Honestly, I kinda know what tautology means, but not in its entirety. And there seem to be several definitions and connotations. Could you spell out how you mean it? Also, I'm just taking it on your word that my claims represent psychological egoism, but I'm alright with that if you are.
Very roughly, a statement is
tautologous if it is true in a trivial sense that tells us nothing at all. Somewhat more precisely, it is tautologous if the very form of the statement makes it true regardless of the meanings of its parts. (Much more precisely would require talking about propositional logic.)
The statement "If it is raining, then it is raining," is tautologous in this sense, as is any statement of the form "If P then P." I think that what you've defended is of this form, asserting that "If a person chooses to do X, then he chooses to do X."
Aha! Now we're getting somewhere! We've been using different definitions of self-interest, obviously. So let's ditch self-interest, at least for now. Let's talk about preference, since we were at least able to agree that when the soldier jumped on the grenade, that was the choice that he preferred.
When you say "tangible outcome", does that include emotions?
Yes. The word "tangible" seems only to confuse my meaning. Please ignore it.
Right. I think that altruism is when someone makes a sacrifice for the benefit of another. I think it is like a sacrifice play in chess. Give up the queen in order to make an even greater gain, or to take a less severe punishment. And so with morality. The fact that people take the actions that they find the most rewarding, and/or the least punishing is the very thing that allows us to make moral evaluations of character or action.
The soldier jumping the grenade is a good scenario to discuss, because I think it pushes the limits of sacrifice. But maybe a more mundane case would make my position clearer. Let's imagine a little old lady living on a government pension. She lives mostly off of generic brand canned soup over bulk rice. But she gives a large portion of her cheque to charity. Maybe she does it because she empathizes with people that are even less fortunate than her, and it makes her happy to see other people happy. And/or she likes the feeling that it gives her to be the agent of this altruism and this satisfies her moral sense. Personally, I would rank those as good moral reasons for a good outcome. On the other hand, maybe she's a total meanie and her main motivation is to rub her superiority in the face of her sister out of pure spite. Well, still a good outcome on the charity side of things, but not something I would rank as well on my own moral scale. In any of these cases we see what they are like by seeing what they find rewarding.
Here I'll reiterate that I can't imagine an example of someone making a meaningful choice without that choice being based on what they prefer. I'm not sure what that would even mean? Before, I gave the example of someone infected by a brain parasite. Or maybe someone could be possessed by some kind of spirit, but I don't believe in that kind of thing. And whether it's a brain parasite or a spectral parasite, I don't think the actor could be said to be making choices in a meaningful way. Could you give some other kind of example?
The devil seems to be in the details now on how we define "prefer". It seems to me that you use "prefer" to mean the option actually chosen is the preferred option, and that's fine if we want to define the term that way, at the cost of making your claim tautologous.
But we should also carefully note that people do say, "I'd prefer not to do this, but I will," without seemingly contradicting themselves. Obviously, they are using the word differently than you are, and we should take care that we don't equivocate between the two meanings.
In any case, regarding dear Granny, I absolutely agree that things which may appear to be purely altruistic can actually be in the person's interest, either because of some hidden selfish motive or because they are the kind of person who enjoys being generosity.
.
Okay, not sure why you chose this example with an egoist as the central character? The moral philosophy that I'm trying to put forth is a descriptive one. Its success or failure doesn't depend on some individual acting as if they believe in it or not. Also, I don't see the relevance of such an implausible scenario. As if anyone, in such an instance, thinks about that stuff?
I just thought that we should take the example to the point of discussing utility in order to show that it is implausible the heroic soldier is really reasoning in terms of self-interest, but we've dropped self-interest in favor of preference, so we may also drop this line of argument.
Here's where I think we stand on a few claims.
(1)
People always choose to do what they believe to be in their self-interest. I think that we agree this is false, though it may be that
most actions are chosen according to self-interest.
(2)
People always choose to do what they prefer to do. True if we use the term "prefer" to mean "what they choose to do", but in that case, it becomes tautologous and hence uninteresting.
(3)
Some, perhaps most, apparently altruistic actions are actually in the person's self-interest. This seems to be both true and non-trivial.
