Hey Egoists! Do you always act from reasons of self-interest with all of your acts aimed at achieving your own good?
Immortalist
of your acts aimed at achieving your own good, is every act, however
unselfish in appearance, really the product of your selfish motives?
Is the sole end of all your actions your own pleasure. Whatever you
do, you do because you expect to maximize your own pleasure by doing
it.
---------------
People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
Are all people at bottom egoists? Do we always act out of self-
interest, with all of our acts aimed at achieving our own good, that
every act, however unselfish it may appear, is really the product of
selfish motives? Is the sole end of all human action the agent's own
pleasure. Whatever we do, we do because we expect to maximize our own
pleasure by doing it.
Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, St.
Francis-all just glory-seekers?
When an atheist gives an anonymous donation to charity, tells nobody
about it, does not believe that there is a God to know about it, and
is not aware of any conscious motive involving a desire for moral
superiority nor of any conscious feeling after the fact of moral
superiority, this person seems to provide a counterexample to the
psychological egoist's claims.
Persons And Their World: An Introduction to Philosophy - Jeffrey Olen
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0075543117/
Fred Weiss
> People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
>
> Are all people at bottom egoists? Do we always act out of self-
> interest, with all of our acts aimed at achieving our own good, that
> every act, however unselfish it may appear, is really the product of
> selfish motives?
This confuses so-called "psychological egoism" with "ethical egoism".
There really would be no point to ethical egoism if our acts already
were governed by the pursuit of self-interest. But clearly they are
not. People in fact often act in ways that are contrary to their
interests, even knowingly. For example, self-destructive behavior is
clearly and obviously not in our interest and yet many people engage
in it (in varying degrees).
You ask "Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother
Teresa, St.
Francis-all just glory-seekers?"
So what, even if they were? That wouldn't in itself mean they were
acting in their interest. The mere fact that they gained some
psychological satisfaction from their work, felt ennobled by it, or
enjoyed the adulation still doesn't mean it was in their interest. Any
of them, given their talents and intelligence, could have done far
more with their lives (for themselves) and possibly even for others
without that even be any part of their motivation. For example, if
they had discovered a life-saving drug or developed some new
technology that transformed and improved the way we did something,
etc. etc. Thomas Edison for example did far, far more for people
(without that being his primary motivation) than all four of these
"saints" combined.
Fred Weiss
ZerkonXXXX
> Whatever we do, we do because we expect to maximize our own pleasure by
> doing it.
This cynical argument always stops short. An additional question should
be asked. "why does this give pleasure"?
Why do ALL humans get pleasure (in the broadest meaning) from helping
others? This is a much more vital point. Why do many cultures even
considered it a form of duty? Is this innate to human nature? Since
seemingly altruistic behaviors have been observed in other species, is
there even more to this? Is it an aspect of life?
Also, since this type of behavior seems dependent upon circumstances,
what are the basic components in these circumstances?
To some, this is a kinetic subject. Not something as dead, dreary and
implosive as the position here.
> People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
The age of the Istist or Istism is getting to seem like the Orwellian
concept "double plus good". How can an individual not be a EGO-IST if
"EGO" is meaning "Self" here as opposed to the Freudian meaning. (Are id-
ists about?)
Everyone acts as self. Acting 'for' is the issue here. A parent feeding
(acting for) their child is a selfish act? Sure, their genes, their off-
spring. A parent neglecting to feed their child because a good TV show is
on.. is this the same thing?
> When an atheist gives an anonymous donation to charity....
When a [insert a scenario here that forces conclusion].
This ra-ra atheist position is self defeating by claiming itself as being
'morally superior' (NOTE: A RELIGIOUS CONCEPT) to others making these
types of ""atheists"" little more than yet another gang of temple priests.
.... (yawn)....
tgde...@earthlink.net
And this tripe gets published? If there is no cause for the action,
then it must be a QM-grade random event, eh. So how do we assign to it
being either 'selfish' or 'unselfish'?
Come on you great philosophers---give it a shot; actually make a
rigorous case instead of handwaving and such.
-tg
Fred Weiss
> Why do ALL humans get pleasure (in the broadest meaning) from helping
> others?
