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(Latin ego, I, self), the designation given to those ethical systems which hold self-love to be the source of all rational action and the determinant of moral conduct. In a broad use of the term any system might be called egoistic which makes any good of the ego the end and motive of action. The name, however, has been appropriated by usage to those systems which make happiness, pleasure, or personal advantage the sole end of conduct. In one form or another and with various modifications, the principle pervades the theories of the Cyrenaic, Epicurean, Utilitarian, and Evolutionary Schools; and, slightly disguised, it lurks at the bottom of utilitarian altruism. Its typical expression is to be found in Hobbes and Mandeville, while Jeremy Bentham, combining it with the other cognate principle, that pleasure and pain are the only good and evil, formulates it in its full character as egoistic hedonism.



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The undisputed fact that men do experience sentiments of benevolence and perform disinterested actions offers an obvious difficulty to the egoist. Hobbes seeks to evade it by resolving altruistic impulses into personal hopes and fears. Later hedonists, recurring to the principle of the association of ideas, contend that virtue, which at first is pursued only for the pleasure it brings, comes later on, through a confusion of means and end, to be pursued for its own sake. Innumerable analyses have shown that pleasure and pain are not measurable, and still less for estimating the quantity of different pleasures by considering their various dimensions--intensity, duration, nearness, certainty, purity (freedom from pain), fruitfulness--is commonly regarded as a piece of absurdity.

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Mankind at large understands very clearly that self-interest is one thing and virtue quite another; that self-sacrifice and heroic devotion do exist, and are not vice and immorality; that a worthy action challenges our approbation in proportion to the disinterestedness of the agent. Let it become known that the hero of what we at first considered a brilliant act of self-sacrifice had after all no other motive than to obtain some advantage for himself, and immediately he appears but a vulgar mercenary. As Lecky says: "No Epicurean could avow before a popular audience that the one end of his life was the pursuit of his own happiness without an outburst of indignation and contempt, no man could conscientiously make this--which according to the selfish theory is the only rational and indeed possible motive of action--the deliberate object of all his undertakings without his character becoming despicable and degraded." ( European Morals, vol. I, p. 35.)

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But moral judgments are not resolvable into estimates of self-interest; and if we commit ourselves to classifying conduct purely by the advantages, in terms of the pleasure and pain, to be reaped from it, we shall be forced to appraise as virtuous actions which the reasonable judgment of men condemns as immoral; while, on the other hand, we shall be compelled to brand as wrong acts of self-sacrifice such as, in all life and literature, challenge the highest honour and reverence. -- http://www.catholic.org/

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