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This episode transcribed by Maria Araújo. Thanks, Maria! Episode post here.


Matt Teichman:
Hello. Welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Greg Salmieri, a fellow at the Anthem Foundation, who teaches Philosophy at Rutgers University, and who co-edited a companion to Ayn Rand in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series and Foundations of a Free Society — which is out from University of Pittsburgh Press.

Today he is here to discuss egoism and altruism. Greg Salmieri, welcome back to Elucidations.

Greg Salmieri:
Thank you. It’s great to be back.

Matt Teichman:
So, I think egoism isn’t a term that everybody’s always come across—not even, necessarily, in a philosophy class. So what exactly does egoism mean?

Greg Salmieri:
Well, the word’s been used for a number of related theories. I think the kind of central idea to start with—to get a grip on all of them, and how they’re related—is the idea of an action’s being egoistic. And an action is egoistic if it’s ultimately motivated by the agent’s own well-being. The agent is the person taking the action; that’s how we use that term in ethics. So that the person taking an action—and he has a goal that he’s trying to achieve by taking the action—and if that goal is ultimately to benefit himself, the action’s egoistic. As opposed to the goal being to help someone else, to obey some kind of a duty, or just him not having much of a goal at all.

And what we’re talking about here is the ultimate goal of an action. So, you know, you might do one thing for the sake of something else, and that second thing for the sake of a third, but this chain comes to an end somewhere. And so, we’re talking about the ultimate goal. So you might well be acting to help someone else—but because you think that doing this will somehow enrich your life. Or, you might be acting to help yourself—but only because you think it’ll fit you to be a better servant of God, or a better servant of other people, or help you to better do your duty. Whether an action’s egoistic or non-egoistic is a matter of what the ultimate goal is. In the final analysis, why are you doing this? And is it to benefit yourself? If so, it’s an egoistic action. And then, the various theories that have been called egoism make claims about actions: either that they all are egoistic, or that they all ought to be egoistic, or that they are all egoistic insofar as they are generally the agent’s own action, as opposed to being motivated by some kind of neurosis, or something.

We can give different names to these theories. So that the theory that all actions are egoistic, that no one ever acts for any reason other than self-interest is sometimes called psychological egoism. The theory that all someone’s genuine actions—as opposed to compulsions, or nervous ticks they have—sometimes that’s called egoism about reasons or rational egoism—although that term is often used in another way that we’ll discuss. And then, the theory that I’m interested in, and that I endorse, and that some of the people I study are proponents of, is ethical egoism. That is, the theory that central to what makes an action good—what makes it right, what makes it moral—is that it benefits the person taking it.

Matt Teichman:
Okay, nice. So maybe just to make sure that I’m clear on this idea of an ultimate action, it seems like what we’re talking about there is: for any given thing that you’re doing, why are you really doing it? So for instance, let’s say, I’m going to meet my friend in Philadelphia; and I could take the 5:05 train, or the 5:10 train; and either way I’d get to meet my friend in Philadelphia. Let’s say I do take the 5:05 train. It seems like it would be silly to imagine that I’m taking the 5:05 train specifically, as an end in itself. No—I don’t care about this exact train. The only reason I care about it is because it’s going to get me to my friend, and what I want to do is see my friend. But then, once we get to me seeing my friend, it seems like we could kind of ask the same question about that. Well, ok, but why do I really want to see my friend? So then, as we keep ascending this ‘Why am I really doing this?’ chain, and getting to a further, and further, bigger life goal of mine—if we eventually stop, and we get to the main thing that I’m doing everything for, maybe that’s an ultimate goal. Is that a good way to understand it, or?

Greg Salmieri:
You could understand it that way, but the word ‘really’ gives me pause. Because it’s not as though you don’t really want to get on that train. It’s just that there’s a reason why you want to get on that train. Part of why I’m skeptical or reticent about the word ‘really’ is: there’s this idea you get, in Plato’s Symposium, that you love someone or something. And then we could say why you love them. And suppose the answer is that they’re beautiful—that’s the kind of answer you get in Plato’s Symposium, in any case—well then, what you really love is beauty, not the person. And if you could just encounter beauty pure—uninfected by the human flesh, and whatever else, as Plato says, that it’s got in the person—you would love it more.

And, regardless of the details of Plato’s view of beauty, and that it’s beauty that you love someone for, I think there’s something wrong about this way of thinking of something. You love a concrete person, or a concrete thing. And we can give some account of what it is about it that makes you love them. But that doesn’t mean that you, then, love only that thing that’s specified in the account—and not the concrete person that you love, on account of those features specified in the account.