All? I don't think so. Second, it hardly applies to merely (and
broadly) helping others without many qualifications. I'm sure that ALL
humans find helping others in certain circumstances and depending on
who they are and what kind of help they need to be very burdensome and
annoying, e.g. the miscreant friend or relative who is always asking
for a hand-out. Most people I imagine also draw the line even for the
closest friends or relatives if the expectation - or demand - for help
becomes excessive. Most people I suspect draw the line on generosity
when such help will involve considerable personal sacrifice - as they
should. For a (rational) egoist there is no justification for putting
someone else's interest above your own. Why are their interests more
important than your own?
However, I do agree that there is a natural tendency to be benevolent
to those in need, especially if that need is not their fault, e.g.
personal tragedy, and if the help required is short-term and not
excessively burdensome. People are famously generous in donations of
time and money when natural disasters hit, even sometimes to people in
distant lands.
It might be worth noting that the *most* generous people in this
regard are generally those with the highest standards of living and
the greatest amount of freedom, e.g. Americans.
Fred Weiss
Giga
"Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:72261902-5bb6-438e...@f41g2000pra.googlegroups.com...
suffer (as I think most people naturally do to some extent). Is it selfish
then to want them to do well, or to see their sufferring reduced? If so its
a really unselfish form of selfishness.
John Jones
> Hey Egoists! Do you always act from reasons of self-interest with all
> of your acts aimed at achieving your own good, is every act, however
> unselfish in appearance, really the product of your selfish motives?
If everyone respects self-interest then how would that be selfish?
eyele...@gmail.com
ho...@yahoo.co> wrote:
> "Immortalist" <reanimater_2...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
Yep. There's a fallacy of equivocation hiding in some of the arguments
here, conflating two different definitions of "selfishness": (1)
weighing your desires and choosing actions based on your desires; (2)
being a dick.
Objectivists build an entire worldview on failing to notice this
fallacy of equivocation.
eyelessgame
Fred Weiss
> ...There's a fallacy of equivocation hiding in some of the arguments
> here, conflating two different definitions of "selfishness": (1)
> weighing your desires and choosing actions based on your desires; (2)
> being a dick.
>
> Objectivists build an entire worldview on failing to notice this
> fallacy of equivocation.
Except of course Objectivism excepts neither of those definitions of
selfishness, something obviously you failed to notice.
I guess that makes you the dick, Mr. Eyeless. But apparently being
blind, how would you know?
Fred Weiss
shrik...@gmail.com
> Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, St.
> Francis-all just glory-seekers?
This is rather a digression, but I felt like attacking
Mother Teresa.
I don't know about the other guys, but Mother
Teresa seems like a pretty cynical bitch who
was just building a saint's empire. What do her
facilities in India do for the dying anyway?
Anything useful? No, they just pray.
She was a friend of the Duvalier dictatorship,
and an apologist for Charles H. Keating, Jr
of Keating Five fame (who made sizable
contributions to her empire.) She sent a letter
to the prosecutor of Keating's case, and asked
for clemency. The prosecutor wrote back that
Keating had ripped off a bunch of folks less
fortunate than himself, and a sizable portion
of that money wound up in Mother Teresa's
coffers, ironically enough. He asked if she
felt obliged to give that money back to the
victims. She never replied.
mrdilligent
TOPIC: Hey Egoists! Do you always act from reasons of self-interest
with all
of your acts aimed at achieving your own good?
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy.debate/t/56d8124ab2aa731e?hl=en
==============================================================================
== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 20 2009 2:12 pm
From: Immortalist
<<Hey Egoists! Do you always act from reasons of self-interest with
all
of your acts aimed at achieving your own good, is every act, however
unselfish in appearance, really the product of your selfish motives?
Is the sole end of all your actions your own pleasure. Whatever you
do, you do because you expect to maximize your own pleasure by doing
it.>>
Unfortunately, too many do.
Egoism, or narcissism, is a necessary natural state of orientation for
the preadult. A genuine adult (and there are not many these days) has
outgrown this to the third and final orientation of the mind,
altruism. Just think of how rare altruism is these days!
But think about it; does a spider not HAVE to be altruistic to raise
her young? Does not any offspring-producing and -raising organism?
One cannot have a familly and be stuck in the eogism phase----without
raising more stunted adults.
It works this way: a newly "born" preadult is too immature in body
and mind to fend for itself. Parents are supposed to protect the body
to its adul stage, but the cognitive faculty, too, is far too immature
to solve the problems that come to it. So it develops a "surrogate
self" to handle the problems such that the still tender real self is
not harmed. As it grows and develops bodily and cognitively, it
learns gradually how to understand problems and then to solve, even
prevent, them. Eventually, this culminates in a pretty broad
understanding of the objecctive world into which it came, and it can
shed this egoism or narcissistic pseudo self. It is now a young
adult, ready to stand on its own, at which time it is also ready to
socialize properly with the adult world, and then to take a mate and
rear the young which follow.
