Hi all, welcome to More than Philosophy. I’m the author, Zane. This blog is dedicated to critical thinking and philosophy, and if you want a certain topic to be featured for discussion, please write in to me here. Without further ado, let me start on today’s topic, Psychological Egoism and Hedonism.

To help you better understand what I’m actually discussing about, Psychological Egoism and Hedonism with a tiny part on Ethical Egoism, do visit the link below and read up before continuing.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/Egoism.html

I’m going to assume that by the time you read this sentence, you’d have already read the article in the above link. Ah, and just a reminder, this will be a freaking long post! Although I’m sure that since you’ve already read up to this point, you’re actually pretty interested in stuff like these, otherwise, you’d have probably closed the browser upon long ago (when reading the title or the first 2 paragraphs of this post). Here goes…

Psychological egoism is the claim that people always act selfishly, to foster their own self-interest or happiness. Psychological hedonism is the claim that people always act to attain their own pleasure and avoid pain. Psychological hedonism is also called the “pleasure principle.”

Actually, this is a topic that I had pondered over for months last year before gaining an ephiphany on it. I decided to search up the topic as my friend told me that she finds me rather egoistic as I often talk about myself. It made me wanted to know more about egoists. As usual, I googled (Google is my best friend) for Psychological Egoism and found notes by Sandra LaFave, a Ph.D. holder in Philosophy. It was rather interesting as there were plenty of arguments to compare and contrast egoism with altruism and ethics. You can also see that there’s a lot of relationships between Psychological Egoism, Hedonism, Ethical Egoism and Altruism. For me, I found a lot of similarities in the articles that relate to my personal perceptions on the particular topic.

The article provides quite a number of arguments against Psychological Egoism and provided scenarios whereby Psychological Egoism is refuted by anti-egoists. I concur with the “soldier saving his comrade” example, that you don’t save your comrade to be happy, but rather, you feel happy being able to save your comrade. For myself, I would argue that there is no absolute Psychological Egoism (meaning that, we do not ALWAYS act based on self-interest), but most of the time our actions are indeed self-interested. Also, values and attitude are formed over time. For example, if you first help your friend in need because you want to help, then feel happy about it because you managed to help out your friend and he/she thanks you for it. Then over some time, you’d associate helping as a feeling of pleasure, and therefore offer help to attain pleasure. In future, you’re likely to help others because you want to feel good again. If such scenario occurs, I’m still fine with it as it’s a win-win situation for both parties. I made someone happy, and I’m happy. But yeah, my point is that, even with traditional ethics in mind, it can still be developed into a form of egoism over time. Even though Psychological Egoism may not be true at this point of time, but if everyone starts to “help others for the sake of reliving the pleasure (of helping someone)”, then it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that some form of Psychological Egoism may be developed in future.

I will not be going onto Ethical Egoism as I’ve already rejected the theory of Psychological Egoism. Next up, I’m going to share with you my “pleasure principle”. Do note that this is not the same as the one in Psychological Hedonism, as this is one that I attained after going through a period of ephiphany. I ever once went through a period whereby I thought I could never be happy again as I was able to anticipate surprises. The example I’m going to use is very simple. It’s my birthday celebration. Basically, I was able to anticipate that my friends are going to celebrate my birthday for me on my birthday, and at that time, I based happiness largely on the surprise factor. By being able to anticipate a lot of things, it takes away the pleasure factor as I was able to predict the usual things a celebration would go like and all. So I wasn’t all that happy even though I had friends to celebrate with me on my birthday. Believe it or not, I had that idea in my head for months. After a few months, I decided to go deeper in thought with that and I realised that with a simple twist of perception, you can be happy.

As a critical thinker, I often analyse things in different points of view, and I overlooked that I could do the same in my own situation! Basically instead of focusing on the surprise factor, all I need to look at was the effort made in planning the celebration. My friends took the time to plan a celebration for me as opposed to others which may not even have friends celebrating with them. After realising that, I appreciated having friends celebrate with me on my birthday and I’m happy to have such friends. I’ve also the twist of perception in other situations as well, and as an result, I’m now an optimistic and positive person. For example, I can anticipate failure and plan for a backup plan so that I would not be at loss for what to do if I were to ever fail. Meanwhile, I’ll still keep a positive attitude and do my best to attain my goals. Another plus factor of anticipating an inevitable event is that, you can be mentally prepared for things such as life and deaths. It makes one emotionally strong. Yup, so this is my “pleasure principle”; looking at things from different angles. That’s all for this article!