Peter Schwartz’s Elementary Mistakes 2: ‘Egoism’ and ‘Altruism’

What are “egoism” and “altruism”, according to Mr. Schwartz?

“Sacrificing yourself for the needs of others is universally seen as the essence of morality. The tenets of altruism are widely regarded not simply as true, but as practically self-evident. …the doctrine… tells you to subordinate yourself to other people. It tells you that in any choice you make, your own interests should be less important to you than those of someone else.”

So described, “altruism” is the claim that you must sacrifice yourself, or your interests, to others, others’ needs, or others’ interests. Now, what are these needs for which we’re supposed to be making sacrifices? “…under altruism only one thing qualifies as a need: that which requires someone else’s sacrifice to fulfill.”

On this account, altruism tells us to sacrifice for the sake of having sacrificed. No one else has to benefit. That is of course not “subordinating yourself to other people” or sacrificing your interests for others’ interests. So altruism seems to be two very different doctrines. One kind of altruism would be self-destruction for its own sake. The other would be self-destruction for the sake of the well-being of other people. So let’s distinguish:

Altruism-1: the destruction of one’s interests

Altruism-2: the pursuit of others’ interests

Altruism-1 has never been held by anyone, ever, under any circumstances. What Rand and Mr. Schwartz are talking about is not a theory, but an alleged psychological condition. People with this (hypothetical) syndrome need clarification and guidance, not refutation and very definitely not condemnation.

Egoism, on the other hand, is supposed to prescribe “selfishness” which is “a concern with one’s own interests”. The two different kinds of altruism would then be two different ways of not being an egoist. So we have egoists who pursue their own interests, altruists who pursue others’ interests, and altruists who pursue no one’s interests.

Egoism (so described) contrasts with the two kinds of altruism in different ways. Altruism-1 is the negation of egoism. Egoism says to pursue interests; altruism-1 says to destroy them. That makes altruism-1 just a parasitic perversion of egoism. Egoism and altruism-1 would agree about what our interests are; they would just disagree about what to do about those interests.

Altruism-2, however, would have a more complicated relationship with egoism. Egoism tells me to pursue my own interests, and altruism-2 tells me to pursue others’ interests. Why can’t I just do both? Mr. Schwartz would rapidly point out that altruism is supposed to tell us to pursue others’ interests by way of destroying our own. But can I actually achieve anyone’s interests by destroying my own? Not really; other people benefit substantially more from my pursuit of my own interests than they would from my self-destruction. If altruism-2 demands that I destroy my own interests to pursue others’, which is doomed to fail, it’s just telling me to destroy my own interests, and would collapse into altruism-1.

Egoism and altruism-2 contradict one another only on the assumption that there are conflicts of interests. If there are no conflicts of interests between people, then, when I pursue my own interests, I am achieving others’ interests, and when I pursue others’ interests, I’m achieving my own. If there are no conflicts of interest, then there is no question for either egoism or altruism to answer. But Mr. Schwartz follows Rand in denying that there are conflicts of interests: “Among rational individuals, there are no conflicts of interest.” Why is the word ‘rational’ in there? Your interests are your interests; whether you’re rational or not has nothing to do with it. A rational person is liable to correctly identify his interests and an irrational person is liable to be wrong about them, but our interests don’t rely on our knowing about them. If there are no conflicts of interest, then egoism and altruism will always give the same advice. It’s hard to see what all of the fuss is about, then.

However, according to Mr. Schwartz, altruism creates conflicts: “It is altruism, by replacing desert with need, that generates continual conflicts.” That’s as may be, but those are conflicts between people, not interests. Our interests are our interests; neither egoism nor altruism has any answer to the question of what our interests are. They are supposed to be answers to the question of whose interests to pursue. If our interests are in accord, then there is no such question: pursuing the interests of either self or others would consist in exactly the same actions and so no decision must be made about whom to benefit.

