Are human beings selfish?

 This is offered as a model of a small piece of philosophical work, applying ordinary language methods or examples methods to philosophical problems. It is organized in two main pieces. The first piece is tracing out a tempting line of thought, and clarifying some consequences of that. The second is mounting an attack on that line of thought based on looking at the meanings of, and non-philosophical examples of, the terms involved. The main result is that the question is not answered but is instead dismissed as resting on mistakes. This is, then, a meditation on method and an argument for the methods in the second part of the paper.

     There is a line of thought leading to a yes, always and all the time and in everything we do, human beings are selfish. Some of this might start with adoption of an article of faith among scientists and social scientists, that there is a causal account to be found for every event. It may be that doing science requires us to believe this. If we are going to do science on human beings, we apply this idea to human actions. The background to this idea includes the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Leibniz’s notion that there is for any event causes sufficient to assure its occurrence (with roots in Parmenides’s maxim that it is impossible to derive something from nothing). After all, whatever we do we've got reasons and choices and they are our own reasons and choices, and they of course have their own antecedents in how we were raised, our conditioning, our genetic makeup, what we’ve learned out of previous choices. We choose to hand over the money to the mugger at gunpoint rather than die, so we do that for selfish reasons. We shovel the walk for the old lady and even if she never finds out who did it, we get a good feeling out of it, or we please our parents, or we can rationalize then that we are not evil or an unfeeling monster. It looks unselfish but really it's selfish when you think about it.

      The line of thought, then, seems to be this. Whatever we do, there is a story that goes with each action which accounts for what we do by referring to our own motives. No action takes place in a vacuum. It instead could be regarded as something in the middle of a story in which the action plays a part. Every action, that is, has a set of causes, reasons, preferences, a history of training and learning and concerns, which, when you put it all together shows how that particular action came to be done. We can tell this story equally as easily for those actions we might be tempted to say are unselfish, just as easily as we can tell it for those we might be tempted to say are selfish.

      So, when we take some archetypal "unselfish" action (the scare quotes are a hint that we are worried that the word may be some kind of mistake), such as my friend Jim stopping to help an elderly couple on 101 whose tire went flat, we know that there are things about the action we can find out which will have to do not with the elderly couple but with Jim, with his self we might say.

      We know quite a bit about how the outline of that story must go, even if we do not know Jim. He got to be the kind of person he is by way of a history of learning and reinforcement, he probably gets a good feeling out of helping people, he may think he ought to help people, he feels bad about passing by people who do need help, and so on. These are parts of the story of the particular action which are about how Jim himself gets payoffs or gets out of distress by doing what he does, and about his preferences, which are after all not anybody else's preferences but are preferences within himself. If he prefers to help people, that is after all his preference.

      It is based on similar considerations that we conclude that Jim, whom we might have said (before thinking it through) is unselfish, is in reality selfish. And it is based on these kinds of considerations that we conclude that every single one of us is after all completely selfish in everything that we do, and that, really, being unselfish is a conceptual impossibility.

      Now there are unfortunate consequences of this view. We think of selfishness as a moral shortcoming, and we do not like to think that we, you and I, might be open to the charge of being selfish. We also like to think that our admiration of people who do help others, especially when they take risks to do so or especially when their commitment to helping shows in their giving up things they want in order to help others--we like to think that our admiration of those people and those deeds, admiration based on their unselfishness, is well-founded. Well, tough. We are selfish, and we have been wrong to admire people for being unselfish. The small consolation (any frying pan in a fire) is that we are no different from anyone else in this, and probably then we should not be blamed for our selfishness (not because everybody's doing it, but) since it is conceptually impossible for us to be any other way. Unselfishness is a mythological beast who does not really exist any more than flying unicorns do, and it is even stronger than that since unselfishness is logically impossible, like five-sided triangles. We need a correction, then; unselfishness does not really exist any more than five-sided triangles or round squares exist, and that is really not to exist. That's pretty far out there.

      The distressing consequences of this idea need to be faced up to in a forthright way. It follows that the people who sheltered Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, all those heroes of the Holocaust, the mothers in famine-stricken countries who do not eat but instead feed their children, the saints who give their lives to help the poor and the lame and the homeless, the wonderful heroes who sacrifice themselves for others, such as firefighters going back into the burning houses, to your mothers and fathers who are sacrificing to help support your going to college--well, hell, that is their preference, every one of them. Unselfish? Nope, not at all.

      Now the attack on the foregoing line of thought. Lets consider some reminders. The first is about the philosophical tool that comes with the claim that words mean things based on contexts with alternatives. The idea is that words make the kinds of sense they do by virtue of the fact that they eliminate alternatives. That is, when you say someone is courageous part of that saying just is denying that that someone is cowardly or apathetic, and part of that saying requires the possibility of threats or danger. It follows that there is no possibility of courage in heaven--neither word nor thing is going to make sense when the alternatives vanish and the possibility of threats and danger vanish. Saying that something is colored purple is in part saying that it is not orange or green, and without those possibilities the sense of saying it's purple is changed, and without any of those possibilities it no longer makes sense to say it's purple.

