act of sacrifice that matters. If your motive for personal sacrifice is to gain heavenly reward, then you are acting selfishly. Your actions must be motivated by love of God. However, as John D. Caputo puts it, "It is impossible to love someone who threatens infinite punishment if you don't and promises infinite rewards if you do." (4) Influenced and inspired by Christianity and the power of reason to discover duty, Kant gave his own impossible ideal in his call for the good will, the will which follows duty apart from all other motivations. (5) While not all Christians and perhaps not even Kant himself believe it is necessary to achieve this kind of pure motivation, it is put forth as a moral ideal. Following Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and other secular philosophers have argued that an action only has moral worth if its motivation is purely altruistic. (6)

Egoism can be divided into psychological egoism and ethical egoism. Joel Feinberg defines psychological egoism as the ultimate goal that people want or seek its personal interests; ethical egoism means that the individual interests of the actors make an act become a moral act. Self-interest motivation in social public opinion generally includes self-improvement, self-identification, self-status pursuit, and so on. Therefore, this paper puts forward the following assumptions:

In ethical philosophy, ethical egoism is the normative position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest.[1]Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.[2] 2ff7e9595c