 Well, I'm sure you've heard it said, and you might even agree, at least sometimes, that you should always look out for number one. The idea is pretty straightforward. People are not always going to get what they want, especially people who have competing interests. They want the same thing, but only one person can have it. And the idea behind looking out for number one is you should pursue your interests. Now where it gets interesting is you pursue your interests at the cost of others. Should you always step on somebody on the way to the top? Should you always look out for yourself even at the cost of others? So if you're answering yes to these questions, or the person who answers yes to these questions is some version of an egoist. And we're going to look at two different versions of egoism in this video. We've got psychological egoism, and we've got ethical egoism. We'll take a look at psychological egoism first. It's important to keep in mind that right off the bat, psychological egoism is not a theory in philosophy. Psychological egoism, well, is a theory in psychology. It's the claim that in fact people only ever pursue what's in their best interest. People only ever pursue what's in their best interest. And the idea is that when you look at what a person does, you can say, well, hey, they believe that's in their best interest. That's the source of the motivation. Now like I said, psychological egoism is not a theory in philosophy. It's a theory in psychology. And what it's trying to do is it's trying to provide an explanation for all of behavior. Now immediately philosophers, especially ethicists, tend to worry about that, about psychological egoism. Because if it's true, that means that pretty much all ethical theory goes out the window, because there is a certain goal determining factor for what you do. And that's your best interest. The question of what you in fact do versus what you should do is the difference in question. The question of what you in fact do, that's like psychology. The question of what you do do, or what you should do, is ethics. That's philosophy. So Rachel's first looks at an argument in favor of psychological egoism. And it's more or less called the argument from wanting or the argument from desires. It starts off with the assertion that people have actions, and they base their actions on their desires. So I desire some exercise, so the action I use is walking. Now they add something else onto that. It's like, well, if you have a desire, that desire is always in your best interest. You desire what's in your best interest. So you don't look at, you know, I don't look at, if you can see it, the cedar tree right here. I've got some cedar needles. I don't look at this and say, hey, it's not my best interest to eat cedar tree needles. So I desire to eat them. No, that doesn't really happen, at least not very often. We don't look at things that are bad for us and say, hey, I want that. At least, not merely that, there's issues there. So carrying this further, even if somebody acts on behalf of somebody else's benefit, the psychological aegis says they perceive helping that person out as in their own best interest. You know, if you're in a parking lot and you see, I don't know, you see an older customer trying to handle, trying to pull out a shopping cart. You would go over there to help them and you'll pull out the shopping cart so they can be on their way. The psychological ego is to say something along the lines of, wait, you did that because you wanted to get the next cart and they were holding you up. So the idea with psychological egoism is like, you always act on your desires. Your desires are always in your best interest and even if you're helping somebody else out, what you really desire is in your best interest. Helping them out helps achieve what you want. And that is the argument from wanting. Now Rachel's has what he thinks are at least two counter examples to this claim. He wants to say that, you know, there's at least two cases in which people are not acting out of what they proceed to be their own self-interest. So one case is obligation. So sometimes people act out of obligation, even though they really don't want to. You know, there's some examples of this I'm sure you can be familiar with. So you know, you're doing what your parents tell you to do, even though you don't really want to do what your parents tell you to do. And you may not even think they'll necessarily get in trouble, it's just this is what my parents want me to do. I don't want to do it, but they're my parents, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. We can think of the law. You don't really want to pay your taxes. Of course, in that case, you know, you don't pay taxes good or jail, so that may not be the best case. But you know, manners, right? You might believe that you're obligated to be respectful of other people, but you don't really want to. He's like, that guy's a jerk. I really don't want to be respectful to him. But you are anyway, because you're supposed to be polite to people. So the acting out of obligation is another possibility for explaining an action for Rachel's. Another one is self-sacrifice, extreme cases of self-sacrifice. So the soldier who throws himself on the grenade to save his comrades, Mother Teresa who gave up her life to help the sick and the poor, Cesar Chavez, who suffered a lot of difficulties in his life because of his fight for workers. These are cases of extreme self-sacrifice. Now