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Dull sublunary lovers love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love, so much refin'd, That our [...]

An extensive literature on reputation signaling in prosocial settings has focused on an intrinsic desire for positive reputation. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence that some individuals are averse to both positive and negative reputation and will therefore respond to visibility by signaling that they are an 'average altruism type' relative to their audience. We formalize our hypotheses about 'wallflower' behavior in a theoretical model. Our experimental results show that instead of uniformly increasing contributions, visibility draws contributions toward the middle of others' contributions. As a result, visibility is associated with higher levels of giving only in scenarios where others are giving a large amount. We also observe heterogeneity in reputation concerns: wallflower behavior is particularly strong for women and can be observed in several different settings. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1837. Keywords: economics; behavior and behavioral decision making; organizational studies; motivation--incentives; microeconomic behavior History: Received September 2, 2012; accepted August 24, 2013, by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance March 10, 2014., 1. Introduction How does visibility impact prosocial behavior? If the desire to appear altruistic (or avoid appearing selfish) is an important motivator for prosocial behavior (Becker 1974, Benabou and Tirole [...]

The worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. (1) Moral rationalists hold that the demands of morality are to [...]

There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). (1) Does [...]

Virtue ethics is often alleged to be egoistic, based upon its linking of virtue and happiness. Virtue ethicists often respond that their approach to the moral life is only 'formally egoistic' and therefore not objectionable. This paper develops a clear, non-arbitrary definition of egoism (often lacking in these exchanges) as systematic pursuit of one's own welfare, and then catalogues four broad egoistic strategies for achieving it. I identify 'formal foundational egoism' as the one most plausibly attributed to virtue ethics (its subtlety allows it to account for many features of the moral life, seemingly justifying Aristotelians in their admission that their theory is egoistic in this way). I show instead that any moral theory whose first principle is that each should pursue her own welfare is indeed objectionable. I conclude by showing how virtue ethics can avoid all forms of egoism by counseling the pursuit of perfection rather than welfare alone.

In 1978, Liberty Fund published nineteenth-century intellectual giant Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics in two volumes, with an introduction by Tibor R. Machan. Spencer's magnificent tome is full of wisdom [...]

Recent research has raised questions regarding the consistency of unrealistic optimism and related self-enhancing tendencies, both within cultures and across cultures. The current study tested whether the method used to assess unrealistic optimism influenced cross-cultural patterns in the United States and Japan. The results showed that the direct method (a single comparison judgment between self and peers) produced similar patterns across cultures because of cognitive biases (e.g., egocentrism); specifically, participants were unrealistically optimistic about experiencing infrequent/negative events but pessimistic about experiencing frequent/ negative events. However, the indirect method (separate self-and peer judgments) produced different patterns across cultures because culturally specific motivational biases emerged using this method; specifically, the U.S. sample was more unrealistically optimistic than the Japanese sample. The authors discuss how these results might influence the interpretation of previous findings on culture and self-enhancement. Keywords: unrealistic optimism; egocentrism; culture; self-enhancement; direct versus indirect method

People are often egocentric when judging their likelihood of success in competitions, leading to overoptimism about winning when circumstances are generally easy and to overpessimism when the circumstances are difficult. Yet, egocentrism might be grounded in a rational tendency to favor highly reliable information (about the self) more so than less reliable information (about others). A general theory of probability called extended support theory was used to conceptualize and assess the role of egocentrism and its consequences for the accuracy of people's optimism in 3 competitions (Studies 1-3, respectively). Also, instructions were manipulated to test whether people who were urged to avoid egocentrism would show improved or worsened accuracy in their likelihood judgments. Egocentrism was found to have a potentially helpful effect on one form of accuracy, but people generally showed too much egocentrism. Debias instructions improved one form of accuracy but had no impact on another. The advantages of using the EST framework for studying optimism and other types of judgments (e.g., comparative ability judgments) are discussed. Keywords: egocentrism, optimism, likelihood judgment, comparative judgment, shared-circumstance effect

In this paper I argue that the prohibition on desire in the orthodox Indian systems is not simply a prohibition on selfish desires. The word 'selfish' is ambiguous. It can mean either 'self-interested' or 'excessively self-interested.' Since only excessively self-interested actions are prohibited, the prohibition on desire cannot be a prohibition on all self-interested desires. But the prohibition on desire cannot be a prohibition on excessively self-interested desires either, because this class of desires is too insignificant to explain the general preoccupation with the elimination of desire in the tradition. Finally, I argue that selfish desires are indeed prohibited, but only if by 'selfish' one means 'based on false beliefs about the self.' Even then, however, selfish desires do not exhaust the class of prohibited desires because some prohibited desires are based on false beliefs about things other than the self.

