Egoism,Altruism,and the Ethical Foundations of Personhood

Individualism and Egoism

One fundamental way in which Modern thought can be distinguished from Ancient and Medieval thought, on the one hand, and Postmodern thought, on the other, is the metaphysical priority that Modernism has traditionally accorded the individual self, or rational Cartesian ego (Meer, 2011). From the very beginning of the modern period down to the present, the individual self has been taken to be either (a) the site of sensory receptivity and reflection (i.e., empiricism) or (b) the source of meaning-giving and conceptual organization of what would otherwise be meaningless sensory experience (i.e., rationalism). Despite the significant differences inherent in these two epistemological positions, there is nonetheless a shared commitment to the primacy of the individual as individual; a commitment that is very much alive and well in contemporary psychology (Christopher & Hickenbottom, 2008; Cushman, 1995; Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999).

If, however, the individual self is given metaphysical priority, then one’s relation to others—that is, one’s sociality—must be seen as something that arises out of individuality. The modern or Cartesian self, in essence, “looks out on” other persons from the primordial givenness of private, individual consciousness and the rational categories of thought and understanding such consciousness provides. Yet if one’s relation to others is seen to arise out of this very individuality, then social life and meaning is constructed by individuals out of what is available to them—that is, their own private subject experiences. This gives rise to an important question: If individuals are able to compose social relations only out of their own resources, then what is motivating the expenditure of those resources toward the construction of social relationships in the first place? Since any answer to this question must be grounded in the individual (since the individual is taken to be primary in this model), we are inexorably led to individualistic answers. Thus, it is usually, and quite matter-of-factly, assumed in most psychological theories that the only possible grounding motivation for human social relations is some sort of egoistic instrumentality (Fowers, 2010; Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio, & Piliavin, 1995; see also Richardson et al., 1999). And so, the individual, taken to be primarily—if not entirely—responsible for the conditions that make social life possible, is motivated always and in all ways toward relationship with others solely out of egoistic considerations.

Even in so-called social psychology the focus of almost all research and theory is on the individual, in particular how the individual self is affected by the real, implied, or imagined presence of others (Brehm, Kassin, & Fein, 2004). As Baron and Byrne (2000) state, “The focus, in social psychology, is squarely on individuals” and that “the field’s major interest lies in understanding the factors that shape the actions and thoughts of individual humans in social settings” (p. 9; see also Milgram, 1992). Obviously, such accounts consider the individual to be the central and appropriate unit of analysis for social psychological theorizing and model building. Indeed, it is this focus that sets social psychology apart, in the minds of many social psychologists, from other social science disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and history (see, e.g., Baron & Byrne, 2000). Ironically, however, in this presumably social psychological perspective, other people (and the possibilities for social relationship that they represent) are of interest only insofar as they are relevant to and can have some effect on the emotional, cognitive, or behavioral activities of the individual. Indeed, this odd state of affairs has provoked more than a few scholars to wonder: “What’s so social about social psychology anyway” (see, e.g., Carlson, 1984; Gantt & Williams, 2002; Greenwood, 2004; Parker, 1989; Reber & Osbeck, 2005)?

In addition to assuming individualism, many social psychological theories also endorse the assumption that human beings as individual entities are selfish by nature and, thus, only relate to others—particularly in helping ways—out of a fundamental egoistic concern to maximize self-benefit and minimize self-cost (see Batson, 1991, for a review). In other words, when we help others in any way, we do so out of a basic desire to either increase or maintain feelings that are pleasurable (Wegner & Petty, 1994) or to avoid unpleasant consequences or feelings (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1981). The assumption being that—whether consciously or unconsciously—we always act out of a concern for our own well-being rather than out of any genuine or selfless concern for the welfare of others. For, as Hoffman (2000) states, psychologists study prosocial behavior “knowing full well that however much a person cares about others, when the chips are down, the individual thinks of himself first” (p. 1). Thus, it is claimed, we act to aid others only insofar—and only to the extent that—we anticipate that doing so will ultimately be of some benefit to ourselves, either by gaining some end that will help maximize our individual pleasure or minimize our individual discomfort.

