Ethical Egoism

According to some, morality is about personal interest. They say things like, "What's morally right is whatever is good for me. I have no duties to others. The only duties I have are to myself."

Ethical Egoism (EGO):

An action X is morally right iff X promotes my (the speaker's) best interests at least as well as any alternative to X.

It is important to appreciate that EGO is a very different theory than SES. The implications of EGO have objective a posteriori truth conditions. Note that we can be mistaken about what is in our best interests. What is or is not in our best interests is something we discover as we mature.

It is also important to appreciate that EGO is an extremely popular theory. It is so popular, in fact, that there have been vigorous attempts to argue that the theory is true. Before turning to the Standards of Evaluation, let us consider some of these arguments.

Three Arguments for EGO:

Unfortunately, each of these arguments is unsound. Premise (1) of the Social Benefit Argument cannot be true if EGO is true, since if EGO is true it could not be the case that we should adopt the policy which promotes everyone's best interests. Ayn Rand's Argument blatantly commits the Fallacy of False Dilemma. Her view of Ethical Altruism is that it requires one to sacrifice one's life. But surely there are less onerous ethical theories which are nonetheless not egoistic in nature. It bears mentioning that heroes, those who risk or sacrifice their lives for others, are the exception, not the rule. The Intuition Argument is interesting. Essentially what it says is that EGO passes the Standard of Reflective Equilibrium. As we shall see, this is not the case. But the problem with the argument is that premise (1) is false. A theory may be consistent with common moral intuition, but that does not imply that the theory is true. We have already seen a number of examples where (some) peoples' intuition tracks the implications of a theory, but the theory turns out to be false for other reasons.

Showing that the arguments in favor of the theory are unsound does not mean that we're done, however. It doesn't follow that the theory is false. At best we can say that we have no reason to think that the theory is true. What we need to do is run EGO by the Standards of Evaluation to see how it fares.

Standard of Clarity:

Provided that we have a theory of best interests (for which we would need to consult with psychologists, biologists, sociologists, etc.), it seems that EGO passes Clarity.

Standard of Coherence

Does the theory imply any contradictions? Consider that it may be in my best interests to cheat you out of your money, yet it is clearly not in your best interests that I cheat you out of your money. Since there can be conflicts of interests, EGO implies that there are conflicting (or contradictory) moral judgments. Thus,

It may be argued that the Conflict Argument begs the question against the Ethical Egoist. That is, EGO presupposes that actions can be both right and not right--right, insofar as the action is in one person's best interests, and not right insofar as the action is not in another person's best interests. If this is correct, then EGO does not fail Coherence. Instead, we have the following Reflective Equilibrium argument against EGO, which is a variation on The Conflict Argument. Call it "The Conflict Argument*".

This is a Reflective Equilibrium Argument because Premise (3) is not a point of logic such as a contradiction; it depends upon intuiton backed by further argument.

Since it is fair to charge that the Conflict Argument begs the question against the Ethical Egoist, we find that the problems for EGO emerge from Reflective Equilibrium considerations.

Standard of Reflective Equilibrium

In addition to the Conflict Argument*, we have the equally problematic feature of the theory that it privileges the agent over anyone else.

We reject EGO because it fails Reflective Equilibrium.