Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism

European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):39–58 (2011)
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Abstract

Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person's intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person's intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the "empathy-altruism hypothesis" that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the data that are still not ruled out. One of the most potent criticisms of Batson comes from Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. I argue for two main theses in this paper: (1) we can improve on Sober and Wilson’s conception of psychological egoism and altruism, and (2) this improvement shows that one of the strongest of Sober and Wilson's purportedly egoistic explanations is not tenable. A defense of these two theses goes some way toward defending Batson‘s claim that the evidence from social psychology provides sufficient reason to reject psychological egoism.

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Joshua May
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Citations of this work

Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind.Joshua May - 2018 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Egoism.Robert Shaver - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Moral psychology: Empirical approaches.John Doris & Stephen Stich - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Egoism, Empathy, and Self-Other Merging.Joshua May - 2011 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1):25-39.

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References found in this work

What we owe to each other.Thomas Scanlon - 1998 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The possibility of altruism.Thomas Nagel - 1970 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..
The Possibility of Altruism.John Benson - 1972 - Philosophical Quarterly 22 (86):82-83.

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