This should not be taken to mean that Hoffman (or any other like-minded psychologist) is advocating a self-absorbed, crudely manipulative or discourteous approach to human relationships or claiming in any way that all people always do act in such ways. Psychological egoism, or fundamental self-interest, is not to be confused with crude selfishness—at least, in the colloquial sense of the term selfish wherein one is manifestly concerned with self-aggrandizement and personal advancement no matter the cost to others. Indeed, the psychological egoist would likely argue that such behavioral strategies are ultimately self-defeating and, therefore, not reflective of our best self-interest. After all, most people resent others’ arrogance, disregard, or blatant attempts at manipulation and tend to respond in kind. An example of this sort of thinking can be found in Albert Ellis (1990), a proponent of both psychological egoism and ethical egoism, who argued for

the philosophy that one should primarily strive for one’s own satisfactions while, at the same time, keeping in mind that one will achieve one’s own best good, in most instances, by giving up immediate gratifications for future gains and by being courteous to and considerate of others, so that they will not sabotage one’s own ends. (p. 134)

Nonetheless, whether or not one happens to treat others with kindness, respect, and courtesy, from the perspective of psychological egoism it is impossible to conceive of others and our relationships with them as anything other than the instrumental means by which we accomplish our own deepest desires for individual fulfillment, self-realization, or advancement.

It is also important to keep in mind that despite the epistemological confidence with which some psychologists claim that all human behavior is undergird by psychological egoism, such claims are not in fact based on any indisputable empirical observation or necessary rational inference. After all, psychological egoism as a basic motivational reality is not the sort of thing that falls on the retinae of one’s eyes—so to speak—or the sort of thing which is indubitably obvious to reason itself. Rather, such knowledge claims merely reflect a set of taken-for-granted philosophical presumptions that the only reasonable explanation for any given human behavior—be it altruistic or otherwise—is one that invokes fundamental self-interest as the originative force behind particular human behaviors. Thus, rather than being forced (by dint of irrefutable logic or brute empirical fact) to accept that “when the chips are down, the individual thinks of himself first,” psychologists such as Hoffman seem to just prereflectively assume this must be the case and then proceed to interpret research findings and explain human behavior accordingly.

An additional feature of the egoistic approach to psychological theorizing, in particular, and social scientific inquiry, in general, can be seen in James B. Rule’s (1997) Theory and Progress in Social Science. In this very influential text, Rule identifies three essential features of any genuinely scientific psychological theory seeking to adequately explain human social behavior and relationships. First is the notion that “human action is essentially instrumental, so that most social behavior can be explained as efforts to attain one or another, more or less distant, end” (Rule, 1997, p. 80, italics in the original). Second, explanations of social behavior must admit that individual actors “formulate their conduct through rational calculation of which among alternative courses of action are most likely to maximize their overall rewards” (Rule, 1997, p. 80, italics in the original). And, finally, scientifically viable explanations must rest on the notion that “large-scale social processes and arrangements—including such diverse things as rates, institutions, and practices—are ultimately to be explained as results of such calculations” (Rule, 1997, p. 80). This last point, according to Rule (1997), is crucial for an adequate theory of social behavior, in that the doctrine provides the indispensable analytical tools for relating aggregate events and processes to the microworlds of face-to-face interaction and individual decision making.

