Philosophy: Please explain this to me in 'simple' language?

Question

I've read through it three times and I STILL don't understand the point fully [I understand bits of it :/ but not enough to use it in an essay...]

'Egoists also face another difficulty if they insist that all motives must ultimately be egoistical. If every apparently altruistic act is ultimately a disguised egoistical one the egoist position threatens to degenerate into an empty claim. This is because the theory becomes irrefutable. Nothing will count as evidence against it. For any apparently altruistic act a selfish motive is posited. [I UNDERSTAND UPTO HERE] But if nothing can count against it, then the theory doesn't explain anything. For it in reality there are no altruistic acts then there is no longer any contrast to be drawn between egoistic and altruistic behaviour. If all act are selfish then there is no difference between a selfish and an unselfish act. But if there is no such contrast, then the concept of a selfish act loses its meaning. It simply becomes synonymous with 'motivated'; for the very concept of a selfish act trades on the concept of the unselfish one. This shows that we cannot articulate the concept of self-interest independently of the concept of other-interestedness. This suggests that our ideas of what counts as self-interested behaviour can only be identified against a backdrop of cooperative behaviour. Thus any attempt to explain cooperative behaviour solely in terms of self-interested behaviour might be doomed from the start.

Now I've read this four times and I don't understand -.-

Please, please help me! :)

Answer 1

It is saying "You can't have something without its opposite for comparison."



So it is saying "We can't talk about selfish acts if all acts are selfish, because there would be nothing to compare it against."



At the end, it says "You can't explain cooperation solely in terms of selfishness, because one can't exist alone. So if you say 'cooperation exists only because all acts are selfish', you are doomed from the start."



In general, the paragraph is poorly written, and perhaps completely untrue. Confusingly, it changes terms from "unselfish" to "altruistic" to "other-interestedness", which all mean the same thing.





The question "Are all acts selfish?" is a classic philosophical one.



Lincoln allegedly said that all acts were selfish. When asked how it could be considered selfish to, say, save some puppies from drowning, he supposedly replied, "I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't."

Answer 2

OK. There are people who believe that everything one does, and I mean everything, is a selfish (self rewarding) act. The claim is unprovable. It maintains that someone like Mother Theresa did what she did for the poor and dying was to make herself feel good, and not the suffering poor. The hypothesis is untestable and thus non-provable. It denies the existence of altruism , at least among humans. It is a political statement (see Ayn Rand), but no more.

Answer 3

i don't mean to sound like a hillbilly saying this, but teachers and professors write extracts for their students as complicated and hard wording like this to feel better about themselves..........my teacher is a ***** and talks normally, but writes questions so ******* hard

Answer 4

no idea