Rachel wants to say, look, these are clearly cases where they're not acting in their self-interest. I mean, they're suffering, they're suffering a lot. Yes, they're working to benefit others, okay? So Mother Teresa is working to benefit the poor, Cesar Chavez is working to benefit workers. But it's not as if they ever think or can reasonably think that they're going to benefit from that work, right? So Mother Teresa might start a movement to help the poor, but she's really aware of the fact that she's going to die before everybody is ever, you know, everybody is no longer poor. Same thing with Cesar Chavez, you know, he's really sure that he was starting a movement, but you know, maybe, maybe, maybe he didn't think he would ever see the end of it because he would, you know, die before the end. You know, it looks, you know, cases where people sign up for the Secret Service to protect the President of the United States. You know, they might believe that everybody else would be better off if, you know, he takes the bullet, right? The assassin is pointing the gun at the President and the Secret Service man or woman stands in the way and takes the bullet and dies because of it. Now they might think that they're helping everybody with, by taking that bullet for the President, but it's not as if they expect that they're going to be able to see that benefit, right, and they're probably going to die in that situation. So with these cases of extreme self-sacrifice, Rachel says, you know, look, this is not a case where somebody is acting in their own self-interest. They're acting on behalf of others. So those are the two count examples, acting out of obligation, acting out of extreme self-sacrifice. Well, I'm sure at least some of you are thinking right away and, you know, a lot of people think this. I've heard it before. I'm sure you've heard of it is, you know, talking about these cases of self-sacrifice, even cases of obligation, you say, look, you know, these people that are acting out of obligation, they're acting out of extreme sacrifice, they're doing it because it feels good to do it. It feels good to do it. So, you know, in the case of the parents, even though you don't really want to do what your parents tell you to do, it makes you feel good to know that, you know, you're making your parents happy or you're being a good child or, you know, you're, you know, whatever, you're taking it easy on your parents. Take your pick. And in cases of self-sacrifice, the idea is like, yeah, you know, that's extreme self-sacrifice, it feels good to do that. It really does feel good. You feel very pleased with yourself for doing these really wonderful things. And, you know, you might even take it further and say, well, the reason why people do this is so that they get praised by everybody else. Everybody praises the self-sacrificing behavior or this, you know, acting according to obligation. So, you feel like people are approving of you when you're performing these kinds of actions. And, you know, I'm not denying that there's something to it. I'm sure there are people who act out of approval of others. But it's kind of hard to see that in some of these cases. You listen to some of the autobiographies of these people who go through this extreme sacrifice. And they're going through a lot of hardship. If we're talking about feeling good in the sense that feeling of approval, I mean, I don't know about you, but there really hasn't been a time in my life where people have approved of what I've done. And that just skyrocketed me to the heights of wonder and joy. I mean, it feels nice to be approved of by others, but it's never made me so elated that, for instance, you know, I never thought that, you know, people's approval would feel better than, say, you know, living a life of hunger and with hardly any hunger and illness and having hardly any material needs satisfied that that, you know, that would somehow be outweighed by public approval. I don't think that actually happens. Yeah, I'm not denying that it feels good to be approved of by others. I'm just, I don't think that it feels so good that it outweighs some of the things that these people went through. But I suppose it's even further, right? So, you know, and just as a matter of fact, these people were not universally approved of in their time, and these heroes go through a lot of criticism. So it's not universal approval. But he would just look at the idea and say, yeah, you know, the reason why you help, like I say, you give $5 to somebody on the street who's hungry, the reason why you do this is because it feels good. And that feeling good is in your best interest. So that's why you do it, not because you care about the person who's hungry. Well, why would you feel good about giving $5 to somebody who's hungry if you didn't care about that person? You know, not denying that you feel good giving somebody who's hungry $5, but the reason why you feel good is because you're helping somebody. You care about their needs. Kind of a same idea happens with the birthday gift, right? You feel good giving a birthday gift. Hopefully you feel good giving a birthday gift, not because of approval by everybody else, but because you want to bring a little joy and a little excitement into somebody else's life celebrating the day of their birth. You care about that person. If you give a birthday gift because you care about yourself, there's something off there. If you give a birthday gift and it's because