Another peculiarity of Mr. Schwartz’s contrast between egoism and altruism has to do with the objectivity, or otherwise, of interests. “Under the code of egoism, the good is determined by what is objectively necessary for sustaining man’s life.” However, “By an altruistic standard, if your neighbor expresses an irrational desire, you should accommodate it; saying no would be selfish on your part.” In this case, ‘selfish’ is supposed to mean “non-self-destructive”. But altruism construed as the doctrine that I must pursue others’ interests is incompatible with altruism construed as the doctrine that I must serve others’ whims; others’ whims no more correlate with their actual interests than my whims correlate with mine.

The underlying problem is that Mr. Schwartz uses the word ‘interest’ ambiguously. When he defines egoism and altruism, he takes interests to be given independent of moral theories. Egoism is the pursuit of one’s independently-specified interests; altruism-1 is the destruction of one’s independently-specified interests; altruism-2 is the pursuit of others’ independently-specified interests.But when he claims that altruism creates conflict, he takes interests to be dependent on our beliefs about our interests. That’s because rational people’s interests can’t conflict, but irrational people’s can. That makes one’s rationality affect what one’s interests are. You can’t believe that interests are both independent of one’s (rationally accepted) moral theory and also dependent on one’s rationality (and the moral convictions that it leads one to adopt).

This is only one expression of Rand’s general failure to grasp the difference between the valued and the valuable, but more about that in another place.

Peter Schwartz’s Elementary Mistakes, 1: The Word ‘Selfish’

This is the first in a series of posts about Peter Schwartz’s new book, In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive.

Mr. Schwartz says, “the term ‘selfishness’ means only a concern with one’s own interests”. That is not true. I have never heard of anyone being described as “selfish” for working for self-improvement. People who go to the gym for health are not selfish. Have you ever heard anyone say, “You’re trying to lose weight? How selfish!” People who eat well for health are not selfish. Have you ever heard anyone say, “You’re trying to eat more healthily? How selfish!” People who read literary fiction or who educate themselves about science or history are not selfish. Have you ever heard anyone say, “How dare you read Tolstoy! How selfish!” People who do their work well and conscientiously are not selfish. Have you ever heard anyone say, “You put in a full eight hours today just like you were required to, and you were working diligently the whole time, and exceeded expectations? How selfish!” If you’re like me, you have not. That’s because the word doesn’t apply to those actions.

Mr. Schwartz says:

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Altruism’s purveyors… try to equate selfishness with the destruction of others. Note how some dictionaries have slipped this notion into the very definition of ‘selfish’. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, for example, defines it as ‘regarding one’s own comfort, advantage, etc., in disregard, or at the expense, of that of others. Defining selfishness in this manner makes it seem that the harming of others is an integral part of the concept.

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No dictionary that I’ve checked has failed to “slip” “destruction of others” “into the very definition of ‘selfish’”. That’s because the destruction of others is the very definition of ‘selfish’. This is just a fact about the English word ‘selfish’, available to any native speaker of English. ‘Selfish’ does not and has never meant a concern with one’s own interests. It is not true that “The authentic concept of selfishness, of simply pursuing one’s interests, has been surreptitiously expunged from our vocabulary.” The concept of simply pursuing one’s interests was never the concept expressed by the word ‘selfish’. And it obviously hasn’t been expunged from our vocabulary, since “simply pursuing one’s interests” is a perfectly good phrase of English that Mr. Schwartz uses correctly and that precisely expresses the concept that he desires to express. You can’t say, “Here is a concept that I cannot express in this language”, and then express it in this language.

Why is Mr. Schwartz tilting at this linguistic windmill? I think that there are two reasons, the first of which is not an “elementary” error: he doesn’t know the difference between concepts and words. (The second one is another elementary error that I’ll talk about in another post.)

