"Everyone is self-interested."
I put that in quotes because it's not necessarily me saying it, but I'm sure I've said it before. It's become a sort of quasi-intellectual quasi-meme that's sort of common knowledge nowadays, almost like the theory of evolution or the water cycle; it's been widely accepted at at least some level and has generally found a place in people's conceptions of humanity. (At least for those people who ever really think about such things.)
This makes sense too, because it's predicated on evolutionary biology, or at least the version of it that's entered the popular consciousness. But what exactly is self-interest, and what does it mean?
Another thing I've heard many people say is that "everyone is selfish." Now at first glance this may sound like a simple and logical, albeit somewhat harder-to-swallow, corollary to the statement about self-interest, buttttttt that doesn't seem quite right to me.
Obviously people, being people, are interested in themselves and what becomes of them. Thus the statement about self-interest is fairly self-evident; if it's debatable then we can debate it later.
The second statement, however, comes across a bit stronger. Everyone is selfish, which is to say that they are interested in themselves to the exclusion of others. Here self-interest becomes the primary goal and orientation, and altruism becomes a myth. Self-interested is no longer a condition that can be measured in degrees; it is simply something that you are or are not. And the presumptive conclusion is that you are.
For the moment, let's take this idiom to be fact and give it the benefit of the doubt; time to give the ol' confirmation bias a chance to shine.
Everything everyone does is done out of self-interest; it is simply impossible to act against your own self-interest. But what is this *interest* that you have in yourself? You have an interest in your own survival, so deeply ingrained that you don't even need to consciously think about it to act on it; you have an instinct named after it. You also have an interest in reproducing and continuing your genetic line.
Already, however, things are complicated. The interest in preserving your own body may come into direct conflict with the interest in preserving your offspring. History has seen people give precedence to each of these at different times; one does not always supersede the other. Beyond this too, the dynamic becomes even more complex and even less absolute. Let us do our best to rationalize human activity according to our foregone conclusion..
People donate money to charities that don't do anything in return for them.
--Well obviously they care a lot about what people think of them; generosity and goodwill have become requirements for living in a human society. If you want to receive benefits yourself, then you have to give of yourself; giving to charity is simply good business.
What about when people donate money anonymously? What of the people who give their lives to save others with whom they have no genetic links?
You could get sociological here and postulate that it has to do with people's obsession with how they are perceived or their need to play out the societal roles that have been given to them and charity makes them feel good about themselves if nobody knows it was them, but that only serves to illustrate the point that the survival instinct and the genetic preservation instinct are not always dominant. And what is self-interest if it is not these two things?
Even if extraordinarily creative evolutionary biologists are able to rationalize all of these actions according to these basic instincts, the fact is that some people do these things, and some do not.
If everyone is absolutely self-interested, then why isn't there a uniform rule that can be used to perfectly predict what people will or won't do for themselves or others? I'm not going to say that self-interest can be measured by degrees in a linear fashion, but I will say that different people are differently self-interested. It's clearly apparent that different people have different conceptions of what is "in their own interest."
But at this point does this abstraction still have any sort of significance? "Everyone is self-interested but to different degrees" is clearly logical, but what does it really mean now? "Everyone is self-interested, but some people hoard all their money for themselves while others die in poverty doing dirty mission work in AIDS-ridden countries in Africa." It's like saying that "everyone is blind, but some people have 20/20 vision and can spot birds on mountains miles away while others can't see their hands in front of their face." Enormous amounts of rationalization and over-analyzing is required to continue validating the now incredibly complicated and somewhat unintuitive "people are selfish" statement.
But that's only considering "interest" and what that entails; we haven't spent much time on the "self." So let's expand self-interest a bit and try to wrap our collective metaphysical head around the differences we've seen in self-interest. Our goal at this point in time is to reduce self-interest from a meaninglessly all-inclusive label to something that once again applies equally to all people, yet also stays true to evolutionary biology as something that reigns supreme over our other interests.
To be self-interested is to act in (what you perceive to be) the interest of (what you perceive to be) your self. These are equally fluid variable concepts. If you see yourself only as your body and your genes, then you will act only when your actions will directly benefit your own well-being or that of a direct descendant. If you see your family as connected to you genetically, you might see them as just as much a representation of yourself as your direct descendants are. You can see kinship bonds in general as extensions of yourself. If you look beyond genes (or if you happen to zoom farther out in examining the collective human gene pool) you may see communal bonds as familial bonds too, and then an individual might end up viewing an entire community, large or small, as part of himself.
This might again be a meaningless rationalization of the "all people are self-interested and selfish" hypothesis, but it is the only one that controls for the difference in behavior among self-interested individuals. It all depends on what is identified as "self." (Also on what is identified as being in the interest of the self; humans aren't always good at figuring that one out)
I had solid ideas for how to cohesively organize this post, but then I didn't.
Conclusion!:
Assuming all previous conclusions have been valid: altruism does not exist except as a word to describe those who are generous and unrestrained with their self-identification. Which is about the same as saying that yes, it does exist, but solely as a product of empathy.
