著者

内藤 淳

出版者

法政大学文学部

雑誌

法政大学文学部紀要 = Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University (ISSN:04412486)

巻号頁・発行日

no.75, pp.13-59, 2017

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According to Jeremy Bentham, human nature is governed by pleasure and pain, and increasing pleasure and avoiding pain is the primary interest of human beings. Men, he opines, act innately to achieve this outcome. This idea was termed psychological egoism and has been criticized by many scholars for a long time. However, Bentham did acknowledge that men sometimes acted in the interests of others. To be precise, he was of the opinion that men acted both selfishly and altruistically, but were more likely to act selfishly. This is not perfect egoism; it is what is called "relative psychological egoism." We can modify Bentham's ideas in terms of evolutionary psychology to explain our innate reactions to pleasure and pain and their influence on our behavior. By examining the human mind and its mechanisms from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, we learn about how it operates to produce adaptive behavior, which helps in coping with varied and diverse environmental stimuli. In other words, our minds fundamentally operate in our best self-interests because our adapted behavior adheres to this. We thus introduce "absolute psychological egoism" based on this understanding of the human mind and the behavior that it results in. Absolute psychological egoism is consistent with the premises of the "moral foundations theory" proposed by Jonathan Haidt, a social and cultural psychologist; it also counters different criticisms leveled against general psychological egoism and Bentham's views on human nature by the likes of Joseph Butler, James Rachels, Bhikhu Parekh, Robert Nozick, and John Stuart Mill. By proposing absolute psychological egoism as a modified version of Bentham's standpoint on relative psychological egoism, we attempt to redefine and advance the theory of human nature.