Gordon Clark: Egoism (Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics)

1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] Egoism

EGOISM. See also Altruism. Egoism is the theory that one's own good either is or ought to be the sole motive operative in human choice. The term has attracted to itself some disagreeable connotations. For example, Thrasymachus argued that the tyrant who could get away with brutality and murder is the happiest man. Plato repudiated this view and enjoined justice; but Plato was equally an egoist. He asked everyone, Do you want what is really good for you or do you want what really harms you? He expected everyone to answer in the affirmative to the first option.

Plato of course did not identify the good with pleasure. In his middle period he taught that pleasure was actually evil. Justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage are good. If therefore a man chooses injustice or intemperance, it is because he does not know what is good for him.

In the Middle Ages the problem was not acute because Christians agreed that God adjusted the interests of all men.

Thomas Hobbes sharpened the matter by insisting that by an inviolable scientific law the sole motive of choice is one's personal pleasure (q.v.). To this egoistic psychological hedonism (q.v.), Jeremy Bentham (q.v.) tried, inconsistently, to add a universalism (q.v.): each man ought to promote the pleasure of all. As with Plato, failure is due to lack of knowledge.

Henry Sidgwick also tried to unite egoism and universalism; but he saw that this was impossible, unless, with Bishop Butler, we assume that God eventually redresses present injustices. Sidgwick hesitates before a theistic assumption; the other utilitarians are more outspokenly anti-theistic.

Since the time of Freud (q.v.) the discussion has not been carried on in precisely the same terms.

Gordon H. Clark