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Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1978
Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences
Egoism, nowadays, has centered the attention of our competitive society. The goal of this article is to provide some insight into egoism by revealing egoism as a virtue or as a vice under different theoretical and factual support by examining literature research. This concept of egoism centered around self-interest and has been discussed over hundreds of years. There are theories and ideas proposed that support egoism as a virtue for contributing to both self and common interest, whereas some arguments contradict egoism as beneficial to the overall society and are "immoral". Though the theories are not flawless, they allowed us a new understanding of egoism rather than the stereotypes that are often against egoistic actions. There are two sides to everything; the same applies to egoism.
Egoism and altruism are unequal contenders in the explanation of human behaviour. While egoism tends to be viewed as natural and unproblematic, altruism has always been treated with suspicion, and it has often been argued that apparent cases of altruistic behaviour might really just be some special form of egoism. The reason for this is that egoism fits into our usual theoretical views of human behaviour in a way that altruism does not. This is true on the biological level, where an evolutionary account seems to favour egoism, as well as on the psychological level, where an account of self-interested motivation is deeply rooted in folk psychology and in the economic model of human behaviour. While altruism has started to receive increasing support in both biological and psychological debates over the last decades, this paper focuses on yet another level, where egoism is still widely taken for granted. Philosophical egoism (Martin Hollis’ term) is the view that, on the ultimate level of intentional explanation, all action is motivated by one of the agent's desires. This view is supported by the standard notion that for a complex of behaviour to be an action, there has to be a way to account for that behaviour in terms of the agent's own pro-attitudes. Psychological altruists, it is claimed, are philosophical egoists in that they are motivated by desires that have the other's benefit rather than the agent's own for its ultimate object (other-directed desires). This paper casts doubt on this thesis, arguing that empathetic agents act on other people's pro-attitudes in very much the same way as agents usually act on their own, and that while other-directed desires do play an important role in many cases of psychologically altruistic action, they are not necessary in explanations of some of the most basic and most pervasive types of human altruistic behaviour. The paper concludes with the claim that philosophical egoism is really a cultural value rather than a conceptual feature of action.
İş ahlakı dergisi, 2014
This paper seeks to put forward an alternative approach to Psychological Egoism which attempts to capture what Psychological Egoism often alludes to. Thoughts of selfishness, thinking about one's own role and gain in any action or event, the moralization of the concept of selfishness-all of these prompt us to think of humans as psychological egoists. Yet, certain examples such as a soldier jumping up on a grenade seemingly debunk the concept of Psychological Egoism. This paper seeks to redefine and expand the basic tenets of want, Self, desire, Selfishness, behaviour, etc., to better explain the phenomena, behaviour and Self, that Psychological Egoism alludes to. This paper will do so by increasing the scope of the Self, and what it means to be Selfish through Humanist and Social psychology, and attempt to show how humans act in accordance with this new framework of psychological egoism. Various examples are to be used to demonstrate the application of this alternative approach, and, their real-world and moral consequences.
When Ayn Rand is studied in philosophy classes, it is most often in connection with her defense of ethical egoism and rejection of altruism. 1 Though this is a striking aspect of her moral theory, and it is the one that she most often highlighted, she did not think that the question to which egoism and altruism are contrary answers was the central or fundamental issue in moral philosophy: The choice of the benefi ciary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the fi eld of morality. It is not a substitute for morality, nor a criterion of moral value as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary : it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system. (VOS x) S For Rand, the purpose of ethics is to defi ne " a code of values to guide […] the choices and actions that determine the course of [man's] life " (" Philosophy: Who Needs It? " PWNI 4). I The central question of ethics is what values are worth pursuing. In Chapter 4 , above, Allan Gotthelf discusses how Rand answers this question, including her view that a philosopher's answer to this question depends on his fundamental premises about the nature of values and of human beings' need for them. Rand's position on these issues is discussed by Gotthelf in Chapter 4 (76–78) and by me in Chapter 3 (63). Both of those chapters discuss the egoistic character of Rand's ethics, but it is not their focus. In the present chapter, I discuss what it means for Rand's ethics to be egoistic. I begin by looking at different doctrines that have been called " egoism " and situating Rand's position relative to them. Then I turn to her characterization of altruism, and identify instances of this view both in popular moral discourse and in the history of philosophy, and I survey Rand's criticisms of the view. I close with a discussion of Rand's insistence on describing the moral life as " selfi sh " even though, in common usage, " selfi sh " is a term of opprobrium and connotes a type of behavior that is incompatible with her morality.
in R. Crisp (ed.) *The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics*, OUP, 2013
This chapter deals with psychological egoism, act ethical egoism, moral self/other asymmetry and the prerogative to give one’s own good less weight than the good of others when one is deciding what to do, rule ethical egoism, rational egoism, agent-relative partiality, agent-neutral partiality, degrees of permissible partiality, impartiality in the application of rules, Bernard Gert’s account of impartial treatment, and agent-neutral impartiality in the justification of rules, including utilitarian, Golden Rule, and contractualist forms of impartial justification. The chapter closes by outlining the reasons that utilitarian and contractualist foundational impartiality might allow and even require forms of agent-relative partiality in day-to-day decision making.
European Journal of Special Educational Needs
Hesperia, 2010
The 14th International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy proceedings, 2017
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The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 1998
Pragmalinguistica
South East Asia: Actual problems of Development, 2021