      This tool becomes relevant in the present case if we try to think of what the word selfish means when we have decided on the basis of our line of thought that everybody all the time is really selfish.Unselfishness, even the very possibility of unselfishness, has vanished. But what then does selfish mean? What kind of sense does the word selfish make when it is impossible to meaningfully say that someone is selfish, since it is impossible for them to be any other way? It becomes unclear what we are saying when we say that someone is selfish, after we have bought into this philosophical line of thought. The line of thought has turned the word "selfish" into nonsense, or at the very least threatens to make the word nonsense.

      There is another bit of evidence that our line of thought has gone astray. That can be seen, not just by considering how words mean things outside of philosophy, but by considering particular examples outside of philosophy--in this case, perhaps, each example is a pair of stories. Think of Jim and then think of me. I was startled to drive by Jim stopped helping other people. I am a lot like Jim, I think, powerful philosopher and all, but I never do any of that do-gooder shit--my time is too valuable to me. It never even occurs to me to stop and help people, no matter how lonely the road and no matter how much distress and how clear or how extreme the need. People don't ask me for favors because they know I never say yes, even when it would be easy. I don't ask other people how they are doing, though I am happy to tell them about my troubles and my victories and my opinions about pathetic other people who cannot be independent. My wife has secretly had the thought that it would be poetic justice if I were to suffer a stroke and have to be in a wheelchair all the rest of my life and have to keep asking people for favors, but as a matter of fact this would affect my character not a whit--I'd be no more kind or sympathetic or empathetic than I am now, which is not at all. In a word, a nonphilosophical word, I am completely selfish.

      You meet us at a party, and a bit later in a distant corner you ask Rich, who is a philosophy major and so knows the faculty, to tell you about Jim, and then to tell you about me. Rich mentions about Jim that he is something of a saint, a nurturer, given to helping people in distress. When you ask about me, you ask Rich, "So, is Powell unselfish too, like Jim?" He shudders. "Absolutely not--it would be hard to conceive of anyone more perfectly selfish."

      Now if the words selfish and unselfish function partly as comparatives, as descriptors of some people in contrast with others, regarding whether people are helpful, see the needs of others, put their own needs and activities aside in the face of the needs of others–then part of that tempting line of thought at the beginning of this paper can be true, that there is a story about any particular action and how any of us came to do that action without that having anything at all to do with whether we are selfish or unselfish. That is, the words have their homes in examples other than scientific accounts of human motivation. There are problems about whether the Principle of Sufficient Reason applies to human choices and decisions. The conviction that it does rests on some other ground than the practice of science, and may be more like an item of religious faith than like an axiom of logic. But accounts of selfishness and unselfishness have their homes in examples like the one example in which Jim and I are being compared, and the abstract philosophical line of thought (uncritically accepted in some circles in psychology), in its ignorance of the proper homes for the words, has ripped the word out of the gimbals in which it makes sense, and turned it into nonsense. If Rich says Jim is a very unselfish person at the beginning and your grasp of English is not sehr gut, you may ask him to explain what that means. He might give the examples, or say that Jim often notices other people's needs or wants and acts to help other people. Or say some other things, and we could supply several things, that would help make sense of the word unselfish as applied to Jim.

      Which survives, then, the abstract philosophical line of thought or the examples from outside philosophy? The answer is the examples survive. This is not to say that really we human beings are unselfish. This is not to say that the story that really we are selfish is false. It is more fierce than that. The story that we are all, really, selfish, is a bit of nonsense ("nonsense on stilts," as Ryle said in another setting). It is not even a candidate for being false because what it is saying cannot be made intelligible, cannot be made sense of. It requires us to make the words mean something other than they can mean. It's tempting, but it's nonsense, understandable only if we grant the abstract line of thought instead of argue for it and if we turn a blind eye toward the meanings of the words in the examples which are their homes.

      And since this line of thought (perhaps generated by a simplified model of human beings) underlies our temptation to ask the question, the question itself is revealed as corrupt because it rests on the mistakes about meaning and letting the abstractions overrule the examples in which the words live. Rather than answer the question, what is called for is philosophy of exactly the kind displayed in this short paper, and the final result is that when we expose the confusions and mistakes, we do not answer the question-instead we watch it evaporate. And we stop. To the extent we have found the abstract line of thought tempting (that is, to the extent we are philosophically inclined), we may feel uneasy and restless. We will want to keep picking at it. But carefully picking at it will acknowledge the arguments presented here, and stopping our philosophical work on this problem will be a positive accomplishment.

     jwp

P. S.: This work might seem to owe some debts to the kind of philosophy pioneered by Jacque Derrida, deconstruction, but its roots are different and its effect is also different. Granted, there are commonalities: I’m interested in pathologies which accompany a dichotomy; results of the work include undermining the terms partly by undermining the thinking behind the terms; there might be some impetus to play in the field vacated between the poles of the dichotomy and between each particular term and the thing the term is about. Still, the kind of therapy recommended here seems to me more corrosive than deconstruction, corrosive at least of abstract thinking about selfish and unselfish, science and human lives. The kind of therapy recommended here crucially involves reminders about how the words are used separate from the account we put together as scientists or as philosophers. The words are not our property, and we cannot just set about knocking down walls. We are more in the mode of renters–we can use the words but have to return them in good condition. It seems to me that when this therapy is successful, the result is that we are less in the grip of the dichotomies and their pathologies, but we are also less susceptible to the abstract lines of thought which fertilize them, and less likely to be seduced by bad philosophical problems.