Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
In a nutshell, I think human behaviour can be explained by self-interest. When you understand peoples' motives, you understand their behaviour.
I wonder to what extent we need to think of ethics at all outside of philosophical debates. Applying Occam's Razor seems to eliminate it from any discourse about how people actually behave, or want to behave.
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Arthur Schopenahauer's praxeological observation was that the three prime human motivators are self-gain (egoism), malice, and compassion which exist in varying degrees in each individual with self-gain being, by far, the most prominent of the three. BTW, I read Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on my ebook reader. I'm not really interested in reading any other philosophers. Schopenhauer wrote on self-interest/self-gain :
"The individual is filled with the unqualified desire of preserving his life, and of keeping it free from all pain, under which is included all want and privation. He wishes to have the greatest possible amount of pleasurable existence and every gratification he is capable of appreciating."
"Egoism [self-interest]… will never be argued out of a person, as little as a cat can be talked out of her inclination for mice."