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A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richmond Campbell
Richmond Campbell*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

The theory I want to refute is sometime called Impersonal Ethical Egoism (IEE): the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation. It might be thought that this view can be distinguished from Personal Ethical Egoism (PEE): the view that I ought (morally) to do what will benefit me the most in any given situation. But to whom does “I” refer in PEE? To any person who states the view? And is the view supposed to be true no matter who states it? If the answers to the last two questions are Yes, then PEE and IEE come to the same thing. To distinguish the views, we might take “I” to refer to a specific person, say, the person who just stated the view. Put unambiguously, without the personal pronoun, PEE then becomes: RC ought (morally) to do what will benefit RC the most in any given situation. IEE would then logically imply PEE, but not conversely. But the reason why PEE would not imply IEE is not that it would be a conflicting, or even an alternative and competing, form of ethical egoism; it is simply that PEE would be formulated much less generally than IEE. In fact, since PEE would concern only what one particular person ought to do, it would not be obvious that the view itself should be called a form of egoism. For if anyone else subscribed to the view, that would hardly make him an egoist; so there would seem to be nothing inherently egoistic about the view. But, in any case, what I aim to refute is a general theory about what anyone ought to do in a given situation, not a theory limited in scope to the actions of only one individual.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , December 1972 , pp. 249 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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References

1 I understand (I) to require that it is logically possible for any two persons to do what they ought to do under any true description of the actions they ought to perform. So interpreted, (I) does imply that it must be causally possible for any two persons to do what they ought to do. For if it is causally impossible for two actions to be performed together, then one of them causally prevents the other. But under that description (in the last clause) it is also logically impossible for both to be performed, since it would be inconsistent to say that both actions are performed although one of them causally prevents the other.

2 The logical structure can be made more precise using the symbolism: “F” for “x ought to do y in situation z”; “G” for “there is an accurate description of x’s doing y in situation z and of u’s doing w in z such that the whole description is inconsistent”; “H” for “x would benefit most from doing y in situation z”. The argument has two premises:

3 This objection is suggested by Section IV of Jesse Kalin’s “On Ethical Egoism”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Monograph Series, No. 1, 1966, pp. 26-41. Kalin argues that if moral activity is formally similar to competitive-game activity, then a certain premise of an argument against egoism is false. The premise is that one ought never to prevent someone from doing what he ought to do. Since my (I) entails this premise, Kalin’s argument constitutes a possible objection to (I).

4 This qualification is needed to rule out the following specification of an action with characteristic C; what will benefit him the most provided that his being prevented from doing it by someone else will not benefit someone else the most. Here the reference to the agent is essential and the previous kind of argument will not refute the view that everyone ought to do this sort of thing. But this view doesn’t seem egoistic.