Egoism & the Social Contract

This is Unit Three of Ethics and Values: Egoism and the Social Contract. Two questions run through this unit, and they are easy to run together. The first is descriptive: as a matter of fact, what moves people to act? The second is normative: what ought to move them? Keeping those apart is most of the work. The first half takes the claim that self-interest moves everyone, then the claim that it should. Both have arguments behind them, and both have replies you can state precisely. The second half asks what people in it for themselves could still build together. That is the social contract — morality as the rules rational people would accept for mutual benefit, provided others accept them too. By the end you will be able to do five things. One: state psychological egoism, and show why defending it by re-describing every counterexample costs the thesis its content. Two: answer the two arguments usually offered for it — the one from wants, and the one from good feelings. Three: tell the descriptive thesis from the normative one, and self-interest from selfishness. Four: state the two objections that ethical egoism has not answered. Five: explain what the social contract is answering, and what the veil of ignorance is for.

Begin with the descriptive claim. It is broad, it sounds worldly, and its defenders have an answer for every apparent exception. Watch the answer closely — it is what turns a bold thesis into an empty one.

The claim, in full.

Ethics 101 Psychological Egoism

A firefighter entering a building, a donor writing a cheque, a friend keeping a secret — the thesis files all three under the same heading.

Now watch it handle a hard case.

Ethics 102 The Reinterpretation Strategy

The nurse who stays late is re-described as buying admiration or avoiding guilt. Some hidden payoff is always available, and the supply never runs out.

That inexhaustible supply has a price.

Ethics 103 The Unfalsifiability Problem

Hold that all swans are white and call each black one painted, and the thesis survives with nothing left in it. Compatible with everything, it explains nothing.

Set the defence aside; there are real arguments here. One says every voluntary act serves the agent's own desire. The other says helping is done for the feeling it brings. Each has a reply, and both replies turn on the same move: asking what the desire is actually about.

The argument from wants.

Ethics 104 The Want-Satisfaction Argument

A relief worker chooses the flood zone, and the argument notes she satisfied her own want to help. That much is true of every voluntary act.

Here is what the argument leaves out.

Ethics 105 Why Wants Don't Make It Selfish

One neighbour wants a taller fence; another wants her elderly friend fed. Both act on wants of their own, and only one of those wants is about herself.

The second argument, from feeling.

Ethics 106 The Good-Feelings Argument

A partner mentors a junior and walks away glowing. The argument reads that glow backwards, as the goal all along.

The reply reverses the order.

Ethics 107 The Byproduct Reply

Only someone who already wanted the stranger rescued feels joy at the rescue. The feeling follows the caring and is evidence of it, never a substitute for it.

Two things have to be clean before the normative theory arrives. One is a word that gets used loosely, and one is the difference between saying how people are and saying how they should be. The unit's name depends on both.

The word first.

Ethics 108 Selfish vs. Self-Interested

Lunch and a check-up serve you and wrong nobody. Taking a colleague's lunch is where the other word begins — where someone else's interests were genuinely at stake.

Now the second thesis.

Ethics 113 Ethical Egoism

A retiring official asks what she owes the public, and this theory answers: whatever serves her. One describes, the other prescribes, and keeping the names apart is half the unit.

It is narrower than its reputation.

Ethics 114 What Ethical Egoism Doesn't Say

The gambler emptying his savings gets scolded as sternly here as anywhere. The quarrel is with his arithmetic, not with his aim.

Take the theory at its strongest. The best-known argument for it is not about greed at all — it is about taking one person's life seriously, and the reply does not deny that premise so much as widen the field.

The argument.

Ethics 115 Rand's Argument

On this telling, "live for others" turns a person into a means, and each person has only the one life. Egoism is offered as the theory that refuses to spend it.

The reply, in one move.

Ethics 116 The False-Dichotomy Reply

A manager funds the scholarship without vowing poverty. Between the martyr and the egoist sits most of ordinary decency, doing ordinary good.

Two objections have not been answered. The first is about what the theory tells you to do when harming someone pays. The second is about a division the theory makes and cannot defend.

The first is about what it prescribes.

Ethics 117 The Wickedness Objection

If falsifying the trial data enriches the executive and stays hidden, the theory does not merely permit the fraud. It records the fraud as her duty.

The second is about a line.

