ABSTRACT
Yet our culture’s faith in egoism’s ubiquity may not be immediately obvious, particularly to those who engage in refined philosophical disputations on the matter. As there must be several plausible answers to any properly philosophical question, it may seem that this should be all the more the case with regard to the long-debated subject of human nature. Yet the divisiveness bred by such discussions can be misleading. A random assortment of people asked to “locate” human nature somewhere along a continuum between egoism and altruism will undoubtedly return a variety of answers. But the majority of our respondents, be they lay or educated, conservative or leftist, will position themselves closer to the egoism pole, and none will take their stand at the extreme end of unqualified altruism – which would leave them looking naïve in the extreme. The cynics will maintain that human action is by its very nature egoistic, while others will eschew such extremism and cite what they
take to be incontrovertible examples of altruism or heroism. Predictably, the cynics will retort that such ostensibly altruistic deeds are motivated by vanity or some other ignoble sentiment. The well-worked tracks on which this debate must proceed are common knowledge.