A study argues that if flourishing is understood in terms of the agent's welfare, then the further case that virtue ethics is actually egoistic, or at least self-centered, is made. The outlines of a clearly non-self-centred version of eudaimonistic virtue ethics are presented.

Members of partisan social groups often exaggerate how much their own opinions differ from those of their rivals. In the present two studies, partisans estimated their own and their rivals' attitudes toward different issues related to the social conflict and also made a variety of evaluative judgments about their own and the rival group. The authors found that (a) partisans perceive more disagreement with their rivals about values that are central to their own sides' ideological position than those that are central to their rivals' position and (b) perceptions of disagreement about the partisans' own central values are what predicts partisans' global evaluations of members of the outgroup (e.g., disliking, trait stereotypes, perceived similarity). Furthermore, partisans believed their adversaries were motivated by an opposition to the partisans' own core values rather than by promotion of the adversaries' core values. Discussion concentrates on the theoretical and applied implications of these findings. Keywords: egocentrism; conflict; stereotyping; intergroup perception; negotiation; prejudice

The accounts of psychical unity by Sigmund Freud and Bernard Lonergan are compared and their understanding of psychical structure is analyzed. It is argued that Freud's theory is based on an imaginative synthesis of the laws of natural science while Lonergan's theory is based according to the functioning of intellectual bias, thus, providing a comprehensive understanding of the unity of the human self.

This essay presents central themes from my forthcoming book, The Awakening of the Global Mind. This book seeks to open a new frontier of Global Consciousness that has been long emerging in human evolution through the ages. When we step back from our more localized perspectives and expand into a more integral, holistic, and global space through the awakening of the global mind we are able to discern striking mega-trends in cultural evolution across diverse cultural and religious worldviews and perspectives through time. One striking finding through this global lens is that the collective wisdom of humanity is quite clear that we make our living realities through the conduct of our consciousness: our technology of minding. And when we make ourselves and worlds through egocentric patterns of thinking we get polarized and fragmented worlds that are not sustainable. This essay joins a growing chorus of visionary thinkers and futurists which recognizes that in the 21st Century we face grave planetary crises and that our ego-based cultures are at a tipping point and not sustainable. The primary crisis on the planet now is a crisis of consciousness, and our global wisdom suggests that humanity is in a painful transformation toward a more healthful integral technology of mind that ushers in a new sustainable global civilization wherein the whole human family may flourish together on our sacred planet. KEYWORDS: Dialogic, egocentric, first, philosophy, global mind (lens, perspective), hermeneutical, holistic, integral, logos, minding, ontology, technology of mind.

Russian culture is shaped in an era of total disintegration and rejection of cosmocentric culture under the strong influence of sociocentric culture and radical negation of everything that is connected with egocentrism. The natural character of cosmocentric insertions becomes obvious if people take into account the fact that the basis of Russian country culture was formed primarily by the cosmocentric culture.

The research explores the tendency for people to attribute negative motives to others who hold an attitude position that is discrepant from their own. In Studies 1 and 2, American and Canadian respondents indicated their perceptions of U.S. President Bush's motives for initiating war in Iraq. Consistent with the proposed bias, respondents who disagreed with the war attributed more selfish motivations than did those who supported the war. Study 3 revealed a similar bias when respondents rated the motives of the general citizenry concerning their attitudes about the war, and Study 4 provided evidence of the bias on different attitudinal issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). Study 4 also indicated that biased attributions of motive were primarily confined to respondents who were highly involved in the attitude issue. Discussion centers on naive realism, social identity concerns, and attitude justification as relevant underlying theoretical factors. Keywords: interpersonal perception; attribution; ingroup; outgroup; egocentrism; intention; motive

ABSTRACT. The authors hypothesized that the modulation of coordinative stability and accuracy caused by the coalition of egocentric (neuromuscular) and allocentric (directional) constraints varies depending on the plane of motion [...]

