CHAPTER 1:

James Rachels: Egoism and Scepticism

What I expect to learn:

                I expect to learn what and how egoism affects our daily life. I also expect that I should be gathered some knowledge through citing examples, situations or scenarios from this chapter. As I will read the chapter, I will try to figure out the difference between egoism and scepticism.

Quote:

                “If I want only my own good, and care nothing for others, then I am selfish; but if I also want other people to be well-off and happy, and if I act on that desire, then my action is not selfish.”

Review:

                Basically, this chapter includes some contribution of James Rachels in the field of philosophy especially in ethics. In this reading, he mentioned about egoism and specifically about psychological egoism. In his statements, he had two arguments about this psychological egoism. One is that, based on the readings, “Psychological egoism seems to fly in the face of the facts. We are tempted to say: “Of course people act unselfishly all the time”. Also, the readings, cited example in order to know better about the concepts of egoism. This is nearly mean to unselfish behavior of some of the people. In this psychological egoism, there are 2 arguments built. The first argument goes like this, “the agent is merely doing what he most wants to do”. This means that, we do a certain thing because we want it or we tend to do that thing. Aside from Smith’s situation, I think of another scenario. For example, a simple person volunteers to help the people who are victim of calamities in his country. We can say that, he really want to help the victims because he volunteered. This will fall a statement on the reading, “the argument rests on the premise that people never voluntarily do anything except what they want to do.” The second argument is “unselfish actions always produce a sense of self-satisfaction in the agent”, which is nearly similar to previous argument.   

                As I read through the text, I gathered that we should feel happy or satisfied on what we’ve done in our life because we made our own decision and we should be responsible or aware of the decision we should made.

What I’ve learned:

·         We should have peace of mind in decision making

·         Think first before we decide

·         Egoism has significance on what we are doing

Integrative Questions:

1 W What is egoism?

2.        What are the effects of egoism in our daily life?

 Why we should have “peace of mind” when we are do decision making?