Topics Ethics

Question Is it possible for a human to ever do a selfless act? When someone does do a seemingly 'selfless' act, it is normally because of religious duties or an excuse to brag about it at a later stage, or even to get that good feeling you get when you know you have done a good deed (which is essentially selfish, considering that you get a mental reward, instead of a material one).

Accepted:
October 29, 2005

Comments

A powerful demon gave me a choice at lunch the other day: either my children will thrive and I will think they are miserable (which will make me feel miserable), or my children will really be miserable but I will think they are thriving (which will make me feel very happy). The moment I choose, I will have no memory of having made a choice or indeed of having ever had lunch with a demon. You know what? I'm going to choose happy children and miserable me. I'm no angel, but that is a selfless act.

The fact that we usually feel pleasure after we are aware of having performed an act that we believe to be good does not imply that we performed the good act for the sake of the pleasure we expected to feel when we succeeded. True: we do many things simply for the sake of the pleasure that they allow us to feel. Many people, much of the time, have sex simply because they enjoy doing so, and if they didn’t enjoy sex, they wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, have sex. But not all actions are like that. Some of the things that we do we do simply because we think that they’re worthwhile things to do. Since we believe that they’re worthwhile, we will feel satisfaction upon learning that we did something worthwhile. However, it doesn’t follow from the fact that we often experience pleasure when we act successfully that we are always motivated by considerations of self-interest. For many such acts, it can’t be the case that we perform them for the sake of the pleasure that our success causes, since our feeling this pleasure in the first place depends on our giving independent value to these acts or the consequences of these acts. For example, if I didn’t think that it was a good idea to contribute my limited resources to Oxfam, then I wouldn’t feel pleasure at my act of doing so. So my believing that it’s a good idea for me to contribute to Oxfam can’t be due simply to my expectation that I will experience pleasure at the thought of having done so.

Peter Lipton’s thought-experiment takes this point one step further. Not only, he is arguing, can we be motivated by considerations other than our own interest; in fact, we can be motivated by considerations completely at odds with what we believe to be in our own interest. In the case that Peter imagines, he believes not only that he won’t experience the usual pleasure that attends his consciousness of his good deeds; worse, he will experience pain as a result of this choice. Still, he thinks, and I agree, he would choose the good deed, even at a significant cost to himself.

I wonder, though, whether it matters for the plausibility of this thought-experiment that Peter is considering a case in which he benefits his beloved children. Some philosophers have held that, when one truly loves another, one’s sense of one’s own good gets merged with one’s sense of the good of the beloved. I don't know whether this is true. But if it is, then when I choose the good of my beloved children, I’m not really choosing a good that I regard as distinct from my own, and so, such a case is not really a counter-example to the claim that all of my actions are ultimately motivated by considerations of self-interest.