Richard F. answered • 03/19/21
Cornell Ph.D with teaching experience from MS/HS through Ph.D.
Hi Shaun,
A Psy Egoist might say: he did it because he wanted the glory more than life! Looks implausible - but if you've been trained and trained to care about how you will be perceived, then maybe you would (mistakenly??) see that as in your interests in the heat of the moment.
I'm not saying I'm convinced. But note that this slides close to a different claim, which is that it *must* have been (perceived to be) in his interests because it's what he did (without coercion) and we only do (without coercion) what we want to do - by definition.
That's plain silly. (But a common type of silly.) It simply gets you to an empty form of PE by way of deliberately conflating two senses of "want." I can have multiple values (getting as much chocolate cake as possible and not putting on weight). I can both want to eat the cake and want to avoid doing so, and defer one because of the other.
Going back to the first case, then: if for whatever reason my values are bound up with (say) my country not being invaded, I may want to risk death, or even die, in order to further those values. There's exactly nothing "more" rational to preferring my own narrow self-interest over this; my own narrow self-interest is just another thing (like my country) I can more or less value.
This fact kills strict PE. A more interesting q is an empirical one - are we *predominantly* selfish in the sense of preferring our own narrow self-interest over other values? And the answer is (big roll of drums) sometimes yes, sometimes no. Life's full of positive evidence of the kind PEs love. (People rob banks!) But it's also full of negative evidence. The happiest people aren't the bank robbers but have *meaningful work* - but what makes it meaningful is that other people appreciate and value it. We are social creatures.
In short, PE is a crock.