Byline: Norvin Richards (1) Keywords: duty to die; John Hardwig; realtionships of mutual devotion; selfishness; self-sacrifice Abstract: What would make it the right time for you to die, or the wrong one? In particular, could it be the right time for you to die even if your loved ones want to make the sacrifices needed to prolong your life, because that would cost them too dearly? The worry is that it would be selfish to permit these sacrifies, and wrong for that reason. I think it matters that the sacrifies would occur within a relationship of mutual devotion, and I try to say how it matters. In particular, I argue against some fairly simple views of what constitutes impermissible selfishness in this context, and in favor of approaching such decisions in a different way. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0218, USA Article History: Registration Date: 10/03/2005 Received Date: 25/01/2005 Accepted Date: 25/01/2005

Byline: Stuart Rachels (1), Torin Alter (1) Keywords: Derek Parfit; egoism; Harold Langsam; James Rachels; Jennifer Whiting; my division; personal identity; rationality; self-concern; the extreme claim; what matters in survival Abstract: Do I have a special reason to care about my future, as opposed to yours? We reject the common belief that I do. Putting our thesis paradoxically, we say that nothing matters in survival: nothing in our continued existence justifies any special self-concern. Such an 'extreme' view is standardly tied to ideas about the metaphysics of persons, but not by us. After rejecting various arguments against our thesis, we conclude that simplicity decides in its favor. Throughout the essay we honor Jim Rachels, whose final days exemplified his own unselfish morality as well as the 'neutralist' ideal we espouse. As an appendix, we include the last original work to be published by James Rachels, in which he criticizes Sidgwick's most famous defense of egoism. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama, Tusculoosa, AL, 35487-0218, USA Article History: Registration Date: 10/03/2005 Received Date: 25/01/2005 Accepted Date: 25/01/2005

Egoism in friendship has a person loving his friend as a source of pleasure if he is believed to have a particular character of the person's choice. An egoist friendship searches and enjoys friendship and loves the other person only because he is valuable to him and because of who the person is and as has self-interested reasons, his love would be rational.

Drawing on Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Mandeville, and Rousseau, Faulhaber's 1977 article argues that self-absorbed self-interest cannot serve as the foundation of society because individual perversities do not sum to the [...]

Durkheim's classic study Suicide still has many surprises and mysteries over 100 years after it was written: why was the order of analysis reversed in this study? Why did Durkheim have recourse to theory? Why did the study require dramatizations of its 'individual forms'? This paper tries to answer these questions with reference to Durkheim's failure to find a link between the way individual suicides are committed and social causation. This simple and unexpected finding suggested to Durkheim that analysis of suicide rates was more complex than he had anticipated. Because he could not establish a continuous causal chain via the means employed to commit suicide, he looked elsewhere and claimed to have established it in the emotional character of the act itself. This led him to a highly speculative construction of a set of ideal typical scenographies of suicide to save his conception of expressive causation, rather than restructure his theory of suicide to meet the complexity he had found, and particularly his conclusion that 'the form of death chosen is ... something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide'. Keywords: suicide; causation; sociology; egoism; altruism; anomie.

This article begins with the observation that people often cooperate in social dilemmas. Specifically, they may do so either for altruistic reasons or for reasons indirectly linked to self-interest. Because these competing motivations exist in different contexts, we explore the consequences of the incorporation of altruism in the economic framework in the context of a series of prisoner's dilemma experiments. Our experiments involve student subjects in groups of three. Each student plays two rounds of a monetary prisoner's dilemma game with the other two subjects in that group. We find evidence for recognizably different levels of the altruistic behavior of cooperation due to personal attributes and specific experimental conditions. Cooperation rates are higher for female students and more senior students. Of more interest is the evidence that economics majors tend to behave more cooperatively than noneconomics majors.

In contrast with R. Karniol's (2003) protocentric model, this article proposes an egocentric comparison model of social prediction. To predict the experiences and reactions of a target other, judges are assumed to relate self-knowledge to the target via a process of comparing the target with the self. Two alternative comparison processes are distinguished. Similarity testing yields target judgments that are consistent with the self, whereas dissimilarity testing leads to target judgments that are inconsistent with the self. From this perspective, social prediction is egocentric in that it makes use of self-knowledge as its primary representational basis. At the same time, egocentric prediction does not require the self to be seen and judged as similar to the target other. Conceptualizing social predictions as social comparison suggests that predicting the experiences and reactions of others is a highly flexible process.

