Psychological Egoism and Ethical Egoism

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying it's bad to do good deeds simply because they're all in all selfish. I think that it's interesting to think about though.As to what you're saying, I doubt you would be doing a good deed if it made you miserable. The motivation for doing most good acts is the very fact that it makes you feel good doing it, for one reason or another. Either because you're trying to impress your friends (which is not a good reason to do a good deed) or because it gives you intrinsic pleasure to do so. Even if doing the good deed somehow resulted in some negative stimulus to yourself, the overall result is pleasure, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. The example that you give, Stile, is a completely different situation than performing a good deed, and can't be used as an analogy. The sun shining on your wedding day would have been completely out of your control, and so your resulting happiness would have obviously been coincidental. But the happiness resulting from doing a good deed is not accidental, because you didn't just happen to do a good deed. You made a conscious decision, because it would give you an intrinsic reward to do so. That is why I'm entertaining the point that all good deeds are, when you get down to it, selfish. That's not to put any negative connotation on the fact, though.

But this isn't true. This part imparticular:

quote:

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You made a conscious decision, because it would give you an intrinsic reward to do so.

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This is not true. I explicitly told you that I made a conscious decision because I wanted to help someone, this is what I said: I specifically did not make a conscious decision because it would give me an intrinsic reward to do so. Such a thing wouldn't be "only to help them," it would be "to benefit myself." And I agree that such a thing would be selfish. That's why I'm talking about the exact opposite.So, if I'm not doing what you're calling "selfish", why are you still calling it "selfish?"

What I'm saying is that you made a conscious decision to help someone because it makes you feel good. We could go around in a circle about that all day. But my point is that when you make a decision to help someone, you either say, "I have to look good to society, I'm going to help this person," (the wrong reason to do a good deed) or, "You know what, I'll feel really good about myself if I help this person out." Seeing other people happy, in turn makes you happy. In that sense, you're doing the good deed because it would make you feel good to do so. It is therefore indirectly selfish.If doing something good to others made you feel entirely miserable, you wouldn't be doing it at all.

I recently helped someone move. It made me ache for days, I was miserable doing it (it rained the whole time) and I only did it because they had recently helped me move and they didn't have anyone else to ask. I guess you could say I helped out of an obligation, not to make myself feel better, because I didn't feel better and didn't think I would. What does that do to your theory?

Yes, I understand what you're saying.
I understand that you are tyring to tell me why I'm doing something.
Are you also going to tell me I'm wrong when I say I like chocolate ice-cream?
Are you going to tell me that no matter what I say, I must like vanilla because you say so?You have no authority in telling me my motivations for my actions.
The only person who can correctly identify my motivations is myself.So when I say I'm doing something only to help someone out. And you say I'm doing it "because it makes me feel good"... guess which one of us is right? What you say doesn't make a difference, it's irrelevent and bordering on arrogant rudeness. What I say is the only thing that matters where the workings of my mind are concerned. These very well may be the only 2 options for you. I wouldn't contend to know the workings of your mind. But, I'm telling you that I have many more options for my motivations, another completely separate one is: "just to help them out." Perhaps you are incapable of this motivation, but I assure you that I am not. It's really quite easy, actually, I just ask myself: "Self, what is your motivation for helping others?" And the answer I usually have is "to help other people." (Sometimes I am greedy and selfish, in which case the answer is something else, but I try to stay away from those motivations). Then I also ask myself "Self, are you sure you're not doing this just to feel good later?" And I answer "Yes, I am sure, that is irrelevent to my motivation for good deeds." Sure, most the time it certainly does. Absolutely not. Feeling happy is a mere coincidence, my desire to feel happy or sad has absolutely no bearing on my decision to help other people. I help other people because I want to help other people. Just because something is an unavoidable result of an action doesn't mean it's the motivation for the action.Take changing a baby's diaper, I change a diaper because I want to keep my baby clean. An unavoidable result of changing the diaper is unleashing an ungodly smell upon the local area. Are you saying that my "real" motivation for changing my baby's diaper is actually to turn my house into a filthy, stench-covered ground zero? That's insane!The position that just because personal benefits are unavoidable means they must be the motivation for the action is equally insane.It is my conscious mind that chooses my motivations. My conscious mind is not limited to selfish motivations. No, it is therefore not selfish at all in any sense of the word. This doesn't have any relevence one way or the other. But, you're wrong again. It's quite possible that you wouldn't be doing any good deeds if they made you feel entirely miserable. But we're not the same person. I don't act or react or have the exact same motivations as you do. I have my own mind that I'm in control of, and you telling me things like this has no bearing on the reality of the situation. I certainly would do something good even if it made me feel entirely miserable. That's because I do good things to help other people. As long as I helped other people, then it doesn't matter how I feel, such a result doesn't enter into my decision making process.