I think, likewise, if you value, say, getting on a concrete train, and there’s a reason for that, it’s not necessarily that what you value is that reason rather than the train. Now, in some cases, as with this train case, it’s plausible to say that—because another train is coming along in just a moment, and if you miss this train and get on the next one, you won’t be (or feel yourself to be) any worse off. And so, we might think you’re indifferent to which train it is. But, if we take a more significant value—like, you love a certain job, or a certain person, or a certain house that you live in, or a certain artwork—I think there, too, we can specify why you love it, why it’s good for you. And the account that we would give in those kinds of cases would really be explanatory of its value to you: what contribution does it make to your life, in a way that wouldn’t make it fungible, where we’d say that, really, what you value is these other things that we’re referencing in the account.

Matt Teichman:
Okay, right. So, it’s not that getting this train isn’t really a goal of mine. It’s that I’m not getting the train just in order to get the train—I’m getting it in order to do some further thing. So then, if we ask this question: ‘What am I doing this thing in order to accomplish further?‘—and if we keep asking that, and the thing we get to at the end is, ‘In order to benefit myself’—then the thing I did was egoist.

Greg Salmieri:
Yeah, I think that’s right. The action was egoistic in that case. But we’re going to have to think a lot about what it really means to benefit yourself—what’s good for you. And, as we’ll see, there are different views of the answer to this question. Egoism is not really one theory, so much as it is—even ethical egoism—a description of a type of moral theory. And likewise for psychological egoism, or any of the other kinds of egoisms. They’re descriptions of a type of theory that explains something in terms of self-interest. But then there’s a question of: what is self-interest, anyway?

Matt Teichman:
Right. So, in a way, it’s like we could slot in our preferred account of what it is to benefit yourself into this, and come up with different views—depending on what you think it really is to be good to yourself. Maybe I think: to benefit yourself is to have lots of ice cream, experiencing the pleasure of the great taste of the ice cream. And someone else thinks: benefiting myself is working out really hard and having a really fit physique. And so, to the extent that there’s a debate about what benefiting yourself ultimately is, there can be different variations on egoism.

Greg Salmieri:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And here are some accounts of what benefiting oneself is. We can think of it as: benefiting yourself is trying to attain your own well-being, or your self-interest, or what’s good for you, or your good. These are all different expressions we could use for the same thing. But what is it? What is good for you, or for someone? What is someone’s good? What is their well-being, what is their self-interest? Well, one account is: it’s whatever gives them the most pleasure. That’s hedonism about self-interest. Another account is that it’s fulfilling all of their present desires; or maybe fulfilling as many of their desires over time as possible; or the greatest proportion of their desires. Other kinds of accounts try to give a list of things—they think they know what’s good for human beings in general. And you’re a human being, and as many of the things on this list you can tick off—or the proportion of the things on the list that you can tick off—that’s your well-being.

And I think those are three of the main categories of them. Also—this last one is sometimes run together with the previous one—fulfilling your nature as a human being. There’s an idea that there’s a certain thing that we’re meant to mature into, or realize our capabilities. And the extent to which you do that is the extent to which you have well-being. So these are some of the traditional theories on it. My own view on it is based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s view, and a little bit different from all of those—we’ll talk more about the details later—but has elements of a few of them.

Matt Teichman:
So, we talked about this a little bit, in your earlier appearance in the program. And if people want the detailed answer, they can re-listen to that episode— that was Episode 73, on Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy.

But just for people who are coming at this for the first time: can it ever be the right thing to do, to do something just to benefit yourself? Don’t we just automatically think that that’s evil or wrong? We teach kids not to be selfish, to share their toys with each other, etc.?

Greg Salmieri:
Yeah. Well, there are two questions: can it ever be, and can it always be?

Matt Teichman:
Right.

Greg Salmieri:
And I think, most moral philosophers would regard what you said we teach our kids—you know, never be selfish, never do things just for yourself, and so forth—as a straw man of what either contemporary mores are, or what moral philosophers say. I do think it is a straw man of what moral philosophers say—that is, if you look at theories of ethics, you’ll find very few people who say, ‘Never do anything ever for yourself’.

I think it’s much less of a straw man of how we actually teach kids: ‘That was selfish’, ‘Don’t do this for yourself’. ‘You’re only thinking of yourself’ is almost always a pejorative.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah.

Greg Salmieri:
But, I think, if we just think about moral common sense, and the reason why most moral philosophers would say it’s a straw man—to say that any ethical theory says you should never do anything for yourself—is there are lots of things that we admire that people do for themselves. They are ambitious; they support themselves. If someone’s in an abusive relationship and leaves the relationship, we think that’s good: she (or he) stood up for herself (or himself).

Matt Teichman:
A big talking point within feminism these days is self-care, as a way of resisting the patriarchy, which pressures you into not caring about yourself.