Well, that is the way it is supposed to be, with all organisms, and if
you carefully observe enough dogs, cats, lions, plants, etc., you see
that most of them (there are always natural anomalies) do exactly
this. (Let's not confuse the mate-killing attempts of such as female
spiders and praying mantisses with "egoism." This is an evolutionary
adaptation which actually makes the surviving males stronger and
wiser, which then makes them better sires of offspring.)
Because mammals take longer to develop, they tend to have a harder
time, especially males, so the adaptation here is for the mom, or
group, to send them off in their puberty to attempt to stand on their
own. Many cannot, and die, but most survive to seek a group of their
own. These are "men" of the species. Prehistoric man followed suit,
and so we see that aboriginal teen males are sent out into the forest
to fend for themselves---to learn more about the real world than their
culture could teach them. We have termed this policy "puberty rites."
If the prehistoric "puberty rite" does not entirely do the trick, and
the surviving adolescent is still cockey and narcissistic, the tribe
puts on a special rite to handle this. Margaret Mead and her husband
Gregory Bates, for example, found a tribe which put an adolescent boy
through a festivity (forget its name) in which the men dress as women
and act silly and stupId. This is NOT female-bashing, as Bateson
claimed, nor is it transvestism as he also claims. It is no different
in essence than what the drill sargent (or football coach) does to
many of his recuits. It attempts to get the still chldish lad to GROW
UP. But one main difference is that the adolescent subject of the
tribal rite ends up laughing with the others, and at himself; he gets
the point, and all is celebratory, while the army recruit may suffer
mortification.
But things changed as what we have relatively recently come to call
"civiization" came about. This is too involved to go into here, but
we can paraphrase a familiar quote: "You can take humans out of
nature, but you cannot take the nature out of humans." One outcome of
"civiization" is that the ancient and prehistoric "puberty rites,"
which served a real purpose, shrivelled up and became pure token in
such as "Confirmations" and "Bah mitsvas."
So today we have "postnatal" mental disorders in which the mother
cannot stand her new baby. It is not CAUSED by hormones, but is
MANIFESTED in hormones; the real cause, IMO, is that the presumably
adult female knows, deep down in her neural cells, that she is not a
true adult, ready for properly altruistic maternal behavior. Her
neurons then send the signals to produce the "hormones" that "say"
exactly this in her mind and behavior.
This is nature talking; civilized culture as we accept it can do
nothing about it.
mrdilligent
From: Immortalist
<<People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
<<Are all people at bottom egoists? Do we always act out of self-
interest, with all of our acts aimed at achieving our own good, that
every act, however unselfish it may appear, is really the product of
selfish motives? Is the sole end of all human action the agent's own
pleasure. Whatever we do, we do because we expect to maximize our own
pleasure by doing it.
<<Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, St.
Francis-all just glory-seekers?>>
Without knowing them personally, is is impossible to say, but there is
some indirect evidence. Mother Teresa grew up Catholic, which
denomination greatly fosters the sense of guilt. Many of us have
known people whose "altruistic" behavior arises from a deep-seated
guilt, and I have always suspected MT of this.
Probably not Dr. King, who appears to have been literally selfless, in
the narrow sense of the term (or egoistic). He seems to have
genuinely cared that society was imbalanced and grossly unfair---
which, let's be honest, it was. He mostly acted out of what one
philosopher called "enlightened self-interest," which is what real
altruism is. The genuine altruist has a strong sense of self in the
real, not phoney or imposter, sense. Such a critter holds others as
extensions of his true self, and is in pain when others are in pain.
Contrast with the narcissist, who implicitly sees himself as the
center of the world, and all others exist to serve him, not the other
way around.
Francis of Assisi lived too long ago, and there is relatively little
told of him, but the topical facts are just close enough to those of
Siddhartha Gatauma (the Buddhist) to cause me to opine that he was his
true self, born of actual experience, which enabled him to identify
with other humans, and especially with animals. I think he was a true
adult in an ignorant and stunted civilized world.