you care about the person, that's really good. You know, that's perfectly normal, right? A good thing to experience. So one reply to this whole idea behind feeling good, say, well, that's the reason why I do it, it's in your self-interest, but the reason why you feel good is because you care about somebody else. So even if it is in your self-interest to feel good, the reason why you feel good is because of what you do for somebody else. By the way, don't ever feel guilty for feeling good about helping somebody else. That's one of the worst lies we've perpetuated on ourselves. If you feel good about giving to charity and helping others out, keep on feeling good. That's perfectly okay. Psychological egoism also has another significant problem. Recombo was happening with psychological egoism. It started out pretty much presuming psychological egoism is true. It stated the only reason why people perform actions is to fulfill their own self-interest. That's not a proof. That's a presumption. Psychological egoism just interprets people's behavior. And the guise of that is that you can see people doing this. You see that they're acting and it helps them, so it's their own self-interest. Here's just something that's true. You never observe intentions. You can't. Intentions happen all in the mind and the brain. You never see what's going on there. And even if you wire up a person's brain and you are somehow able to figure out that they're thinking that this is in their intentions, which I'm not sure you can actually do, it's only those people. This isn't the universal hell claim. So when the psychological egoist offers this claim, there's no real evidence to back it up, because you can't observe intentions. So you see Mother Teresa says, yeah, you can interpret at the say that Mother Teresa thinks she's acting on her own best interests, but you can also interpret that to say that she is acting in the interest of others. She believes she's acting in the interest of others. And it's not hard to support the latter interpretation because Mother Teresa's life was hard. Cesar Chavez's life was hard. George Washington, Ben Franklin, these guys, they went through significant difficulty for what they did. We could start in Martin Luther King. Wow. The guys suffered a lot for his cause. So the fact that they suffered a lot for their cause and yet they keep pushing it is really strong evidence that they didn't think that this was merely gonna help them out. So that's kind of a huge problem with psychological egoism is that it's not evidence for its claim. They interpret the behavior, but that itself isn't evidence for the claim. Another real big problem with psychological egoism is what we just talked about in terms of feeling good for the sake of others. It's pretty hard to refute. At the very least, you have to do a couple of different things. One, you have to show that it's impossible for somebody to feel good about caring about somebody else's interests. You have to show that's impossible. And since most of you do it every day, I tend to think that that can't be done. And that in itself is kind of a nail in the coffin for psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is the claim that people in fact only do what's in their best interest or what they think is in their own best interest. Ethical egoism is different. Ethical egoism is the claim that you should do only what's in your own best interest. Now, there's no not necessarily a strict logical inconsistency between psychological egoism and ethical egoism, but if you're arguing that people should do something, you probably think that sometimes people don't. So in all likelihood, if you're an ethical egoist, you probably are not a psychological egoist. And on top of that, if you are a psychological egoist, you probably are not a psychological egoist. If you are a psychological egoist, it kind of doesn't make any sense to argue for ethical egoism. People in fact do this and they should do this. They're like, why bother with the should? They already do. So there is a difference and there's not necessarily strict logical inconsistency, but probably if you're an ethical egoist, you probably are not a psychological egoist. Now, psychological egoism, I'm sorry, ethical egoism is different. It's kind of interesting. It says that you should only do what's in your own self-interest. What's in your own best interest. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't help anybody else, but helping somebody else should benefit you, or at the very least, not interfere with anything else that you want, right? You know, it's convenient without any real cost. Okay, then it's okay to help somebody else. But psychological egoism says you should look out for number one. You should look out only for your own interests. So, the first salvo in the ethical egoist arsenal is what's called the argument from self-defeat. And the idea is that altruism defeats itself. So the argument starts up basically this way. So you have a choice. You can either act as an altruist or you can act as an egoist, an ethical egoist. Well, if you are acting for altruism, you are acting for other people's self-interest, sorry, for other people's interests. And there are at least three things that are in people's interests when you help them. The first is, if you're trying to work for somebody else's benefit, you gotta know what you're doing. You gotta know what they need, how to help them. You gotta cover the bases and be