Notice that he blurs the distinction in this remark: “…there is simply no concept, in common usage, that refers to actual, i.e., non-predatory, selfishness. The word that should identify the behavior of an honest producer is used instead to identify only the behavior of an unprincipled parasite.” If “common usage” means “language”, then there is no concept in common usage at all, since words are what are in common usage and words are not concepts. Words, unlike concepts, are conventional symbols with histories. That ‘cat’ means cats is a convention of English that results from the etymology of the word. The word ‘cat’ can change its meaning and could have had different meanings from what it has, had linguistic history gone differently. But that the concept of cats is of cats is not conventional and it doesn’t result from anything; that’s just part of what it is to be the concept of cats. The concept of cats results from a process of abstraction from experience, but the fact that that concept is of cats isn’t an additional fact about it, above and beyond its being the concept that it is. The fact that the word ‘cat’ means cats, on the other hand, is not just the fact that it is spelled c-a-t and sounds like “kat”; the same word could have had, and could acquire, a different meaning. If someone has a concept that doesn’t apply to all and only cats, then it isn’t the concept of cats, even if he tries to use ‘cat’ to express it. Words are bound by language; concepts are not. I have no words in common with a speaker of Chinese, but we share most of our concepts.

We use words to, among other things, express concepts. (We can use words to refer to objects because we use them to express the concepts of those objects.) The fact that a word expresses a given concept is conventional and the result of the history of use of the word. There are objective facts about those conventions and histories. But, blurring the difference between words and concepts, Mr. Schwartz has contended that, because the concept that he desires to express cannot be expressed with the word ‘selfish’, the objective facts about language — the reality of people speaking — are wrong and must be replaced by his preference.

The word ‘selfish’ expresses the concept of predatory, irrational behavior that is directed at satisfying desires for wealth, power, pleasure and so forth, at the expense of others; selfish behavior is nearly always self-destructive. The word ‘selfish’ has never expressed any other concept. To say that the word ‘selfish’ should express some other concept, instead of the one that it expresses, is near-perfect in its arbitrariness. Mr. Schwartz might as well complain that the real concept of a bachelor is the concept of a man, married or not, but being unmarried has been slipped into various definitions of ‘bachelor’, so that the word that should have meant ‘men’ doesn’t mean what it should and it is now impossible to talk about men as such.

Why does this matter? I’m not sure that it does; I’m partly writing this out of sheer frustration. I look at Schwartz’s book, and even though I want to throw it aside and give up, one thought stops me: the thought that it is philosophy and that I have to save it, as others could not pass a drowning man without leaping in to the rescue.

Addendum: No sooner did I wrap this up and turn to re-reading David Hume than I found exactly what Mr. Schwartz should have mentioned: Hume does indeed use ‘selfish’, in some places, in the way that Mr. Schwartz wants it used. (His specific phrasings had slipped my mind, unfortunately.) He seems to handle it gingerly, though — his “narrow” selfishness is what we would mean by ‘selfishness’, and he has several other words that he uses, such as ‘self-love’, that he seems more comfortable using to refer to a respectable character trait. I’m not sure how significant is the fact that three hundred years ago, it was possible to use ‘selfish’ to mean what Mr. Schwartz wants to mean by it without courting quite so much paradox. But I know how significant Mr. Schwartz thinks it is. If he (and Rand before him) had actually cared about the matter, then they might have actually given some evidence that the word ‘selfish’ means what they say that it means.

Drawing Muhammad

It seems to have gotten serious in 2005, when a Danish writer, Kåre Bluitgen, wanted to write a children’s book about Islam. He was having trouble finding people to illustrate it — apparently, people were rightly worried about violence. That his intentions were not demeaning is obvious from the cover that was eventually drawn.

The book itself seems pretty benign, though I’ve read only a few pages of it. (You can get it on the Kindle for $5.)

