EAP3_EWAN_Selfish_Gene.pdf

Glenn Ewan ?Mistaken Instrumentalism in Psychological Egoism and The Selfish Gene? Emergent Australasian Philosophers Issue 3, 2010 1 MISTAKEN INSTRUMENTALISM IN PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM AND THE SELFISH GENE Glenn Ewan The theories of Psychological Egoism and the Selfish Gene both rely on an instrumental process that fails to take account of how a motive or a trait can be a means to more than one end. Psychological egoism ignores the lived, felt experience of benevolence that is a necessary part of the means to an end process. The theory of the selfish gene ignores the fact that even though we only evolve benevolent traits if they serve our genetic fitness, these traits nevertheless simultaneously increase the fitness of other beings when we enact them. The means-to-an-end process can occur in both directions when we are motivated by benevolence, serving both ourselves, and others, at a psychological level, and at a genetic level. This is not an affirmation of the theories of psychological altruism and biological altruism however, but a kind of mutualism that guides human beings, before culture and upbringing have their influence upon us. When we talk of something being a means to an end of something else, we think that we do a first thing only because it satisfies another, more primary aim. So, for instance, when we give money to a ticket seller at a train station, it is so that we can have a ticket. The ticket merely allows us to get on the train. The train merely allows us to get home. Yet we experience all of these actions as part of the means to an end process of getting home. It is a lived, felt, experienced process. Likewise, the debate over psychological egoism, and psychological altruism, as well as the debate over biological altruism, is centred on the means to an end process which underlies the experienced actions we perform when we are benevolent. The theory of psychological egoism states that