Hi, Lokins.Welcome to EvC! Even if you disagree with Stile's assessment of his motivations, at least allow him the privilege of posing a hypothetical scenario.Do you feel that it's entirely impossible to help somebody just for the sake of helping them?Just to tie this in to biology, evolution doesn't select for selfishness per se, but selects for self-benefit. I would wager that, most of the time, the benefits to oneself go completely unnoticed by the individual, for both humans and non-intelligent organisms.For discussions like this one, I think it's best to only consider motivations that present at the conscious level.-----P.S. Click the "peek" button at the bottom of a post to see the codes used to make quotation boxes: these usually help the conversation go more smoothly.Have fun here, Lokins!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

I'm terribly sorry that I'm offending you, as I obviously am. You seem to think I'm trying to take away from the fact that doing a good deed is good, and that I'm some sort of monster who only thinks about himself and no one else.However, if you stopped and logically thought about what I'm trying to say instead of letting your emotions lead your arguments (an incredibly poor way to debate), you might come to see my point of view as being sound.As for offending me in return, when I had done nothing to intentionally offend you: well, you can probably already figure out what I think about that. That's right. You want to keep your baby clean, because a clean baby makes you feel better than a dirty baby, as well as making the baby feel better. Wouldn't you feel like a piece of shit (pardon the pun) if your baby was all soiled up? It makes you feel better, therefore, to clean him. Umm, no? That's precisely the opposite of what I'm saying. Me: You're honestly trying to tell me that you would do something that makes you completely miserable just for the hell of it, even if the outcome could only be misery?You: No! I do it because I'm helping someone! ((Yeah, I got that.)) And the outcome isn't misery for myself!There you go. In the end, it makes you feel good, EVEN IF the immediate result is displeasing, such as a stinky household. In the end, you still feel good, because your baby is clean.

Thanks for the welcome, Bluejay! But precisely the point I'm trying to make is that, even if it doesn't consciously result in happiness, it still subconsciously makes a person happy to do a good deed, and that is why they do it. I'm actually talking from an evolutionary perspective. I'm saying that if a good deed didn't present some kind of personal gain, it wouldn't be done. It is subconscious, I agree, but I fail to see how that is irrelevant.Edited by Lokins, : HTML edit.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the presence of an unavoidable consequence does not mean that particular consequence was the motivation for the action. All true. It is an unavoidable consequence that I'm going to feel better after cleaning my baby. It is also an unavoidable consequence that there's going to be a ripe stink. Why do you say that one unavoidable consequence is my motivation for the action, but not the other? What's the difference? Why does either (or any) unavoidable consequence have to be my motivation? Why can't I change my baby's diaper because I want him to be clean? What prevents that from being my only motivation? I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not claiming that feeling good about the action doesn't exist, I'm simply claiming that it's not my motivation for the action. In the same way that the foul bog-of-eternal-stench also exists, and is not my motivation.Action: Changing baby's diaper.
Unavoidable Consequence #1 that exists: I feel happy.
Unavoidable Consequence #2 that exists: Paint peels from the horrendous olfactory raping.My motivation for the action is not Unavoidable Consequence #2, even though it exists.
My motivation for the action is not Unavoidable Consequence #1, even though it exists.
My motivation for the action is to help my baby be clean.Why do you treat one unavoidable consequence different from the other?

Ok, I'll address that directly then. Yes, I'm saying that it is (albeit subconsciously, I'll use that word, because of course you don't actually tell yourself "I want to feel good about myself" upon doing a good deed) the result of feeling good that drives you to do the act. I would also like to now avoid the term "feeling good"... It's not like you get a warm and fuzzy feeling, that's not what I'm saying (although sometimes it is the case). I'm saying that it makes your environment an overall better place to be when you do a good deed, and that necessarily is your motivation for the act.The unavoidable consequence that the house will stink is not the motivation, if that were the case, that would be the equivalent of letting a stink bomb go off in your house for no apparent reason. But the unavoidable consequence of baby being clean is not only unavoidable, it is the direct result that you sought out upon doing the act, and is therefore the motivation for the act.Try not to think about what I'm saying in terms of any specific emotion. I'm talking on an evolutionary perspective here, purely logically.