(Oh: I will be posting several depictions of Muhammad, Peace be Upon Him. I understand that this might be upsetting to Muslim readers. If you are Muslim and you believe that it is wrong of me to depict Muhammad, then you are welcome to try to convince me that your religion is true and that it forbids such depictions. You are also welcome to tell me that I am behaving offensively, though as I already know that, you wouldn’t be very informative. Finally, it is of course possible to avoid the offensive content by closing the browser window, though I would prefer that you endure the offense and engage in a constructive conversation. Go with your god, my friends, and peace be upon you.)

Word got out about Mr. Bluitgen’s problems, and the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten commissioned a set of depictions of Mohammad; I think that the most aggressive of them is this one:

The pattern is that someone wanted to depict Muhammad in a way that is offensive only if depictions of Muhammad are offensive by nature, they were (or at least felt) threatened, and in response to the threats, someone depicted Muhammad in a way that would be offensive to pretty much any Muslim. It’s a sarcastic gesture.

This pictorial escalation was matched with an escalation in violence: over two hundred people were killed in anti-Danish riots across the Muslim world. Some people don’t get sarcasm:

Later came the “South Park” fiasco, the Charlie Hebdo attack, and the defeated attempt to massacre the attendees at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in Garland, TX, a few weeks ago. The winner of the contest was former Muslim, supporter of Ayn Rand, and Eisner-nominated cartoonist Bosch Fawstin, and here is what he drew:

(Muhammad seems to be a cybernetic organism that has replaced its original right-hand-shaped endoskeletal appendage with a small garden rake and pulled its artificial skin over that. — …so maybe this isn’t actually a depiction of Muhammad at all?)

In this case, we have the issue presented in the form of a short dialogue between a cartoonist and his cartoon. The cartoon demands not to be drawn; the cartoonist insists that he will draw the cartoon just because it doesn’t want to be drawn. That’s the original pattern from Denmark: we’re only making offensive images of Muhammad because some Muslims violently freak out when we make any images of Muhammad, for any purpose at all.

So let’s think about this. Imagine that you know a man called ‘Tiny’. Imagine that Tiny’s beloved mother has just passed away. Now, the thing with Tiny’s mother is that she was a meth-addled, crack-addicted prostitute. Also, Tiny is in a little bit of denial about his mother’s unsavory behaviors.

Should you, at the wake, point out to Tiny that his mother was a whore? Probably not. That would be crass and rude of you. Why insult people?

But let me fill in a couple of blanks about Tiny. He is a very large, very strong, somewhat ill-tempered man; this wake is at a biker bar. If you puncture his illusion about his mother, he will get angry and you are liable to get beaten up.

Does that change the calculus about whether you should point out to Tiny that his mother was a whore? Does the fact that the offended person would become violent constitute a reason to offend him? Surely it does not.

Switch the case. Imagine that Tiny believes that his mother has gone to Heaven, but you, as an atheist, think that that is a silly fairy tale. Is the wake a great time to point that out? Maybe not, and the fact that Tiny might get violent about it probably doesn’t make it a great time to point that out.

The fact that something would be offensive to someone else is a reason not to do it or say it or draw it.

The fact that the someone might get violent about it is not a reason to do it or say or draw it.

The fact that drawing Muhammad is offensive to many people is a reason not to do it: all other things being equal, one ought not to do it. But all other things are not equal. Drawing Muhammad might be really funny. It might be educational. It can serve a wide variety of purposes, and once in a while, those purposes are worth the offense. Of course, the people performing this calculus are almost never the ones who would suffer the offense. It’s easy to say that what is beneficial to me is worth whatever harm it causes someone else. People depicting Muhammad ought to consider how they feel when their own beliefs, if they have any, are similarly insulted. For instance, we flag-waving patriots might consider that we don’t take kindly to people who burn the flag, and then realize that, while people might have reasons to burn the flag, they also have a pretty good reason not to; if you take up your pen to draw Muhammad, consider that what you’re doing is the equivalent of someone else taking up our flag to burn it.