sure that your help is actually gonna help and not just cause further harm. The second thing is that you have to respect people's privacy. So, invading people's privacy, I mean, I think you've all had occasions where somebody's invaded your privacy and that's just never a good thing, right? We don't like it when somebody else intrudes on our business, especially if they start messing around with our business. The third, that you have to respect the dignity of the person, the dignity as an individual. Now, the ethical egoists is gonna say, altruism fails in all three regards. I mean, first of all, you can't know perfectly how to help somebody else, right? So, even in the case where I was giving $5 to somebody who's hungry, the ethical egoists will say, look, you don't know what they're gonna spend that $5 on. They could spend that $5 on alcohol or drugs, right? They might spend that $5, I don't know, paying somebody else to do something that's really wrong, right? You don't know that giving them $5 is gonna help. Giving them food may not necessarily help. Maybe they take the food and sell it to somebody else. And then use that money for alcohol or drugs or what have you. Or maybe, you know, there's a whole host of ways that you can imagine how you trying to help could fail. So, the ethical egoist says, you don't know enough about what you're doing since you don't know it perfectly. You don't know enough about what you're doing to help. So, you shouldn't try. If you try to be altruistic, you're gonna defeat the purpose of being altruistic. You shouldn't do it. The second, the next one that they're dealing with is this issue of privacy. And it's kind of related to the first one. So, if you're really gonna be altruistic and you're gonna make sure that your help is gonna help them, then you have to interfere in that person's business. So, imagine that I'm giving the $5 to somebody on the street and I said, by the way, you have to tell me exactly how you're gonna spend this and I have to approve of how you're gonna spend this. So, maybe I have to give some embarrassing personal details. Maybe I watch them or I walk with them to go buy them these things or something like this. And, you know, you'd be surprised how many people who actually do go to charities, how much of their private life they actually have to reveal in order to receive these benefits. And lastly, is the idea that altruism doesn't actually respect a person's dignity. So, here's how the argument goes. Like, if you're giving charity to somebody, and I'm getting $5 to somebody who's on the street, what I'm doing there is I'm telling that person that you don't know how to care for yourself. You're incompetent and running your own life. You can't make the right decisions, so I have to make them for you. So, the ethical ego says, you know, none of these things respect the dignity of a person. To respect the dignity of a person, you have to let them live their own life. You know, so in all three of these cases, the ethical ego says, altruism fails to achieve its purpose because altruism is about looking out for the interests of others. Well, you're either not gonna know if about what you're doing, you're gonna have to invade their privacy, or you got to disrespect them. None of those looks out for the interests of another person. So, altruism inevitably defeats itself. Now, since the only choice is between altruism and ethical egoism, you should be an ethical egoist. That's the way that the argument from self-defeat runs. The next argument for ethical egoism is given by Ayn Rand, or at least it's a paraphrase of Ayn Rand's arguments. I'm not an Ayn Rand scholar, so I can't tell you whether or not this accurate, but we'll take a look at the argument and take a look at, you know, see how it goes from there. So, the first thing to look at Rand's argument, yeah, we could basically call this the argument for the respect of the person. And the first step is like the last argument. It's like you have a choice between altruism or egoism. Now, with any ethical theory, Rand says, you have to respect the dignity of the individual. You have to respect the individual rights of a person. And this, you know, takes a lot of different forms. I mean, roughly what it means is, is like everybody has only this one life. You've got one shot at it, so you have to spend it on yourself, right? You have to pursue what you want to pursue. You have to act as you want to act. It's very heavily influenced by the idea of personal choice and the importance of personal choice. As something about the rights of an individual person, if you're gonna respect the rights of an individual person, then you have to realize that they have goals. You know, people, an individual person has goals, so you have to let that person pursue their own goals. And the goals should be about themselves. Now, Rand says, if you're an altruist, what you're doing is you're requiring people to spend their lives on other people, right? You're requiring that person to give up everything, give up all of their goals, what's in their own interests, and pursue the interests of others, pursue the benefit of the interests of others. Oh, Rand thinks that this is not respecting the rights of the individual by demanding that the individual can pursue the individual's own goals. So, she concludes altruism. You shouldn't choose altruism. Altruism is not a justified moral theory. So, what you have left is ethical egoism. And that, in summation, is the