Greg Salmieri:
Yeah. And not only in feminism. My wife’s pregnant, and we’re reading a lot of parenting books—and I guess this connects to feminism, because most primary caretakers are women. But regardless of who the primary caretaker is—there’s a lot now, in these books, about, you know, ‘Take care of yourself, your kid’s not going to be better off, and no one’s going to be better off, if you’re making a martyr to yourself to be what you imagine is the perfect parent.’ The perfect parent isn’t some kind of put-upon slave. I don’t think we think people should never care for themselves. But I do think people think the idea that it’s always moral to do what’s best for yourself—that I think strikes people as very counter-intuitive. And why is that?

Well, I think there were two reasons. I think that the content of conventional morality that we’re brought up with prizes non-selfish, non-egoistic sacrificial actions. They’re given a kind of special moral weight or halo around them. I think that’s why there’s a need for this kind of advice as part of feminism, as part of parental training, as part of other things. You know, ‘Care for yourself’—it’s a kind of pushback against something that’s big in the culture (and we can talk about why that is). But there’s a sense of: this is what’s moral about morality. And I think a lot of things that are thought to be moral—that are sacrificial—are not moral. But then, there’s also a lot of things that I think genuinely are moral—are demanding, require a lot of work, require struggle, require doing things that might not be what you feel like doing, in the moment. And, particularly if we’re not clear on what self-interest is, these actions certainly aren’t obviously self-interested. If they are self-interested, if they are egoistic, it’s going to be the output of a view of what’s good for you—to say that they are. And so, integrating these actions that we find admirable, with our understanding of what’s good for ourselves, is something to be accomplished by a moral philosophy, if that moral philosophy is egoistic. It’s not something that should be obvious out of the gate.

Matt Teichman:
So, let me just take a quick crude example. Let’s say that I’m a con artist, and all I ever do is go around and cheat people out of their money. And as a result, at the end of the day, I have lots of money and lots of Lamborghinis. Is that an egoist type of life to lead?

Greg Salmieri:
Well, I don’t think it is. I don’t think it’s good for you. We have to ask: why do you want these Lamborghinis? What are you getting out of them? What are you giving up by being dishonest in these ways? What kind of a life are you leading? Why do you value that life? And we can think about it sort of internally—what is your psychology like—I think people like that are generally miserable. But then, we can think about: why is it? Why would we expect that kind of a life to lead to someone being miserable? Well, think about what are the kind of values that comprise a human life and make life worth living for a human being, and that, indeed, sustain a person in life?

And having Lamborghinis is not one of them. I mean, you’ve got to have a way to get around, and a Lamborghini could have some aesthetic value—so I’m not saying don’t buy one, if you’re in a position to be able to, when you find you really love that car. But, you know, your 18th probably has very minor, marginal value in your life—even your second, and even your first. Whereas having relationships with people where they can trust you and you trust them—where they can know the real story of how you got what you got, and not feel like you’re a threat to them—I think, is much more valuable than another fancy car. Or even a first fancy car. And moreover, I don’t think it’s an accident that thieves are people who are living outside the law; and that living outside the law is dangerous. It’s not true that people typically get away with stealing all this money, for all this time. And when they do get away with it, I think they know, in some way, that their lives are perilous.

I think Thomas Hobbes’s theory of well-being is too crude. I don’t think it’s right. Hobbes is basically a subjectivist about well-being. And he thinks (he doesn’t use these terms) but whatever you want is good for you—is in your self-interest. I think that’s not true; I think a lot of things people want aren’t in their self-interest. But, even on a Hobbesian account—he thinks you’d be a fool to be unjust. And you’re a fool to be unjust—to steal from people, and so forth—because that kind of activity necessarily puts you at odds with the whole rest of society, that has an interest in exposing and destroying you. And to think you can get away with it for long is to think you can outsmart the combined force of all of humanity. And I think he’s right that you can’t. You’re going to get caught; you’re always going to know that you’re at risk of getting caught; and if you fail to get caught, it’s not due to your shrewdness, but due to luck. Because it would only be shrewd if it was a predictable outcome that you’ll get away with it. But it’s never a predictable outcome that you’ll get away with swindling the rest of the human race. Behaving in a way that they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with you, if they understood how you were behaving—when, in fact, all the things you’d get of value, out of this interaction, are things that depend on your continuing to interact with other people.

Matt Teichman:
So it seems like a general strategy to a lot of at least the most obvious counterexamples is going to be to say, ‘Well, let’s look a little more carefully at what this life actually is’, and really think about, ‘Is the person really benefiting themselves, at the end of the day, all things considered?’ And it seems like once we subject the life that person’s living to that kind of careful scrutiny, in general, it’s going to come out like:, ‘Yeah, the more I think about it, this is not a life that I’d want to live’.

