FINAL PAPER (A Defense of Ethical Egoism on the Basis of Presuppositions)

Vincent A. Mackenna

Shane Epting

PHIL 242 – 1009

12 December 2018

A Defense of Ethical Egoism on the Basis of Presuppositions

            In the months preceding this semester, I became more interested in philosophy and become more excited as the semester approached. I began reading and watching videos regarding philosophical theory and epistemology. Needless to say, I was disappointed to find out this was a “service learning class” that didn’t feature much philosophy past the rudimentary analysis of the predominate moral theories that we went over at the start of the semester. I found the first few weeks of the semester to be the most enjoyable for me, and I wanted to focus this reflective essay on something that we only graced over for one class—Egoism. If I were to box my moral beliefs into one term, it would be Egoism. As we discussed in class, this is most likely not a normal belief to have and you personally found a lot of issue with this moral theory. In part to be a contrarian and part due to personal beliefs, I am going to attempt to defend ethical egoism using my very rudimentary understanding of philosophy on the basis of rational presuppositions that other moral theories lack. A bold attempt, to be sure.

            Firstly, I wish to establish that I don’t believe it is possible to defend a system of objective morality and ethics. More specifically, I believe that truth itself is a very relative concept. While I understand the self-refuting nature of epistemological relativism, this is the concept that best describes my view of the world. I specifically wish to not use “moral relativism” because, from my understanding, moral relativism is the thought that morals should be assessed to a specific and limited culture or point of view. My beliefs have a level of extraction from this idea in that I believe that judging morals absolutes to be worthless regardless of the scope in which you judge them. The only axiom of judgment that I believe to exist is what I can physically perceive and ration using my senses, such as self-interest. While my senses are a presuppositional truth, at some point I must have the presupposition that what I am perceiving to exists actually does exists or else I am unable to rationalize reality.

            Now that I have established my idea of truth and relativism, it may be obvious why I identify with ethical egoism. With my understanding and belief of relative truths, I find no moral theory other than ethical egoism to be rationally or logically justified as the only truth that I can have is the presuppositions of my senses. For this reason, I believe that everyone can only act in their self-interest as it is the only axiom that we can presuppose to be objective. For example, in utilitarianism it is said that “the ends justify the means.” This, to me, is an irrational idea in that we can never know the consequence of any action until the action has already happened. We can speculate and suppose the outcome of an action, but we cannot truly know. Let’s say that a known serial killer walks up to you and says, “If the president is not killed tomorrow, I am going to kill ten thousand people.” In the thought process of a utilitarian, it is morally permissible to kill the president as it “saves” the life of ten thousand people; however, I find issue with this line of thinking as we cannot know if the serial killer would do what he says he is going to do. Even with the ample reasoning to believe that the serial killer will do what he says, we cannot know. For this reason, a utilitarianism presupposes things that I am uncomfortable presupposing. The presuppositions that surround the rationalizing of one’s self-interest come down to the inability, epistemologically speaking, to further the justifications of one’s beliefs while utilitarianism simply takes on assumptions of truth for no reason other to rationalize the moral system itself. Additionally, while deontology avoids subjectivity that utilitarianism has, it has its own set of issues in arbitrarily defined axioms and beliefs of morals that I am also not comfortable presupposing.

            Ethical egoism solves both issues that I have with utilitarianism and deontology. Ethical egoism follows an axiom, self-interest, that cannot be refuted past the inability to determine anything to be absolute truth and holds no subjectivity of moral absolutes.

            Lastly, I want to rationalize why ethical egoisms is not “self-defeating” despite popular criticism. Most people would say that if everyone were to act in their self-interest, given a limited amount of resources, everyone would ultimately be left at a detriment. This, however, is why I believe ethical egoism is not as such. While there is, again, no way to prove that an action will lead to an ultimate consequence (in this case a detriment), there can be a renationalization that acting “altruistically” in the short-term can lead to an ultimate benefit in the long-term, and this rationalization is protected by the theory of ethical egoism itself—unlike that of utilitarianism—as the idea of “self-interest” is malleable to the individual seeking it. While there is a similar rationalization that is had with utilitarianism when defining the consequence of an action, the way in which the axioms are defined affect the objectivity of the axioms themselves.

            With a rational thought process, ethical egoism leads to an objective moral theory that is not as “self-defeating” as it seems to be on the surface. While there are certainly issues that can arise because of ethical egoism, there is, with my understanding, no moral theory that has the validity and objectivity that ethical egoism holds. Presuppositions are a necessary part of moral and ethical theory, but there are no theories that are grounded in the rudimentary presuppositions, such as perception and self-interest, such as ethical egoism. By matter of validity, I view ethical egoism as the only rational moral theory.