Wesley Autrey is The Guy. He’s the dude that recently jumped down on the subway tracks to save that student who fell on them. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16469039/

Autrey claims that he’s not a hero, he refused medical attention after the event, and he went back to work immediately afterwards. He said that anyone should what he did.
Now, psychological egoism is the view that all actions are performed exclusively for oneself.  Now, I’m not gonna give you a full treatise on this subject–but here’s a quick attack on the view. The defender of psychological egoism is going to tell you that Autrey was only concerned (consciously or not) to benefit only himself. The defender will say: “He knew he’d be famous, or he knew he’d get offered rewards, or he did it to feel good about himself…”

Blah blah blah. So far the evidence we have is against egoism. Autrey seems to be pretty altruistic to me, and he takes himself to be altruistic.

But the egoist is going to claim that Autrey is mistaken about his own motives and that the egoist knows better what Autrey’s motives were: exclusive self-benefit.

But what makes the egoist so sure that he knows what the real motives were? If Autrey can be mistaken about his mental states, so can the egoist. How the can the egoist know that he’s actually acting only for self-benefit?

But, if it is true the egoist always acts only for his self-benefit–that’s fine–but it won’t follow from that alone that Autrey did. How could one so easily generalize from one’s own case?

Now the egoist has more arguments, but I’ll stop here.

-MC Spanky McGee

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