Sarah Hardy is Expert Found's Society & Culture Editor.

Egoism Is Like Racism

Most of us have been asked to do a favor that we didn’t want to do, and if we did we’d feel like we'd been forced into something unnatural to us. Possibly without knowing, we were expressing the egoist side of ourselves.

In the world of Philosophy, the term ethical egoism refers to a normative theory about how we ought to behave. According to this theory, we ought to be selfish. Ethical egoism is a theory that advocates egoism as a moral rule.(“The Moral of The Story”, by Nina Rosenstand, 4th Edition, McGraw Hill 2003) According to Rosenstand, “An egoist is a person who thinks in terms of his or her advantage, generally by disregarding the interests of others.”

It’s hard to believe, but an ethical egoist would say that the firefighters who helped save people on September 11th did the wrong thing. They should have been looking out for themselves. An ethical egoist really believes that the firefighters should not have saved those people because of the risks involved.

I happen to believe that there is nothing wrong with looking after yourself. I feel that most people would agree with that, however I believe that everybody should share some degree of compassion for one another. If nobody ever wanted to look after one another, then we would not have any police officers, firefighters, or doctors. Occupations like these are what the basis of a society is built around. One would say then, “Why have a society anyway?” This has been argued many times over, and many conclude that it is to keep people from being too selfish, and creating a demise of the people.

There are a variety of different ways that ethical egoism can be considered contradictory. Ayn Rand, an American philosopher (though born in Russia), and ethical egoist, took the stance that there was a conflict between her happiness and the happiness of others. This basically means that she can’t fulfill her happiness if she has to compromise her true happiness with that of others. But what if the happiness of others contributed to ones happiness? In this case this argument doesn’t make sense.

This leads me to my next point, which is that ethical egoism, in order to be accepted as a moral theory, has to have a certain degree of acceptance. It has to be imaginable that most people, if not everyone, would be willing to adopt the theory themselves. This theory is hard to be accepted because there is never a good argument in supporting what it is that the ethical egoist wants. Because the egoist “says so” doesn’t mean that everyone should listen to him or her.

Also, if enough people followed the ways of ethical egoism, then people would be always be at a stalemate with one another. If everybody was selfish all of the time, and if somebody really needed the help of another person, who just so happened to be an ethical egoist, then people would never get the help they need. With that being said, an egoist would have to reject egoism sometimes, because an egoist really wouldn’t want everybody to be selfish all of the time. Ethical Egoism inevitably depends on the meaning of selfishness. If everyone ought to be selfish, then what does that really mean? Also, we ought to be selfish according to whom? Where is the line drawn? A murderer might have believed that killing the person that he/she did made his/her life better. Does that mean that ethical egoists think that killing is okay? For this we can go back to some of the shortcomings of psychological egoism.

Some of these shortcomings are more relevant than others, such as the principle of falsification, which ultimately states that in egoism, anything can be described as selfish. There are never any controls. The firefighter may have saved somebody’s life for any number of reasons of personal gratification. There is never an instance of somebody doing a good deed that an example of selfishness can’t come up. The fallacy of the suppressed correlative also makes a great deal of sense. It states that things only make sense in terms of opposition. Since there really isn’t a known opposite of selfishness, then the whole thought of it doesn’t mean that much.

I have already made it known that I’m not a believer in ethical egoism. I’d like to end with the thoughts of the philosopher James Rachels. He says that the egoist assumes that his/her own interests come before other people, but no one person matters more than another person. “Egoism is like racism”, he says, “Racism assumes that the interest of one race count more than the interest of others.” I conclude this to be a very valid point.

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