Greg Salmieri:
It’s not even that careful scrutiny that’s required, right? For some things, it’s gonna really take care to think about it; and they are really hard decisions about what’s in your self-interest or not. But for most people, whether to be a crook or an honest, productive person, I don’t think it’s like that. I think it takes fairly little thought—if you’re really thinking about it—to see that this is no kind of life; to see that Bernie Madoff would have been better off if he was a kind of mediocre, honest investment banker, rather than the runner of a ridiculous Ponzi scheme. Even before the Ponzi scheme came to its end. I think it doesn’t take much effort to see that.

And that’s why I don’t think those kinds of actions are selfish. Because it’s not like what Madoff was doing—or what any kind of crook like this does—is plausibly something that you can come up with as good for you, if you spent time thinking about, ‘What are the life options open to me? What will my life look like if I do one thing or the other? What things do I need to make a life for myself that I could be happy with, and how does this fit into them?’

I think they are acting on their momentary desires or whims. But everyone knows—everyone who pauses to think about it knows—that what you desire right now might not be good for you. The obvious examples are drug addicts, and things like this; eating or drinking too much. We all know there are things we sometimes want that we’d be well-advised, for our own sakes, not to do. And, I think, if you’re going to have an idea of well-being or self-interest at all, it has to be distinguished from whatever I want now. If you don’t think there’s anything that’s good for you apart from whatever you want now, you don’t even need a concept of well-being—you just need a concept of want. And I think it’s clear that people who are just lunging after whatever they want now aren’t even trying to act for their own self-interest—that’s a too complex description of their mental state.

Matt Teichman:
Hmm. Okay. So, I think we have a pretty good idea of what egoism is now, as a theory of what it is to do the right thing. What’s altruism?

Greg Salmieri:
Well, like egoism, altruism is one of these terms that’s had a number of uses.

Matt Teichman:
I was afraid you were gonna say that.

Greg Salmieri:
Yeah. It was coined by Auguste Comte, in the 19th century. The term egoism had been around considerably prior to that, but Comte created it as this other term that’s a kind of a contrast to egoism. And the way he saw it—he was one of the theorists who tries to give a whole theory of animal life, as well as human life, and to integrate human ethics into a theory of psychology. And so, the way he saw it—and I think it’s a common way of thinking about it now—there were two basic types of drives that living things have: drives to benefit themselves, and drives to benefit other creatures. Particularly other than their species. And he called the former egoistic, and the latter altruistic.

So, egoism and altruism are two kinds of psychological poles, or motivational factors, within an organism—so that’s as a matter of psychology. And then, his view was that the higher the organism, the more altruism predominates—and in the case of human life, altruism is the one that ought to predominate. The whole problem of human life, and human social organization, is ‘How do we make altruism predominate?’ And his slogan for acting altruistically was ‘Live for others’—that’s his motto. Make your life, the whole purpose of your life, about serving others, about living for others—serving humanity as a whole. He says things like: ‘Humanity is the only thing that can labor for itself nobly,, her servants for the present, but use the materials provided by her servants in the past—that is, individual people—for the benefit of her servants in the future.’ That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close.

So this is Comte’s view. If you’re going to take altruism as the name of a moral theory, I would say it’s Comtism, it’s that theory. Altruism is also used in the more psychological sense: actions that are motivated for others. And it’s used now, I think, in two senses that are distinct from Comte’s. One is to describe actions that are motivated, ultimately, for other people’s sake. So, you might not think all actions should be like this, but you might think there are actions like this. And almost every ethical theory says there ought to be some actions like this. So we can think of altruism as the view that some altruistic actions are right.

Then, there’s another sense of it, in which it’s sort of the foil to egoism. Because you might think that what a lot of conventional ethical thinking is about is curbing egoism; is saying that there’s gotta be something that trumps your self-interest. And that the reason why Comte’s term altruism caught on is because it was identifying the thing that’s opposite to self-interest that ought to be driving people.

And if that’s really what’s going on—the ‘serving other people’ is a placeholder, but there’s this kind of basic idea that it can’t all be about self, there’s gotta be something that’s higher than self—then I think you can (although I don’t think it’s ideal) use the term altruism to mean this sense that morality is about serving something other than (or higher than) the self. Or, put another way, morality is about self-sacrifice, or being willing to self-sacrifice. And Rand—who I’m a scholar of, and have learned a lot from—she concludes that at its deepest essence, this is what altruism, as widely understood, and as held as a cultural ideal, is about. It’s about, as she calls it, the morality of sacrifice.

