Sympathy Gratification Argument

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One popular argument in favour of psychological egoism, the view that all intentional human actions are motivated by self-interest, is what I will call the sympathy gratification argument. It states that those actions seemingly motivated by altruism (e.g. helping the poor and the sick or working for a political cause to benefit all) are in fact motivated by a person’s own sympathy-based desires. After all, we are all social animals with varying degrees of sympathy. Our being social animals means each of us can identify with other similar beings to a greater or lesser extent and so we may feel their interests as being our own interests; this is called sympathy. So when we act “in the interests of others”, we are really only acting in those interests that we have made our own by identifying with the like being. Therefore, these seemingly altruistic acts are really not altruistic, but self-interested. …show more content…
This is made clear by the example that although I can expect not to get the Nobel Prize for this essay, my aim is not to avoid getting the Nobel Prize (though if you’d like to put my name forward, I wouldn’t fight you). The sympathy gratification argument relies on this premise since it presumes that because we do gratify our sympathetic desires every time we act “altruistically” our aim is really to gratify our sympathetic desires--if it did not presume this it would explicitly not rule out altruism. Yet, what proof is there that this was everyone’s aim (i.e. their actual motivation)? At some point, the psychological egoist, having no access to the person’s inner-world, will have to rely on expected outcomes of actions as proof which would be inadequate. The sympathy gratification argument therefore fails to make the motivation (i.e. the interest) identical with advantage and so altruistic action remains

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