Ethical egoism

Ethical egoism is the consequentialist philosophy which states that morality should be based on self-interest. It is the philosophical basis for many libertarians and (so they claim) Randroids but also got support from Thomas Hobbes.[1]. Some egoists that do not believe in the existence of ethics call themselves rational egoists, because they want to be selfish, but do not want to support metaphysical ideas like ethics and morals.

Thinking hardly
or hardly thinking?
Philosophy
Major trains of thought
The good, the bad
and the brain fart
Come to think of it
v - t - e

Key ideas

Ethical egoism is based on three arguments:

  1. That morality is subjective and that it is different for every unique individual.
  2. That self interest is the origin of all morality.
  3. That one ought to further one's self interest and that acting against it is immoral.

It is the polar opposite of ethical altruism, the belief that one ought to live for others, and is contrasted with utilitarianism, which is objective. Egoism is subjective, meaning that its implications and conclusions change from person to person and nothing is objectively ethical. This is interesting considering that some of the most vocal proponents of ethical egoism are so-called Objectivists.[2]

Criticism

Contrary to many strawmen arguments, egoism does not mean that you should never act in the interest of another, even if it does not benefit you. Instead, it is acting to benefit yourself, regardless of whether it harms or benefits another. Another way of saying this is that intentions are always selfish. Results may vary, whether they are good for others or not. This is because those who selfishly refuse to help others later find others will not return favours since they received none. If some misfortune arises and the egoist now needs the unselfish help of another, and if everyone is a consistent egoist, the egoist may or may not get the help he needs. So in the interests of self-interest, an egoist must act altruistically, at least sometimes, even if intentions are only about personal gain, thus why it is a relativistic philosophy. There are three types of egoism: universal (everybody should act for their own self-benefit), personal (the egoist is an egoist, but other people can be altruistic or utilitarian), and individual (everybody acts for one individual's self-benefit, which is completely unrealistic).

However, many egoists would say that, for example, helping the homeless is driven out of self interest because you don't want other people to be homeless, it's driven by what you feel, or want, and so altruism is still ultimately driven by egoistic desires. Many anarchists are egoists, and likewise believe in the concept of mutual reciprocity, meaning that helping others out is driven by self interest because others would be indebted to help you out in turn, a self reinforcing cycle that still allows for altruistic behaviors to be driven by egoistic desires.

gollark: It could record locally and upload later, though.
gollark: This person apparently reverse-engineered it statically, not at runtime, but it *can* probably detect if you're trying to reverse-engineer it a bit while running.
gollark: > > App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing> this sentence makes no sense to me, "if they know"? he's dissecting the code as per his own statement, thus looking at rows of text in various format. the app isn't running - so how can it change? does the app have self-awareness? this sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie from the 90's.It's totally possible for applications to detect and resist being debugged a bit.
gollark: > this is standard programming dogma, detailed logging takes a lot of space and typically you enable logging on the fly on clients to catch errors. this is literally cookie cutter "how to build apps 101", and not scary. or, phrased differently, is it scary if all of that logging was always on? obviously not as it's agreed upon and detailed in TikTok's privacy policy (really), so why is it scary that there's an on and off switch?This is them saying that remotely configurable logging is fine and normal; I don't think them being able to arbitrarily gather more data is good.
gollark: > on the topic of setting up a proxy server - it's a very standard practice to transcode and buffer media via a server, they have simply reversed the roles here by having server and client on the client, which makes sense as transcoding is very intensive CPU-wise, which means they have distributed that power requirement to the end user's devices instead of having to have servers capable of transcoding millions of videos.Transcoding media locally is not the same as having some sort of locally running *server* to do it.

See also

References
  1. Sandra LaFave. "Psychological Egoism and Ethical Egoism".
  2. Ethics: Ethical Egoism
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