Whether or not we’re going to use altruism as a name for that, I think that is something that is common. I think if you look at moral platitudes, particularly the kinds that politicians say when they’re trying not to say anything controversial, you often find them saying things like Michelle Obama saying, ‘Service is the rent we pay for living.’ Again, possibly not an exact quote. Kerry once said, ‘Whatever else divides us, the one thing that should unite us is the idea that the measure of our character is how much we’re willing to give of ourselves for others.’

Matt Teichman:
John Kerry.

Greg Salmieri:
John Kerry, yeah. Lots of presidential candidates in America, and other people, talk about serving something higher than yourself as: that’s what’s good. They don’t specify what it is, so much as that it’s something higher than yourself. And I think this idea we do find a lot in theoretical ethics, particularly, since Kant. So, before we were talking about Comte with a C—this is Kant, Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, as opposed to August Comte, the 19th century French philosopher we were just talking about.

Kant draws this real distinction between acting from prudence—which is rational, but self-interested—and acting on motives of duty or morality. And, in effect, the whole way that Kant draws out the content of what this duty is is predicated on this distinction—that it’s not based on inclination, which is what prudence is driven by; it’s not based on self-interest. And whether or not people agree with Kant’s particular views about duty and its content, I think most of moral philosophy subsequent to Kant has really internalized this distinction between acting prudentially—acting for yourself—and acting morally. And seeing that even as part of what defines the scope of the moral, that it’s that which can trump self-interest. So this idea of a morality of self-sacrifice—or a morality that’s about putting something above your self-interest—is, I think, really central to philosophical thought, from the late 18th century on (maybe even a little earlier). We can call that altruism—sometimes that gets called altruism, though I don’t think it’s the, technically, best term for it.

Finally, one other use of this term is that sometimes people just call any action that’s benevolent, or nice to other people, altruistic. But I think that’s really misleading. And I think that when people do that, it’s more theoretically ladden, even in common usage, than terms like kind, nice, polite, benevolent. It’s assuming—when you call holding the door for someone or giving to a charity altruistic—I think there’s an assumption built into that that this is something that’s seen as at odds with your self-interest, and you do it otherwise.

Matt Teichman:
I certainly agree that altruism is pretty big in our culture. There just seems to be something very intuitive about the idea that if you put your needs aside and work to help others—I think the intuition is that it’s more collaborative that way. I spent some time in the Netherlands a few years back, and that’s an even bigger thing there than here. There’s this tradition of: ‘We all work together to build the dam, so that our whole country doesn’t get flooded.’ I think that’s part of the intuitive appeal. Like, yeah, don’t just think about myself—think about: ‘How can I work together in a team with other people, to build together the kind of community we want to live in?’ And I think that’s the way to make altruism seem appealing. So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that a great way to be collaborative?

Greg Salmieri:
Well, I think being collaborative is often good. And certainly, thinking about others is often good. It’s: what place do they play in your thinking? And any plausible theory of what’s good for you as an individual is going to include lots of working with other people, lots of dealing with other people, lots of having other people’s lives go well, too. And it will include them, I think, even as parts of that end, of what a good life for you is—but it’ll include them, at least, as means to your ends. So, I don’t see the valuing of other people, or of collaborative effort, as a foil to, or an objection to, egoism. What I see going on with: ‘You ought to think more of other people’—where that’s a legitimate concern—I don’t see it as much different from other things like, ‘You ought to think more of the future’; ‘You ought to think more about your health’. ‘You ought to think more about a lot of things’ is something you can say to someone who’s insufficiently taking these things into account.

And ‘other people’ is a big one. But then the question is: why? And if the ultimate answer is ‘Because your life will go better for it; you’ll have a life that you enjoy more, that’s more worth living; that’s a better life for you’—then that’s an egoistic answer. So saying, ‘You ought to think more about others’ isn’t in response to egoism. The question is: is the reason really that it’s good for them? Or is it that even though this will make your life worse—or regardless of whether it will make your life better or worse—you ought to do for others, or care about the dam, or the group? And I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s less plausible when we put it that way.

Matt Teichman:
In a way, this seems like the flip side of the point we made earlier, about the hypothetical con artist who builds people out of their money. There, we were taking an example of something somebody might claim to be a case of ‘acting in your own self-interest’, and showing—without having to do that much work—that, really, that person isn’t acting in their own self-interest. Here, it seems like we have these things that are, maybe, in some sense, emotionally difficult to do—like sitting down and thinking carefully about the future; investing your resources carefully; caring about other people. These are the types of things that often colloquially get described as sacrifice. But maybe it turns out that, once we think about them carefully, they’re not sacrifice—they’re, actually, exactly what the doctor ordered in order to live a good life.