Ethics 118 The Arbitrariness Objection

Asked what makes her interests weigh more than her neighbour's, the egoist can say they are hers. That names the owner; it does not supply a difference that justifies the split.

The unit now turns from what one person should pursue to what people together can agree on. It starts from a thought experiment about life with no law and nobody to enforce a bargain — and the answer built on it is the oldest surviving alternative to both theories so far.

The condition, as Hobbes drew it.

Ethics 126 The State of Nature

Hobbes's line does the describing: without a common power, life runs solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Four features do the damage.

Ethics 127 Why the State of Nature Fails

Two families, one well. Neither can dominate for long, neither dares trust first, and nobody referees. Equal vulnerability and scarcity finish the job.

Here is the answer built on that.

Ethics 128 The Social Contract

Professional codes run this way. Each engineer forgoes the cut corner because shared forbearance is the thing that makes any signature worth trusting.

The answer has a boundary problem.

Ethics 129 The Scope Objection

A board weighing burdens on people three generations away finds nobody across the table to bargain with. On contract reasoning alone, they are outside.

Underneath the state of nature is a structure that shows up wherever two parties can each gain by defecting. It is worth walking through in full, because seeing the trap is what makes the contract's answer look less like optimism and more like engineering.

The structure, named.

Ethics 130 The Prisoner's Dilemma

Two partners can each shade the books. Shading pays whatever the other does — and two shaded ledgers sink the firm that both were trying to profit from.

Watch all four outcomes laid out.

Ethics 131 Walking the Dilemma

Check each party's best move against both of the other's choices and the trap appears on its own. It needs no villains — the payoffs are the trap.

One change dissolves it.

Ethics 132 Enforcement Changes the Game

Put an auditor with real penalties in the room and honest books become the profitable choice. That shift is the social contract's whole sales pitch.

Three thinkers take the contract in different directions — one putting rights before government, one trading a kind of freedom for another kind, and one drawing out what follows when a group is denied the bargain's benefits.

Locke moves the starting line.

Ethics 133 Locke's State of Nature

A settlement with no courthouse still treats the harvest thief as a wrongdoer. On Locke's account the courthouse arrives later; the wrong was already there.

Rousseau reframes what is traded.

Ethics 134 Rousseau's Social Contract

Born free, and everywhere in chains — with the legitimate chains being the ones a people forges for itself.

And what follows when the bargain is not kept.

Ethics 135 Civil Disobedience

A group denied the contract's benefits loses part of its duty to obey. King's letter sets the terms: openly, and accepting the penalty.

The contract's modern form asks a different question: not what people would agree to knowing who they are, but what they would agree to not knowing. The objection that follows comes from the opposite direction, and it is the strongest one going.

The idea first.

Ethics 136 Justice as Fairness

Cut-the-cake logic, scaled to a constitution: the cutter who does not know which slice is hers cuts even slices.

The device that does the work.

Ethics 137 The Veil of Ignorance

Talents, wealth, race, sex, and your idea of a good life all go behind the veil. Ignorance of your own position does the work argument alone could not.

The objection runs the other way.

Ethics 138 Nozick's Entitlement Objection

A million fans each freely pay the star a dollar. The fortune arose by just steps, and rearranging it to restore a pattern undoes those free choices.

One ordinary case, and every tool in the unit applies to it. A town conserves water in a drought; one homeowner waters at night. Nothing exotic is at stake, which is what makes it a good test.

The capstone. Egoism and the contract, both in play.

Ethics 145 The Free Rider

Egoism prescribes the watering if it stays hidden, and then cannot say why his exemption is his to take. The analysis never asked whether he would be caught — only one theory needed that answer.

Five things you can now do. You can state psychological egoism, and show why answering every counterexample by re-description leaves the thesis compatible with everything and explaining nothing. You can answer both arguments for it: acting on your own want says nothing about whose benefit the want is about, and the warm feeling follows the caring rather than causing it. You can tell the descriptive thesis from the normative one, and self-interest from selfishness — lunch and a check-up wrong nobody. You can state the two objections ethical egoism has not answered: it prescribes harm whenever harm pays, and it splits self from everyone else without producing a difference that justifies the split. And you can say what the social contract answers — the state of nature, and the trap underneath it — and what the veil of ignorance is for.