Regardless of whether or not someone is acting unselfish or self-interested, they act in a way that is most like what they want to do. Let us consider an act of benevolence. If someone was to perform this act of kindness, they would be doing it out of their own desire. Thus, this makes the act self-interested. It can be concluded that this can be said about any act of kindness. So, Psychological Egoism must be true. A flaw in this argument is that sometimes we do things not because we want to but when we feel we ought to do them. We may have a strong desire to break a promise, but we do not because we feel obligated to keep it. This shows that what we want most is to break the promise, but we keep it anyways, thus the argument is flawed. A second flaw is that when you act out of desire, you are not always acting in self-interest. To assess if something is self-interested, we have to know what kind of desire the issue is based on. If your actions are based on helping someone else, then you are acting altruistically, not
Regardless of whether or not someone is acting unselfish or self-interested, they act in a way that is most like what they want to do. Let us consider an act of benevolence. If someone was to perform this act of kindness, they would be doing it out of their own desire. Thus, this makes the act self-interested. It can be concluded that this can be said about any act of kindness. So, Psychological Egoism must be true. A flaw in this argument is that sometimes we do things not because we want to but when we feel we ought to do them. We may have a strong desire to break a promise, but we do not because we feel obligated to keep it. This shows that what we want most is to break the promise, but we keep it anyways, thus the argument is flawed. A second flaw is that when you act out of desire, you are not always acting in self-interest. To assess if something is self-interested, we have to know what kind of desire the issue is based on. If your actions are based on helping someone else, then you are acting altruistically, not