Psychological egoism and altruism in Hobbes's Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes and Egoism in "Leviathan"

There is, as we shall see, a deep sense in which Hobbes's values are individual rather than universal, but it is not simply a matter of having an 'egoistic' moral psychology. Motivation in Hobbes's account is necessarily egoistic only in a nugatory, definitional sense: each person strives to fulfill his own desires. This does not mean that the contents of those desires cannot be concerned with the good of others. The definitions of the passions which Hobbes supplies in chapter 16 of Leviathan include 'Desire of good to another, benevolence, good will, charity. If to men generally, good nature'. (Hobbes, 34) It is true that Hobbes did tend to explain the passions in terms of self-interest, as when he wrote that 'Griefe, for the Calamity of another, is pitty; and ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe'; (Hobbes, 36) but it is often unclear in such cases whether 'ariseth from' explains the feeling in the sense of analyzing its true content or in the sense of pointing to its causal predecessor. The origin of many of these definitions is found in Hobbes's early summary of Aristotle's Rhetoric; Aristotle is often as ambiguous as Hobbes and almost as reductive. Many early writers on economics and most modern economists have assumed that men are egoistic; thus they have ruled out altruism (Boonin-Vail, 31). If they use the term 'self-interest', they mean only egoism. They are here taken to be, at least implicitly, against the aprioristic idea that economics can use an assumption of self? interest that means merely interests of the self, or self-perceived interests, and which coherently embraces both egoism and altruism without thereby being vacuous.

Psychological Egoism and Leviathan

For instance, in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes assumes that 'of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good' (Hobbes, 88). All apparent acts of altruism are to be explained as disguised self-seeking. Hobbes found the idea of a person's benefiting another for the other's sake to be at best an implausible and possibly a priori inconsistent, view of human motivation. In John Aubrey's Brief Lives, we are told that when asked why Hobbes had given alms to a beggar, Hobbes replied that it was to relieve his own distress at seeing the beggar's distress (Becker, 4) F.Y. Edgeworth states that 'the first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest' (von Hayek, 16). Though he later admits that in reality 'man is for the most part an impure egoist, a mixed utilitarian' (102). So the assumption is merely a generally useful one for Edgeworth. Gary Becker rigorously and consistently applies basic economic assumptions to areas normally considered outside the field of economics (Ryan, 213). He admits the existence of altruism (and that it is part of 'rationality'), but even he assumes that this must be a separate motive, with others, from self-interest as used by economics, which is 'assumed to dominate all other motives, with a permanent place also assigned to benevolence to children' (Shapin & Schaffer, 17). So Becker follows Edgeworth's one-hundred? years-older opinion in finding the self-interest assumption extremely fruitful though not completely true. As Hill (56) and Hume (499) have also observed, using other examples, it looks logically necessary to many economists and their critics that the assumption of self? interest cannot be made compatible with altruism. But this is not so. Let us distinguish two false views on altruism:

1.

People are necessarily psychological egoists and hence never altruists. The argument can be put thus: one cannot help others unless one thereby achieves personal satisfaction, in some sense, so apparently altruistic people give up nothing for they are following their self-interest as much as anyone else (Boonin-Vail, 2).

2.

The assumption of self-interest must be false or vacuous because it is obvious that people are often selflessly altruistic. (Ryan, 210)

Analysis and Conclusion

Ethical egoism is often formulated as a deontological principle: one ought always to do the action that contributes most to one's own welfare. But it can also be formulated as a thesis about the grounds of obligation: the only reason one ought or ought not to do an action is that it will or will not contribute to one's own welfare. Although these two formulations are not identical, they are closely related. If the only reason why one ought to do anything is self-interest, then it follows that one ought always to pursue self-interest; and in fact philosophers who hold the deontological principle usually defend it by appealing to the thesis about the grounds of obligation. Therefore, I shall regard that thesis as the more basic form of ethical egoism.

Although Hobbes is less explicit than one could wish, one can construct an argument for ethical egoism from the hints he drops along the way (Hobbes, Chapter 14 and 15). If the way in which one's action benefits or harms others is relevant to judging whether one ought to do it, then in extreme cases one ought to do something that will result in death. Extreme cases might include the suicide mission of a soldier or the airline pilot's staying at the controls to allow more passengers to parachute from a burning plane as well as acts performed in a state of nature. But every human being has the right of self-preservation. Now if it is not wrong for any man to refuse to sacrifice his life, then no one has an obligation to do anything that will result in his own death (Shapin & Schaffer, 75). Therefore, the welfare of others cannot be relevant to judging what one ought to do. This is a very interesting argument, but it does not establish its conclusion. Although it may be that every human being has a right to preserve his own life, one would like some evidence in support of this key premise. Even if there is a human right to self-preservation, it does not follow that it is always right for a human being to preserve his own life. That someone has a right to do something does not necessarily imply that his act of doing it is right, for one can have a right that one ought not to exercise (von Hayek, 23). For example, one may have a right to free speech when one ought not to speak freely because this is not the time or the place; one may have a right to demand that he be repaid when it would be wrong to force a husband with a sick wife to give up the money at the moment (Hill, 34). Thus the soldier or pilot may have a right to save his own skin even though he ought to sacrifice himself for the welfare of others. But even if one never is under an obligation to sacrifice oneself for others, it may not be true that the welfare of others is completely irrelevant. The assumption of Hobbes' argument is that in extreme cases the welfare of others may outweigh the welfare of the agent by so great an amount as to require the agent to lay down his life. But if life is so very precious, then this situation never occurs.

One can always justify the act of self-preservation, no matter how great the interests of others, by ascribing sufficient value to the agent's life. Therefore, this appeal to the supposed right of self-preservation does not prove that ethical egoism is correct. Probably the strongest argument for ethical egoism is the fact that self-regarding reasons seem to be ultimate in a way that other-regarding reasons are not.