Then we have the response of
== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 20 2009 4:56 pm
From: Fred Weiss
<<This confuses so-called "psychological egoism" with "ethical
egoism".>>
There is no real difference between "psychological egoism" and
"ethical egoism," or with "political egoism," "philosophical egoism,"
"educational egoism,' and so on. Egoism is psychological, period.
Until it is genuinely outgrown, it will manifest wherever it can.
<<There really would be no point to ethical egoism if our acts already
were governed by the pursuit of self-interest. But clearly they are
not. People in fact often act in ways that are contrary to their
interests, even knowingly. For example, self-destructive behavior is
clearly and obviously not in our interest and yet many people engage
in it (in varying degrees).>>
This is naive, to say the least. Masochists (as well as sadists) act
out of a grotesque sense of guilt, as do most egoists in our culture.
Other self-destructive acts are committed without any knowledge of
their outcomes. Which is why I always stress EXPERIENCE, for if self-
destructive people paid attention to, and thought about, and learned
from, their experience, they would see for themelves the self-
destructive consequences of their behavior. Because they do not---
culture does not teach us to "read" our experience, but only books---
we have psycotherapists. The best today (in theory, at least) are the
cognitive therapists, because cognitive therapy holds, correctly, that
neurotics and borderline psychotics "don't think properly." By
playing "backboard tennis" with such a therapist, the patient comes to
see for himself the self-destructive outcomes of his habitual
behavior, and is helped to change this behavior, and to grow up in the
mind.
<<You ask "Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother
Teresa, St.Francis-all just glory-seekers?"
<<So what, even if they were? That wouldn't in itself mean they were
acting in their interest. The mere fact that they gained some
psychological satisfaction from their work, felt ennobled by it, or
enjoyed the adulation still doesn't mean it was in their interest. Any
of them, given their talents and intelligence, could have done far
more with their lives (for themselves) and possibly even for others
without that even be any part of their motivation. For example, if
they had discovered a life-saving drug or developed some new
technology that transformed and improved the way we did something,
etc. etc. Thomas Edison for example did far, far more for people
(without that being his primary motivation) than all four of these
"saints" combined.>>
You don't get it, Mr. Weiss. There is a very BIG difference between
getting personal satisfacion; a sense of ennoblement, from one's deeds
on the one hand, and doing it for adulation from others on the other.
The latter is an egoist, a cognitive child; the other is a genuine
adult.
Let's provide a fairly clear example: Teacher A says (and acts
accordingly) that he learns much from his students, and gets great
enjoyment from teaching, while Teacher B doesn't like teaching unless
all or most of his students worship and adore him.
Students, especially children, have an instinct about the state of
bonafide adulthood of their teachers; they COME to like the Teacher As
of the world, as few as they may be, but continue to behave very badly
in the classrooms of Teacher Bs.
Narcissists can do real or socially imagined good even if their
motives lack adullthood. About Edison I cannot say, but Saulk I am
certain was an egoist---yet he developed the polio vaccine. Every
community has its lauded "outstanding citizens" who do what they do to
get this sort of reward. They wish to be Big Cheeses, so do what it
takes to become a Big Cheese. The bible (which I take to be an
anthology of learnings from observed experience by those who lived a
long time ago, and not a religious work) is replete with examples of
these.
Giga
<eyele...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:3bfb034d-14fa-4976...@i28g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
eyelessgame
= I think, at least in Western culture, we confuse the physical self with
the psychological self. It is a though their limits are the same, but my
psychological self can include all sorts of things outside my body, I can
identify with them. For instance the people we care about, the objects we
care about, the institutions, even ideas. We say 'its almost like they are
part of me' this shows the confusion. To be part of me means to be part of
my body, but it feels like that. They are really part of the you that goes
beyond your body, the psyche, the stuff we care about.
Giga
"mrdilligent" <oso...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:7b309e1d-09f5-4fd3...@k38g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
> Date: Mon, Apr 20 2009 2:12 pm
> From: Immortalist
>
> <<People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
>
> <<Are all people at bottom egoists? Do we always act out of self-
> interest, with all of our acts aimed at achieving our own good, that
> every act, however unselfish it may appear, is really the product of
> selfish motives? Is the sole end of all human action the agent's own
> pleasure. Whatever we do, we do because we expect to maximize our own
> pleasure by doing it.
>
> <<Are Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, St.