Greg Salmieri:
Well, that’s a substantive claim—that they are. And we’d have to think about each of them, and we’ll have to think about, ‘What is a good human life?‘—which we haven’t talked too much about, other than trying to liberate ourselves from assumptions that it’s getting whatever you want in the moment. But I think ultimately, the answer is that these things are part of a good human life for you, for the individual. And recognizing that really changes your perspective on them when you’re acting. You don’t see them as something that ‘dammit, I have to do’—but it’s conflicting with ‘what would be best for me’. You lose a lot of the conflict in life, once you recognize that the things that are good for you to do—that it’s right for you to do—aren’t interjects coming from somewhere else that are harming you, but are actually best for you. A major source of moral conflict and motivation just disappears, if it’s true that what’s right and what’s best for you coincide.

Matt Teichman:
So, would it be correct to say that, according to an egoist, what’s right for a person to do, and what’s best for that person are kind of the same thing?

Greg Salmieri:
Yes, but that’s not sufficient for egoism. I think you can hold that and still not quite be an egoist. So, if you think about the tradition of Greek ethics—eudaimonism, as held by Aristotle and Plato, and the Stoics—all of those thinkers would agree that what’s right for you to do and what’s best for you coincide. And I think it’s due to their influence, in fact, that ‘theories of well-being’ has started to be a topic in philosophy again—I mean, due to their distal influence. More proximately, there are people like Anscombe, and Foot, and Kraut, and Annas, and so forth, reviving interest in these people. And now there’s a whole field of study of well-being. But I don’t think it’s clear that all of those philosophers are egoists. I should say—even the interpretation that they all think that what’s right and what’s best for you always coincide is controversial; I think Kraut would disagree with that interpretation of them—but many people interpret them that way. And I do.

But there’s still the question of, ‘Why do they coincide?’ If something’s moral, if something’s right to do—for reasons wholly other than the contribution it makes to your own self-interest, to your own well-being—and then its being moral somehow leads to it being good for you—and that’s necessarily the case, then I wouldn’t call a view with that characteristic egoistic. Like, suppose there is a God who loves the moral. And what makes it moral is something other than his loving it—it’s just some intrinsic feature of the action, like Kant thinks. And then there’s this God who will reward you if you do what’s moral—and God couldn’t but do that, because he’s good. Right? But in order for you to count as moral, you have to be doing it for some reason other than the reward you’re seeking for it. So if you imagine a view with that kind of structure, I wouldn’t call that view egoistic. It’s true that according to that view, what’s best for you and what’s right coincide.

Likewise, I think the Stoic view—which doesn’t have a god giving rewards like that, but nevertheless has a structure where the account of what makes the action right, or noble, or virtuous, doesn’t really make any use of its benefiting you. And that it benefits you because what’s good for you to do is to live up to nature. Again, I think it’s weird to call that kind of a view egoistic; I don’t think it’s right. And even a view like Aristotle’s—I think it’s ambiguous whether it’s egoistic, because I think there are some ambiguities in his theory.

I think it has to be that in some sense, the goodness for you is explanatory of the moral status of the action—for it to be egoistic. So, they coincide; and they coincide because the actions benefiting you, or the facts that make it benefit you, are the ones that make it count as moral. Rather than there being an account of its morality that’s wholly independent of its benefit to you; and then it’s being moral posterior to that enables it to benefit you.

Matt Teichman:
Right. So, it can’t be that the thing benefiting you accidentally always goes along with it being right. It’s got to be: that’s why it’s right.

Greg Salmieri:
Or even necessarily goes along with its being right. But its being good for you follows from its being right, rather than its being right follows from its being good for you. In effect, the goodness for you has to be prior to the rightness, for it to be an egoism.

Now, there’s a little bit of a complication to that. Because if we’re talking about a particular concrete action—at least on my own view—the moral goodness of the action is part of what makes it good for you. But the principles themselves, by which we judge individual actions are themselves justified at a broader level by their contribution to one’s own life.

Matt Teichman:
So, as you mentioned before, there are a couple of different theories on the market of what self-interest is. Do you have a particular stance on what self-interest is?

Greg Salmieri:
So, most often these days, this issue is put in terms of well-being, or sometimes flourishing, rather than self-interest. I take it one’s self-interest is one’s own well-being. And I think there’s significant elements of truth in a lot of what’s been written about it nowadays. My own view—which is my interpretation of ideas I get from Rand—has elements of several of them. The main idea, though, is that both an individual’s choice and certain facts about human nature are involved in constituting a self-interest or a well-being for yourself. And I think your well-being is, in effect, your life. If we think about what life in general is, and what an individual’s life is, we get a sense of what well-being is.

Life is—Rand really aptly characterized it as a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. So a life is an action. It’s something you do. It’s not just that you’re alive vs. dead; your life is all the things going on in you. A tree’s life has all the things going on in it, which are its life. And what are those things, as opposed to things that just happened to the tree?

