Is Man a Selfish Beast?

Everyone likes to suppose that he has special insight into the motives of others, and that he can unmask the real reasons for their actions rather than the apparent ones or the ones that they supply themselves. In this way we can come to see benevolence as sadism (sometimes, though less often, the other way round) and passivity as aggression. Things are often the opposite of what they seem, and we think we know exactly when they are.

No doubt we are often right. We know that things not always straightforward from examination of our own emotions and motives, when we often realise that they are mixed. La Rochefoucauld, the seventeenth century French writer of moral and psychological maxims, said that there is in the misfortunes of our friends something not entirely unpleasing: an unpleasant thought whose truth most of us recognise at once, but which does not mean, of course, that our malice is pure and undivided, or that our benevolence is false. Nevertheless, the fact that we often successfully hide our less creditable emotions and motives leads us to suppose that others do the same: and from this it is but a short step to supposing that everything is not merely different, but the opposite of what it seems.

Many are the authors, often influential, who have claimed to uncover the real motives, not just of some people, but of all people, with the possible exception of themselves. Karl Marx, for example, found all conduct to be motivated, in the last analysis, by economic interest. Nobody would be so foolish as to deny that this is often the case, but Marx went further, and made it almost a logical truth. When William Wilberforce campaigned to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, he did so, on the Marxist view, not because he was appalled at its terrible cruelty, but because he was acting in the economic interest of his own class, whose ascent was hindered rather than helped by the slave trade’s continuation. A Marxist therefore knows better than Wilberforce himself what Wilberforce was up to, and all the latter’s claim to benevolence were so much hot air, if not outright hypocrisy.

Nietzsche saw nothing in Christian ethics but the resentment of the strong by the weak; Freud was another great unmasker of human motives, as was his disciple who broke away from him, Adler. In Adler’s view, it was the urge to power that was, in effect, the whole of human motivation. And more than one philosopher has seen self-interest behind every human action, however outwardly altruistic it might appear to be.

But this assertion, which is commonly made by those who pride themselves on their hard-bitten realism, is either empirically empty or blatantly false. It can be made true by definition, so that there could be no behaviour in contradiction to it. For example, if someone sacrifices his own life to save anther, it could be said that he preferred to do so rather than live with himself if he failed to do so. But this means that no evidence could ever refute the hypothesis.

The best refutation of the selfishness hypothesis that I know is that of Bishop Butler, the eighteenth century Anglican divine. Modern secularists, in the pride of their rationality, are apt to dismiss ecclesiastical writers of a bygone age as being primitive or superstitious, as if they could have nothing worthwhile to say to us, but this is a prejudice, itself primitive and superstitious. In fact, Butler’s Sermons often tell us more about humanity than many a modern text.

Butler does not deny that motives are often mixed, but this does not mean that all motives are really one meta- or mega-motive. In this connection, he coins his most famous dictum, that everything is what it is, and not another thing. In other words, benevolence is benevolence and malice is malice, even if they co-exist in one human heart.

His argument against self-love, self-interest or power being the only human motive is simple but decisive. He writes in his sermon of 1727, Upon Human Nature:

… that delight in superiority often (suppose always) mixes itself with

benevolence, only makes it more specious to call it ambition than

hunger, of the two; but in reality that passion does not more to

account for the whole appearance of good-will than this appetite

does. Is there not often the appearance of one man’s wishing that

good to another, which he knows himself unable to procure him;

and rejoicing in it, though bestowed by a third person? And can love

of power any way possibly come in to account for this desire or

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delight?

In order to refute this, the believer in selfishness would either have to deny that there has ever been such a case in the world, which is absurd, or so define selfishness that no example of human conduct could possibly be excluded from it, in which case it would tell us nothing real about human motivation.

We may believe with Freud that religion is an illusion, but not that all clergymen have been fools.