> Francis-all just glory-seekers?>>
>
> Without knowing them personally, is is impossible to say, but there is
> some indirect evidence. Mother Teresa grew up Catholic, which
> denomination greatly fosters the sense of guilt. Many of us have
> known people whose "altruistic" behavior arises from a deep-seated
> guilt, and I have always suspected MT of this.
Guilt has a really bad rap but to feel bad about something bad you have done
is surely for the good mostly. If that feeling then drives you to try to
make up for that bad deed or compensate for it is that a selfish act? Surely
it is most unselfish in a way, even tho powered by guilt, because the guilt
itself is caused by harm you have done others. Not sure if this holds for an
imagined bad, like I would say original sin probably is.
>
> Probably not Dr. King, who appears to have been literally selfless, in
> the narrow sense of the term (or egoistic). He seems to have
> genuinely cared that society was imbalanced and grossly unfair---
> which, let's be honest, it was. He mostly acted out of what one
> philosopher called "enlightened self-interest," which is what real
> altruism is. The genuine altruist has a strong sense of self in the
> real, not phoney or imposter, sense. Such a critter holds others as
> extensions of his true self, and is in pain when others are in pain.
> Contrast with the narcissist, who implicitly sees himself as the
> center of the world, and all others exist to serve him, not the other
> way around.
Maybe he acted from love, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Martin Phipps
> People who always act from reasons of self-interest are egoists.
That describes Christians who only do good deeds so they will one day
go their imaginary heaven to a T!
Martin
ZerkonXXXX
> All? I don't think so.
'All' here does not mean 'always' nor does it mean to help all people.
> Second, it hardly applies to merely (and broadly)
> helping others without many qualifications. I'm sure that ALL humans
> find helping others in certain circumstances and depending on who they
> are and what kind of help they need to be very burdensome and annoying,
> e.g. the miscreant friend or relative who is always asking for a
> hand-out. Most people I imagine also draw the line even for the closest
> friends or relatives if the expectation - or demand - for help becomes
> excessive. Most people I suspect draw the line on generosity when such
> help will involve considerable personal sacrifice - as they should. For
> a (rational) egoist there is no justification for putting someone else's
> interest above your own. Why are their interests more important than
> your own?
Their interests are your own not more important and not above.
These qualification you are slamming on do not negate this...
> ... I do agree that there is a natural tendency to be benevolent
FULL STOP. Exceptions do not negate it and since they do not, it's this
naturalness, as you say, that is the more interesting issue not the
exceptions. Everyone is pretty clear why they do not give, the question
is why do they?
> to those in need, especially if that need is not their fault, e.g.
> personal tragedy, and if the help required is short-term and not
> excessively
> burdensome. People are famously generous in donations of time and money
> when natural disasters hit, even sometimes to people in distant lands.
Make up dogma?
> It might be worth noting that the *most* generous people in this regard
> are generally those with the highest standards of living and the
> greatest amount of freedom, e.g. Americans
LOL, OK Fred. You may find also that a most benevolent thing one people
can do for another is not to invade their country!
ZerkonXXXX
> I don't know about the other guys,
I just know what Hitchens, a Bush apologist and supporter, says.
"saint's empire" yes she lived, worked and died in the lap of luxury.
> What do her facilities in India do for the dying anyway?
> Anything useful? No, they just pray.
And you accuse her of being cynical?
mrdilligent
Date: Tues, Apr 21 2009 7:27 pm
From: "Giga"
<<There's a fallacy of equivocation hiding in some of the arguments
here, conflating two different definitions of "selfishness": (1)
weighing your desires and choosing actions based on your desires; (2)
being a dick.>>
How is "weighing your deas" selfish? How is "choosing actions based
on your desires' selfish? Obscure wording here.
A selfish person sees/does what serves his own immediate, or "lower,"
interests. An unselfish person sees beyond his own immediate interests
to his, and others,' long-term interests. The unselfhish person
relates to the Greater Good; the selfish person to his own uniquely
personal interests. I fail to see how these have much to do with
"desires."
The great confusion between these two orientations has many people
giving up their long-range interests for another's short-term
interests on the assumption that this is "uunselfish." We see this in
parents all the time. We also see it in such statements as, "I love
[So-And-So} more than life itself."
We are only supposed to love others AS we love ourselves; that is,
equally to. Not more than, not less than, but equally to. This is
possible only for the fully adult, or developmentaly altruistic. The
still egoistic, or narcissistic, is still a child, dependent for his
care on others. When that care doesn't seem to him to be forthcoming,
he takes. The full adult is autonomous, dependent only on himself for
his care, and he relates that self-care to others in need, so he gives
that self-care to those who are in need; he can always get more for
himself.