argument with respect to the individual. You notice it's not entirely too different from the argument that we just looked at. Another argument for ethical egoism is that it coheres or best explains common sense morality. Now, the strategy here is a pretty general one. Most ethical theories try to do this at least at some point. They say our theory best coheres with common sense morality. So, it's the theory that you already agree with. And the strategy here with the ethical egoist is pretty much not that different. So, the egoist notes or observes that there's lots of rules in common sense morality. Rules like honesty. You should strive to tell the truth. Rules like protecting life. You shouldn't walk around killing a random person. Rules about justice and fairness. You should give to people what's due to them. Now, the ethical egoist says these rules are in place, but the reason why they're in place is because they serve your best interest. If people disobeyed the rules all the time, everybody would suffer, including you, okay? So, the reason why people want these rules in places is because they don't want to avoid this kind of suffering. They're interested in themselves. So, the idea is, with honesty, if everybody lied in our society, we'd all be in really bad shape. Imagine if the FDA lied about which drugs are safe. Imagine if, well, let's go say imagine if lawyers lied, but that may not be the best case. I was gonna say imagine if advertisers lie, that may not be the best case either, but this kind of gets at what I'm saying. They don't necessarily lie, but they certainly try to allow you to believe something which may or may not necessarily be the truth or even just necessarily what's good for you. Imagine if I lied to you all the time, you wouldn't know what to believe about philosophy. And yeah, I know enough about philosophy that I could cook up some doozies that could really cause some serious damage. Your math teacher, your science teacher, your history teacher, they could all do the same thing. Imagine if we lied all the time. Well, that'd be serious harm. The society would fall apart. You wouldn't know whether to believe anybody or not. And that harm would harm you. So, the ethical ego is to say the reason why these common sense moral rules are in places because they actually benefit you. Same thing with killing. If it was perfectly acceptable to kill a random person, you could be killed at any given moment. I'm out here in the park. Imagine it was okay to kill some random person if somebody came upon me. That'd be a deadly situation. Same thing about justice. The reason why you care so much about everybody getting what's due is so that you get what you're due. You care about this. So, the argument is that common sense morality already appeals to ethical egoism. And if it already appeals to ethical egoism, you already think that it's true. So, this isn't like the other arguments where you have the choice between altruism and egoism and altruism just fails. This is actually an argument in favor of egoism. And the claim is you already think it's right. The next thing that Rachel's does is he considers three objections to ethical egoism. Now, the first two, he doesn't, he doesn't really take them very seriously. He just kind of mentions them and casts them aside and moves on to what he thinks is the main objection to ethical egoism. Since he doesn't spend a whole lot of time on them, I don't think I will either. The main objection that Rachel's brings to get said called ethical egoism is what ethical egoism considers to be the most important interest. So the idea behind ethical egoism is the interests that matter most are yours. Your interests are more important than anybody else's. The reason why you should look after number one is because number one's interests are more important. What has two thumbs and is most important interest? This guy. That's the idea behind ethical egoism. Now, what Rachel's pushes on here is that ethical egoism offers no proof that your interests are more important than anybody else's. And really, when you kind of look at it, it's in fact impossible that everybody's interests are more important than everybody else's. It just doesn't work out that way. That's a contradiction. You derive contradictions simply from the use of the term more important than anybody else's. I suppose one person could try to argue that their interests isn't in fact more important than anybody else's, but they're not arguing for ethical egoism. They're arguing in favor of something like meism. So if I were to say that my interests are more important than everybody else's, I'm offering ethical haugenism. But that's not what's going on here. The other thing that Rachel's points out is that in claiming that your interests are more important than anybody else's, you're violating that first condition that he talked about of what's required for a moral, not first condition, second condition that he talked about was required for a moral theory. Remember, there were two things. One, that your moral theory has to be supported by good moral reason. And two, that all interests are equally important. That all interests are equally important. Yes, interests are gonna conflict, but there's gotta be a way to negotiate between them without just saying that somebody's interests are more important than somebody else's. So that's Rachel's main argument there, his main objection is that ethical egoism violates the condition of impartiality.