Necessarily? But people do deeds that negatively impact their environment all the time, even to the worst evolutionary result of all -> death or moving towards extinction.Are you claiming that suicide is actually a physical impossibility?
Are you claiming that a nuclear war that wipes out mankind is a physcial imossibility?I don't think you can show that people necessarily make decisions that always make their environment better. Especially in an evolutionary sense.But, as you say, this is also a subconscious thing. And, strictly because it is subconscious, it cannot be selfish. A selfish thing, by it's very definition, is when someone purposefully does something to benefit themselves. Since "purposefully" requires a conscious decision, any subconsious influences cannot possibly be labelled selfish in a moral sense of the word.I really have no problems with you saying something like:"There exists no action in the universe that a person can do which does not result in some amount of internal benefit for that person."I have no issue with such a statement.
There's just no justification for adding the term "selfish" to this, that's all.The phrase "there is no selfish action" is a wives-tale perpetuated by those who want to sound profound, but do not understand what "selfish" actually means.

I'm absolutely not claiming that suicide is a physical impossibility. People do stupid things all the time that can serve no benefit to themselves. Killing themselves is one of them. Obviously the majority of people in the world do not kill themselves, otherwise our species wouldn't be doing very well. However, that's the exception when we're talking about the rule. Actually, war is in human nature. We're built by our genes to see us as the good guys, them as the bad guys. I really hope you're not going to quote mine me on that, because THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT WAR IS GOOD. Just because something is in our nature doesn't mean that we accept it as a good thing. Nuclear war is a result of our nature (war is also in the nature of chimps, by the way) being amplified by our use of technology. We could talk about war if you want, but I think that's getting a bit off topic.You misread my quote. I'm saying that when people do good deeds (in the traditional sense of the word) it makes our personal environment an overall better place in the long run (and I think you're now misunderstanding what I mean by "environment"). Alright, so now I'll throw out another word: this time, "selfish". If you want to think of "selfish" as meaning "consciously making a decision to something for the benefit of myself" then we have to throw that out too. But I still stand firm on the fact that we do good deeds because it gives us subconscious intrinsic gain. Not necessarily "selfish" gain in the way that you're objecting to.I hope that we can compromise on that.

Hi, Lokins. The point Stile is trying to make is that you made a leap of logic in the middle of this sentence. Benefitting from something does not necessarily make the benefit the motivation, as shown by the fact that you can benefit from the sun shining on your wedding day.So, benefit does not appear to be a valid means of assessing selfishness.----- Can you show this to be the case?
All you have done so far is assert that this is true.For the most part, I agree with you that evolution has fashioned us to derive pleasure from cooperative behavior. But, I do not agree that slavery to endorphins is the only motivation for good conduct.For instance, take gay marriage, a popular topic on this forum. I personally disapprove of gay marriage. However, I argue with many others on this forum that gay marriage should be legalized, simply because it doesn't make sense for me to interfere in the peaceful affairs of a group of people to which I do not belong.I doesn't make me feel good at all: it makes me feel sick to think of two guys "being together."But, those are the breaks: right conduct is not always pleasant or attractive.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

There needs to be some sort of motivation for an act, otherwise a person can be deemed insane for doing it. Without some sort of motivation, saying, "I'm going to do a good deed for the hell of it," is on par with saying something like, "I think I'll go outside, spin 3 times, suck on a rock for a bit, then place it back on the ground." It simply doesn't make any sense for a person to think to do that, if there isn't any motivation. Normal, healthily-working neurons just wouldn't behave that way. There has to be a drive to do an act. I eat because I'm hungry, and eating will satiate my hunger. I watch tv because I'm bored, and it entertains me. I do a good deed because it pleases me to do so, I like to see good things happen. THAT is the drive, and THAT is the motivation. This, I suppose, is what I've been trying to say all along, and I hope I've made it clearer.Now, whether you believe in mind-body dualism is another story, but assuming that it's false, the above statement is very likely to be true.As for your analogy: I am a gay male, so I would have to strongly disagree with you on this one, but that's a topic for another forum.But about the analogy itself, one word that you said was key: "right conduct". "Right conduct" in this case means that society has placed the rule that it is generally wrong in this day and age to openly and actively express hatred towards homosexuals. You would most likely be chastised in some way, by some group of people. It can be said in this case, then, that your motivation not to express your hatred actively (I suppose you could indirectly call that a good deed...) is your desire to avoid this chastisement. In this case, avoidance of a negative result could be seen as a "personal gain" (see my above argument). It all comes down to the same thing.

Hi, Lokins. How is "because it makes sense" equivalent to "for the hell of it"?----- You know what? Go to hell.I've written two messages to you, and in that time you've managed to turn "there are multiple motivations" into "motivation is not required" and "disapproval of gay marriage" into "hatred of homosexuals."I've wasted enough of my recreational time on you.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.