“Don’t get too philosophical with me.”
That’s what my psychiatrist at the time, Dr. Corcoran, said to with a smile and a slight chuckle, as was his style, after an exchange that went something like this:
“I’m terribly selfish, Dr. Corcoran. I only care about how I feel and what makes me happy, and it seems to upset others.” I confessed.
“But you care about your mom, don’t you?” the doctor inquired, knowing part of the answer.
I replied, “Yes, I care about how Mom feels, but only because I feel good when she feels good, and I feel bad if she feels bad.”
That’s when he said, “Don’t get too philosophical with me.”
The philosophy, as you can see, is a question of whether I do bad or nice things in consideration of others (my mother in particular, in this case) out of psychological egoism or altruism.
Though my philosophical outlook has changed to something a bit less solipsistic since then (I was about 16 or 17 at the time), I still think that everything I do is, ultimately, selfish.
Do I do things out of egoism or out of altruism? It’s a false dichotomy: like electricity and magnetism; social conflict and functionalism; or energy and mass; egoism and altruism are two sides of the same coin, different manifestation of the same thing.
I do action A because it benefits me. But I’m a large-brained, social primate, so I can see that action A also benefits, for instance, my mother. It’s not a zero-sum game, this social life – I can be egoistic and altruistic at the same time. One might say that it is, in this way, a bit like a Nash equilibrium in that I try to do what benefits both me and others.
I should take a more specific example. As is my style, I’ll use one that’s goofy and involves food.
I’ve ordered a large pizza. I can’t eat all of it. I offer 1/3 of it to my mother. It’s in my benefit to get rid of the pizza, because I can’t eat all of it, and it’s further to my benefit because my mother will be pleased that I offered her my food. It’ll also have some other benefits for me; say, she’ll have more energy to do me a favor, and she’ll be more willing to reciprocate my altruism because I did something for her, so she kind of “owes” me, at least on a psychological level.
But it’s to her benefit, too, if she’s had nothing else to eat for supper. And it benefits her to have a son who is not grumpy from having a tummy ache or some such thing. And her fridge won’t have my leftover pizza taking up valuable space in it. And it feels good to her for someone to do something nice for her.
Two paragraphs above describe how my giving Mom some of my pizza is an egoistic act; the next paragraph describes it as an altruistic act. Taken together, you can see that the act is both egoistic and altruistic.
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