This article examines the ideology of neoclassical economic theory, focusing on the ethical aspects of applying this economic world-view to social policy. The author criticizes the notion that human action is motivated by nothing more than selfishness, and finds the ideology of free competition both reductionist and relativistic.

The protagonist in Joseph Conrad's novel, 'Lord Jim,' was morally guilty for the massacre of the tribe he was duty bound to protect. His guilt can be philosophically proven by the fact that he yielded to his egotistical belief that a pirate would deem him an honorable man and behave honorably as well. Yet, the fact that Jim was willing to risk his life to save others indicate that he was not egotistical. His moral failing may be attributed more accurately to narcissism, a psychological state that afflicts people whose sense of self is dependent on other people's view.

Contrast effects occur when people judge the behavior and attitudes of others relative to their own. We tested a motivational account suggesting that these effects arise because people tailor their judgments of others to affirm their own self-worth. Consistent with that interpretation, participants displayed more egocentric contrast in their judgments of another person's intelligence (i.e., their evaluation of his score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test was more negatively related to their own score) after their self-esteem was threatened than after it was bolstered (Studies 1 and 2). High-self-esteem individuals displayed more judgmental contrast overall than did their low-esteem counterparts (Study 2). Strongly pro-choice participants whose esteem was threatened also displayed more contrast in their judgments of another person's attitude on abortion, relative to esteem-bolstered participants (Study 3). Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for theory on social comparison, self-affirmation, and social judgment.

John Hewitt has argued that because American culture sees individualism and collectivism as two valued but opposed alternatives, it encourages Americans to construct their identities pragmatically. This study examines the specific forms that pragmatic strategy takes in a collectivist context: membership on a basketball team. Using a semiotic conception of self, the author analyzes team members' use of personal pronouns. Taking '1' to indicate an independent, autonomous self and 'we' to indicate an interdependent, contextually defined self, these basketball players' discourse reveals four patterns of managing the two selves: (1) one pronoun replaces the other, (2) 'we' transforms '1' into a generic individual, (3) both selves coexist, and (4) one self speaks through the other. The author concludes that the concept of the pragmatic strategy of self-construction is too broad of a label to be useful and argues for far greater attention to more specific patterns of self-construction.

The synergistic ideal challenges both thought and action. The concept of synergy offers new meanings to relationships in ways that transcend selfishness and unselfishness. The process creates a new sense of thinking and being, and gives a new connotation to human relationships that includes caring for others in new ways. With the emergence of self-understanding and acceptance, humans learn to gel their individuality and privacy with a bigger working partnership. Principles and processes of synergy of Ruth Benedict, Abraham Maslow and others offering solutions to everyday problems are given.

A conceptual analysis is offered that differentiates our motives for acting for the public good: egoism, collectivism, altruism, and principlism. Differentiation is based on identification of a unique ultimate goal for each motive. For egoism, the ultimate goal is self-benefit; for collectivism, it is to increase group welfare; for altruism, to increase one or more other individuals' welfare; for principlism, to uphold one or more moral principles. Advocates claim that these last three motives cannot be reduced to egoism. Evidence for this claim is limited, however, especially for collectivism and principlism. It is hoped that the conceptual distinctions proposed will permit broader, more precise empirical study of nonegoistic motives for acting for the public good.

In this study, we examined the construct of the imaginary audience (Elkind & Bowen, 1979), presumably a precipitant of adolescent egocentrism, as it relates to public individuation and self-consciousness. We hypothesized that the imaginary audience inhibits public individuation and represents a critical form of public self-consciousness. We also argued that the imaginary audience is a normal aspect of early adolescent development that diminishes in the context of secure parental relationships by late adolescence but remains salient if these relationships are insecure. These hypotheses were examined in a cross-sectional study of 850 adolescents in the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 12th grades. Support was generally found for the hypothesized relations. The validity and limitations of the imaginary audience and public individuation constructs are discussed, along with more general theoretical issues concerning adolescent self-consciousness.

The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian Response, YONG HUANG As virtue ethics has developed into maturity, it has also met with a number of objections. This essay [...]

Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) found phenomenology very helpful for the analysis of concrete human experience and for overcoming the ethical formalism of Kant. Phenomenology, he believed, could also [...]

This essay explores the relevance of the work of Walter Schubart (1897-[+ or -]1941), a virtually unknown cultural philosopher from Lithuania, for today. The writer focuses on the importance of [...]