But what happens when the fact that something is offensive brings it about that we have a reason to do it? For instance, the fact that something is offensive might be precisely what makes it funny — the offensive can be shocking, and the shocking is sometimes the surprise that gets a laugh. And the fact that people are threatened with violence for doing something offensive might make doing it into a statement about free speech.

So offensiveness can be a double-edged sword: it constitutes a reason not to do something, but it can sometimes underlie a reason to do the very same thing!

Think about the Danish cartoon above. It has several levels of meaning. On the first level, it says that Islam is violent. That’s just a direct insult to everyone who is Muslim. At a higher level, given the context in which it was created, it’s intended to be a statement in defense of free speech. But it isn’t. It doesn’t distinguish Islam from Islamism, or Islamic fundamentalism, or Jihadism, or Islamic terrorism, or Islamic theocracy. Its higher-level meaning is the fact that its lower-level meaning is offensive to Muslims is a reason to create the image. It treats Muslims as people who need to be offended, as an end in itself. But that isn’t true: it is not true that, all other things being equal, if something will offend Muslims, then you ought to do it. Violence and threats of violence have nothing to do with it.

Think about Mr. Fawstin’s cartoon, though. It says, right in its content, that it exists exclusively as a statement about free speech. It says that the fact that it is offensive isn’t a reason to create it; it says that the fact that some Muslims respond so badly to being offended is the reason to create it. It doesn’t say anything about Islam as such. It says something about how some Muslims act and whether their actions warrant respect: it says that their violence does not constitute a reason not to depict Muhammad. It doesn’t say that their being offended constitutes a reason to depict Muhammad. On its own, then, that cartoon should be celebrated and displayed widely.

But let’s add some context. The contest that Mr. Fawstin won was organized by Pamela Geller. Ms. Geller is a fan of Ayn Rand who became prominent by trying to prevent the construction of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”. She produced a “documentary” on the subject:

Building a sanctuary of religion X near where some self-described practitioners of X committed an atrocity is not the second wave of the atrocity. It could be, of course. Had al Qaeda conquered Manhattan, torn down City Hall, and put a mosque in its place, then that would be an insult added to the original injury. (Many churches in western Europe were built on sites of pagan worship, in direct affront to the pagan religions; the relevant pagans were no doubt horrified and disgusted, and rightly so, at the desecrations.) But building a mosque in southern Manhattan is not, remotely, the same thing. The Catholic church nearest my home is not a wave of the Inquisition.

Who benefits from this sort of advocacy? If I were writing propaganda for jidahists, I would be overjoyed by Ms. Geller. “The Americans say that they have freedom of religion, including for our religion. But they don’t! They won’t allow a mosque to be built! Americans hate Islam! Flock to the banner of jihad!” I know that Ms. Geller’s advocacy is an expression of stupidity, rather than treachery, but good heavens.

Likewise, Mr. Fawstin asserts that all Muslims are jidahists. Check out his twitter feed for such gems as, “In reality, jihadists are the scum of the earth, capable of committing unspeakable violence, but in Islam, they’re what passes for ‘heroes'”. It’s true that, in reality, jihadists are scum. But why on Earth would you insist, to a billion and a half Muslims, that jihadists are their heroes? Again, jihadists must be thrilled at such rhetoric: “Even the Americans say that we are the only true Muslims! Flock to our banner!” How many people do we want to have to kill in our “war” on terror? Do we want to actually risk the destruction of western civilization? Why go out of your way to tell your potential allies that they are hypocrites and that if they were sincere, they would be trying to kill you?

The threats and violence against Mr. Fawstin and Ms. Geller are indefensible, wicked, evil. No one should convert Mr. Fawstin’s and Ms. Geller’s persecution fantasies into reality. They have a right to speak freely, they should not allow threats of violence to alter their messages, and they must be protected from violence with the full force of our legal systems. Violence shouldn’t affect what they say — but reason should. Instead of exercising their right to speak freely by blithering nihilistic nonsense, it would be grand if they would exercise their right to speak freely by saying things worth saying. Mr. Fawstin’s cartoon is a great example of that — but in general, these people just ooze a desire that the world be cleansed with fire and blood.

