Psychological egoism
Psychological egoism is the conviction or empirically observed fact that all striving, behavior and action of a person, including the unconscious, ultimately aims to maintain and increase his individual happiness or well-being, to realize his own wishes, interests and goals.
According to this view, all behavioral phenomena can be traced back to this basic striving. This explanation of the actual human motivation thus corresponds in principle to the images of humans already drawn by Niccolò Machiavelli , Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith , which, as it were, identified egoistic goals and affects as the actual driving force of all human action.
The emotional amoral egoism based on modern knowledge of neurology is represented in the presence of Nayef RF Al-Rodhan .
Although this is the dominant view in the human sciences and it is also widely used in people's everyday views, there are phenomena that seem to contradict this view, such as B. Altruistic behavior and action. Representatives of psychological egoism try to trace these phenomena back to egoism by looking to provide evidence of how altruistic action aimed at the welfare of others is ultimately only motivated to maintain or increase self-welfare (→ reciprocal altruism ) .
An example of such an argument would be: altruistic / non-profit behavior (such as a donation) actually serves the human wish to have a good conscience or that other people think well of you. The golden rule thus becomes a formula for success and social agreements in the form of laws only serve to protect oneself from the egoism of others. However, this argument can be refuted as partly self-contradicting. There is the following anecdote about Abraham Lincoln , who argued in favor of psychological selfishness when he discussed it lively with a gentleman in a carriage. The two drive over a bridge and Lincoln watches as some piglets get stuck in the mud on the bank of the river. The mother of the piglets tries desperately to save them, but is unable to do so. Lincoln leans over to the driver and tells him to stop for a moment. He then runs to the bank and frees the piglets. Back in the carriage, the discussion flares up again and the other passenger says that this was the best proof of the people's altruistic behavior. Lincoln contradicts this and says that it rather confirms that he only acted selfishly motivated, because otherwise the senseless death of these animals would have tormented him until the end of his days. The contradiction now is that Lincoln can only develop this feeling and the agony that follows from it if he is already compassionate in himself. If he were actually exclusively selfishly oriented, compassion towards others could not develop. Whether this is really a contradiction is extremely questionable, since compassion arises from so-called mirror neurons and is natural. Thus, Lincoln was born as a compassionate being, which while diverting his egoism, does not exclude it.
The term “psychological egoism” denotes a presumed factuality and is not associated with an evaluation.
See also
literature
- Thomas Leon Heck (Ed.): The principle of egoism . Noûs Verlag, Tübingen 1994.
- G. Kavka: Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1986, pp. 35-44, 51-64.
Web links
- Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
swell
- ^ Joel Feinberg , Joel Feinberg, Russ Shafer-Landau: Reason and responsibility: readings in some basic problems of philosophy , 2002, p. 550, ISBN 0-534-57352-5