Giga
>
> Date: Tues, Apr 21 2009 7:27 pm
> From: "Giga"
>
> <<There's a fallacy of equivocation hiding in some of the arguments
> here, conflating two different definitions of "selfishness": (1)
> weighing your desires and choosing actions based on your desires; (2)
> being a dick.>>
I didn't write this btw.
>
> How is "weighing your deas" selfish? How is "choosing actions based
> on your desires' selfish? Obscure wording here.
>
> A selfish person sees/does what serves his own immediate, or "lower,"
> interests. An unselfish person sees beyond his own immediate interests
> to his, and others,' long-term interests. The unselfhish person
> relates to the Greater Good; the selfish person to his own uniquely
> personal interests. I fail to see how these have much to do with
> "desires."
This is more similar to what I was arguing.
Fred Weiss
That depends if the invasion is an act of self-defense or not - or if
the invasion is also an act of liberation (which it might be for some
and not others).
As for the US in particular we have in general been famously generous
and non-vindictive to those we have defeated in war.
But I wasn't thinking of war when I made the above comment. I was
thinking of the typical American response to those who have suffered
from natural calamities, such as earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes -
or the aid they offer neighbors in times of tragedy. I remember for
example the lines that immediately formed to give blood after 9/11 and
the outpouring of contributions to the families of the victims.
Fred Weiss
mrdilligent
From: "Giga"
<<= I think, at least in Western culture, we confuse the physical self
with
the psychological self. It is a though their limits are the same, but
my
psychological self can include all sorts of things outside my body, I
can
identify with them. For instance the people we care about, the objects
we
care about, the institutions, even ideas. We say 'its almost like they
are
part of me' this shows the confusion. To be part of me means to be
part of
my body, but it feels like that. They are really part of the you that
goes
beyond your body, the psyche, the stuff we care about.>>
This seems to conflate many DIFFERENT, and unrelated, ideas.
The word _self_ bears two, if implicit, meanings: 1. In psych and
phil, it i(and _ego_) s the word for the being's essence, no
distinction between "physical" and "psychological." 2., Colloquially
and in great use, _self_ and _ego_ refer to the manifest (as
developed) being, which is usually stunted and undeveloped. This is
the "phoney self," the "imposter self" which is surrogate to the true
inborn self that is "imprisoned" below the surface of manifestation.
It is (nowadays) the psychotherapist''s task to get the "phoney self,"
or "ego" in the colloquial sense, to dig down to the inborn self and
to develop it to manifestation. Bye bye Ego.
In the field of psychology it was found that development has an effect
on the self (as defined in 1, above): The lowest main level of
development has the self identifying with body (the so-called
physical self). A simple cut causes panic that the self---being---
will die (as seen in toddlers), but this state of development can
continue as "age" and "growth" do, resulting in, among other
behaviors, hypochondria and udue emphasis on physical looks. The next
main level of development has the self identifying with emotions; "How
do you/I FEEL." The final level, rarely achieved, sees the whole
picture and can assess conditions appropriately. E.g., a cut is not
death-dealing, nor is emotionality untranscendable.
Daniel T.
> Hey Egoists! Do you always act from reasons of self-interest with all
> of your acts aimed at achieving your own good, is every act, however
> unselfish in appearance, really the product of your selfish motives?
> Is the sole end of all your actions your own pleasure. Whatever you
> do, you do because you expect to maximize your own pleasure by doing
> it.
(I will pull a page from your book and make a massive block quote:
... psychological egoismąs validity turns on examining and
analyzing moral motivation. But since motivation is inherently
private and inaccessible to others (an agent could be lying to
herself or to others about the original motive), the theory shifts
from a theoretical description of human nature--one that can be put
to observational testing--to an assumption about the inner workings
of human nature: psychological egoism moves beyond the possibility
of empirical verification and the possibility of empirical negation
(since motives are private), and therefore it becomes what is
termed a łclosed theory.˛
A closed theory is a theory that rejects competing theories on its
own terms and is non-verifiable and non-falsifiable. If
psychological egoism is reduced to an assumption concerning human
nature and its hidden motives, then it follows that it is just as
valid to hold a competing theory of human motivation such as
psychological altruism.
Giga
I actually see some evidence of my premise in your post itself.