Well, it’s a process by which the tree sustains itself. It might do other things too, like reproduce, and so forth, but the baseline thing that it is, most of the time, is keeping itself going. And so, we can think about what is that process; and it’s different for different organisms. For a tree, it’s one kind of process—it involves photosynthesis, and roots, and fruiting; for a wolf or a squirrel, it’s a different process. And for a human being it’s yet another process. So we can think about what a human life is.

And I think, for an individual person, his well-being is his life. But for it to be a life at all, for it to sustain him existentially—to keep him alive, and to be sustaining spiritually, for it to work, for it to hang together—it’s going to have to be a specific sort of life. So we can think about: how is it that human beings live? Well, we’re rational creatures, we live by using our minds. And in particular, we live by producing values, by creating things that help to sustain us.

The two fundamentals in a human life—there are lots of other values that help to make it up—but the two fundamentals are reason and production. You’re thinking, and you’re creating things. And you’re creating the kinds of things that—in all the multifarious ways they do, or in one of the multifarious ways in which things do—help to keep human beings alive. Either by: you’re farming and you’re growing food; or you’re making technology; or you’re doing something that serves a spiritual need that keeps us able to function and be motivated, like making art, or whatever it might be. I think a human life is a life that is centered around these kinds of activities. There are a lot more than these, but these are the two central ones. And then there are millions of—indefinitely many—lives that have these features. They’re rational, and they’re productive. And there are a whole lot of other virtues that I think are required by this, but just to summarize: rational, productive; there are a lot of other virtues that these require and entail.

But no matter how long you make the list of virtues, there are going to be infinitely many conceivable lives that have these—and your own life is going to be the one of those that you’ve picked and created for yourself. So I think of a life as a kind constellation of activities—that produce, create and sustain the kinds of values that are needed for that constellation to continue over a human lifespan. And one’s own well-being is the set of activities and values of that sort that they’ve created for themselves. We can then say things about what it will necessarily include; I’ve said two of them, ‘reason’ and ‘being productive’. I think there are others that it will also include. We mentioned earlier ‘human relationships’—and maintaining good relationships, I think, is a part of it. But it’s that created set of values—that has the characteristic of hanging together into a whole, and being self-sustaining—is, I think, someone’s life. And then, that is their well-being. And, when we’re asking if an action is egoistic, it’s: does it contribute to that?

Matt Teichman:
What would be an example of someone who lived that kind of life that we could point to?

Greg Salmieri:
When you’re talking about examples of individual people, there’ll always be controversies, because we don’t know everything about them, and most people’s lives have some exceptions to them. But I’ll tell you about some people who I really admire, who, to a very significant extent, and on a grand scale, lived this kind of life.

I think Steve Jobs is an obvious example. This is someone who was brilliant; created tremendous value, on a grand scale; and, I think, really loved what he was doing, and you can see that he loved it. Now, in the human relationships part of his life, there were more difficulties—but even at that, there are people who really cared about him and he really cared about. I think, similarly, someone who I’ve been reading a bit about recently, who I similarly admire, is Jeff Bezos. So these are two people in the same field. But I think you can find people, artists, great achievers,. in many fields, who really created great things with their lives, loved what they were doing, and saw them as achieving what they wanted out of life.

But for any moral theory, the obvious examples are going to be people who did things out of the ordinary—who did things on a grand scale which require not just being moral. And I think these people who I mentioned are, in the main thrust of their lives, moral on a grand scale. But it also is going to require—for them to be these grand-scale exemplars—them being particularly talented and positioned in the world, such that they could have grand effects. I think there are plenty of examples of people who wouldn’t be famous, who nonetheless love what they’re doing with their lives; they’re thoughtful about how the different parts of their lives fit together; they are deeply and passionately committed to their values; and they understand the need to act on some principles to achieve those values over time.

They’ve internalized principles like honesty, rationality, integrity, as—they’re just the natural way for them to act, and they see them as good for themselves. Whether they would identify that as a moral philosopher might, I don’t know. But in the moment, they see cheating, or compromising their product, as something that would be anathema to them—anathema to who they are, and what they want to be, and what they want their life to be like. If you think about what Steve Jobs would feel like about the idea of adding a bunch of bloatware to an iPhone, and the kind of visceral horror you imagine him having at that, I think that’s a really moral reaction.

There are a lot of people who have the equivalent of that, for the things in their own work and their own lives. And it’s the kind of people who really love their children, for example, and who have the kind of attitudes towards themselves that they have towards their children, and that a good parent would have towards them. The other thing that stands out about all these people who I’m giving as exemplars—both the famous types of people, and the people you meet every day who are like this, some of them profoundly, some of them to a lesser extent—is: they’re people who are really taking responsibility for their own lives and their own happiness. They’re seeing it as something they have to achieve. And they don’t take the fact it’s up to them to achieve it as a drag, something that, you know, ‘Dammit, I wish life could just be easy and just happen’—but they see it as something that they want to do. It’s important and it matters to them that their lives are achievements.