(Addendum 6-25-15. The flag-burning/Muhammad-drawing analogy isn’t very precise, since Islam isn’t a country [ISIS allegedly to the contrary notwithstanding]. Putting a crucifix in a jar of urine is more closely analogous. Drawing a misogynistic, obscene cartoon of Ayn Rand or something might be analogous.)

Forthcoming: Depicting the M-man, Peace Be Upon Him

Later this week, I plan to post something about depicting Muhammad. The South Park guys are exemplars of reason and virtually heroic defenders of free speech and free thought. But Pamela Geller and her people seem to be mean-spirited types who are desperate for bloodshed. I want to try to figure out what the difference is between the aesthetically valuable depictions of Muhammad by serious satirists and social critics like Parker and Stone, and the trite propaganda of Geller and her friends, and where Charlie Hebdo stands in the whole mess. Yes, I will be posting Bosch Fawstin’s attempt to debate his own drawing. I feel pretty safe from ISIS, since in Texas, the roads are so confusing that they would just drive around haplessly in their creepy terror-van, scaring old people into giving them weird directions, until they finally accidentally blew themselves up, leading to much rejoicing. Nutbag neo-Nazis, on the other hand, are slightly more worrisome, but they’d drive up, see that I fly the flag, and go home puzzled that the lefty guy flies, doesn’t burn, the stars and stripes. (Not sure why the neo-Nazis don’t recognize that ISIS are their anti-Semitic brethren, but, hey, none of these people are known for their ability to get over differences.)

A Breakthrough in Rand Studies

Blackwell Publishing will soon be bringing out a Companion to Ayn Rand. It’s edited by the late Allan Gotthelf, who was a very gifted interpreter of Aristotle at the University of Pittsburgh and other strong universities, and by Gregory Salmieri, a Visiting Fellow at Boston College.

Now I haven’t much cared for the other Blackwell Companion volumes that I’ve read — the structurally similar Cambridge Companion volumes seem to be systematically superior. Nevertheless, this is the first time since Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Sciabarra and Gladstein in 1999, that a serious interpretive series has had a Rand volume.

Neither the Amazon nor Blackwell pages have anything but boilerplate information about the content, but I would guess that they have populated its pages with the same people involved in recent Objectivist conference proceedings, some of whom are Randians, some of whom are sympathetic, and some of whom write in such a way as to give the impression that they have had a favor called in by Prof. Gotthelf.

Given that it is edited by true believers (regardless of Gotthelf’s well-earned scholarly reputation), I don’t expect much attending to the details, the places in Rand’s purported system where reason gives out and a gap is covered by sheer rhetoric and puffery. But maybe someone will say something useful — someone had better, since the damned thing’ll run $126.61 and I guess I’ll have to read it. (Hopefully, the market — by which I mean amazon.com — has heard the plea of the consumer and will put out a kindle version.)

Speaking of books that I don’t anticipate enjoying reading, Peter Schwartz’s In Defense of Selfishness will be out in a couple of days. Schwartz was previously most noted for arguing at genuinely tedious length that libertarianism is, by nature, a groundless whim for anarchism that naturally allies itself with terrorists and totalitarianism. As that is a very silly claim, one is not optimistic about his latest effort.

While it’s a little dreary to have to read these things, on the up side, the fact that Rand publication is rapidly increasing in quantity and prestige definitely shows a need for my book — before some meaningful fragment of novice philosophers come to think that Rand was seriously onto something, was marginalized, and constitutes a subaltern voice deserving of their attention.

You can support these and my other studies by becoming a patron at my Patreon page. And you can also help by reposting my blog entries on Facebook and Twitter and by posting comments below. I’m trying to start a conversation and I’m sustained by a Roark-like confidence that the auditors and interlocutors are out there and that we just need to find one another.