Matt Teichman:
So thanks; those examples are really helpful. What about an example of a person who typically gets talked about as a great, admirable person, but maybe, once we examine their life and actions through an egoist lens, comes out to be not quite everything they were cracked up to be.

Greg Salmieri:
One example that occurs to me, not to be too controversial, is Jesus. This is someone who—what did he do with his life? Right? He went around preaching to take no thought for the morrow; you don’t have any responsibility for what happens to you; it’s not the one who reaps and sows that creates the harvest, but God. So, it’s a kind of anti-responsibility, anti-causal perspective on the world—very different from the ‘achieving your own happiness’ view that I was talking about before. And the idea that there’s some moral order—whether you call it God, or duty, or a categorical imperative (to reference the Kantian term)—that you’re beholden to, and that your being beholden to it isn’t about causes and effects in the world. It’s not about achieving anything. There’s no intelligible—to you, in terms of your life on earth—meaning or purpose to it. And yet, you ought to do it, and sacrifice your happiness to it.

And there are a lot of varieties of it—I referenced Jesus and Kant both, in different ways, in talking about this. You can think about people like Mother Teresa, who is—or at least, more so in the eighties than now—was a hero to many people. Not because of any great work they thought she accomplished, or anything that they thought she wanted out of life, but because she was seen as someone—and I think she was, legitimately, someone—who gave up a lot of comfort, who gave up what would have been better for herself. Not even to actually accomplish anything for the poorest of the poor, but just to be around them and tell them how good suffering was. Or, to take another example, think of the current effective altruism movement. People like Peter Singer, and there are others.

Matt Teichman:
And that’s pretty big outside of the academy, too, interestingly.

Greg Salmieri:
Yes, it is big outside of the academy. Now, I think oftentimes, giving to charity is a good thing. There are all kinds of causes that are worth supporting. And if you are going to support a charitable cause it’s, I think, morally obligatory on you to think about, ‘Well, what is my money actually accomplishing?’ So, when you think about effective altruism—as opposed to indiscriminate charity—I think some of what they’re advocating for is good. And some of the organizations that rate different charities, it’s a good thing that those have been added to the world. But if you think about the kind of moral propaganda that goes around with it—if you watch Singer’s talks on this, right?—there’s the idea that a life led for yourself has got to be on some kind of hedonistic rat race or treadmill.

It’s this idea you also find in Comte, that when you’re doing something for yourself, it’s an alternation between feverish desire satisfaction of some momentary lust, and torpor. You get this same idea, that that’s what a selfish life would be like. And then, the alternative that we’re given to that is: to serve other people, to minister to the needs of others. Not so that they could do something more, but presumably, they’re meant to be ministering to the needs of others in turn, and so forth. And if anybody were living for himself, or acting for himself, he’d just be satisfying some momentary desire—scratching an itch. And that gives no meaning to life, so the only meaning to life is to help other people have fewer itches to scratch. I think that whole doctrine, and the kind of life that’s devoted to spreading that, I don’t think is an admirable kind of life.

I think it’s a life that’s about upholding the pointless relief of suffering. And I call it pointless because the point of relieving suffering is to make possible something greater than that. And if you don’t really value what people can make of and do with their lives, then I don’t think there’s any moral value to being fixated on suffering. If you do, on the other hand, and you really want to see people in societies that are now poor prosper, and people who are down on their luck prosper, because you have a vision of what’s possible to human beings. And you’re trying to achieve that for yourself, and you want other people to be able to achieve it. And you understand—this isn’t something that we talked about, but—you understand that it’s good for each of us, in achieving that kind of life, to have other people doing it around us.

Ttherefore, you’re thinking about, ‘What can I do to help these other people, and other places, succeed better? And how can I perhaps make it part of my life, in one way or another, part of my career, part of my hobby, my advocacy goal, to help other people achieve the kinds of things that I’m trying to achieve in my life?‘—maybe other people who haven’t had the luck or breaks I had. Then I think that’s really admirable. And there are people who are on that premise—who are devoting themselves to charity and to other causes. But, if you think about the kind of charismatic leaders who are admired—of charitable movements—often they’re more in this Jesus mold.

Matt Teichman:
And with that, now that we’ve driven away all of our Christian listeners—Greg Salmieri, thanks so much for coming back on Elucidations a third time, and benefiting me.

Greg Salmieri:
Well, thank you. I think I’ve benefited from it too, and from my earlier appearances.


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