The consistent conceptual thread running through this sort of thinking is that rationality itself is ultimately instrumental in nature and that to be rational is to be concerned, at a fundamental level, with the maximization of self-benefit and the minimization of self-risk. In this scheme, then, the social world is the principle arena wherein individual human beings maneuver for advantage and manipulate one another toward their own individual ends. One troubling implication of such thinking is that because rationality is grounded in egoism, the ability to act rationally out of other than egoistic motivation is rendered impossible by definition from the very outset. Indeed, as Allingham (2002) asserts, “Choice is rational if and only if it is utility maximizing” (p. 27). Thus, acts of genuine altruism, rather than reflecting a possibility for that which is most noble and praiseworthy in human beings, comes to be seen as either a symptom of some underlying psychopathology or an unfortunate failure of rationality. This implication, in turn, has significant and damaging consequences for ethics and ethical theories. After all, if every rational act (speech acts and mental acts included) is rational only insofar as it is motivated by egoistic considerations, then the only truly rational and defensible normative theory in ethics would be some type of ethical egoism. Consequently, both deontological and virtue ethical systems of thought, wherein normative recommendations toward moral action are made, must then either be viewed as theories that encourage irrational action (insofar as they prescribe altruistic conduct) or be transmogrified into a form of ethical egoism—for example, as a theory about the desire to act out of duty, or the desire to maximize one’s virtuous traits. If such an explanatory interjection is made into these theories, they would, we submit, be rendered quite unrecognizable and ultimately lose all of the moral force and respect they currently command.

Aside from the disturbing picture this perspective offers concerning the motivational grounding of social life, the ontological scene—between individual and society—is also troubled. Exactly how the exchanges of fundamentally autonomous, individual egos manage to produce genuine social existence, especially given that social existence and individual autonomy constitute discrete ontological domains, has proven to be a very thorny philosophical problem for quite some time now (see, e.g., Fowers, 2010; Taylor, 1989). For, if the individual is the most basic metaphysical unit of analysis, and the principle source of all volitional acts, then, at least insofar as social life is constituted by the correspondence of intelligible conduct between various agents, society must be ultimately derivative of the individual. In this conceptual scheme, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues pointed out over a quarter of a century ago, “The individual is prior to society, which comes into existence only through the voluntary contract of individuals trying to maximize their own self-interest” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 143). How a truly meaningful social world can be derived from the isolated confines of the individual self, seeking continually after its own gratification, poses a particularly difficult conceptual problem for any psychology wishing to construct a viable science of social life while maintaining a hold on the shaky intellectual scaffolding of Western individualism. Ultimately, human social life and relationship—of which altruism is one possibility—can only be understood as essentially epiphenomenal in nature, or, perhaps at best, conceptually parasitic on the needs of the private, individual self.

Individualism and Determinism

In addition to its philosophical commitment to egoism, mainstream psychology has also long relied on necessary determinism in its explanations of human behavior, be it altruistic or otherwise (Martin, Sugarman, & Thompson, 2003). In the deterministic view, all human acts are taken to be the products of various natural forces—usually efficient causal in nature—operating in the world. However, the word “influence” is often preferred to “cause” or “determinant” in the disciplinary literature because psychologists (along with other scientists and even philosophers) have faced not only tremendous challenges fully disentangling the network of causal forces—both internal and external—presumed to ultimately give rise to specific human behaviors but also have experienced considerable difficulty conceptually defining what a cause is in the first place (Bunge, 2009). As Salmon (1998) notes, “Causality presents pressing philosophical issues because we do not have an adequate and generally accepted understanding of the cluster of concepts in involves” (p. 5).

Nonetheless, despite difficulties in defending the coherence of such forms of explanation, a general commitment to efficient causal, or necessarily deterministic, explanation runs through most mainstream psychological explanations of human behavior. Indeed, Heiman (2001) argues that as psychological scientists we must “assume that behavior is ‘determined’” and that “behavior is solely influenced by natural causes and does not depend on an individual’s choice or ‘free will’” (p. 7), or else our explanations of human behavior will utterly fail as scientific explanations. Ultimately, according to Heiman (2001), “The laws of behavior force you to have certain attributes and to behave in a certain way in a given situation. Anyone else in that situation will be similarly influenced, because that is how the laws of behavior operate” (p. 2).

Typically, this commitment to lawful determinism is couched in the language of “underlying regularities.” For example, Shaver (1987) asserts that psychological research is “designed to measure the underlying regularities in behavior that occur across subjects despite the unique personal history that each subject brings to the research” (p. 28). “As scientists,” Weiten (2011) states in his best-selling introduction to psychology, “psychologists assume that behavior is governed by discernible laws or principles, just as the movement of the earth around the sun is governed by the laws of gravity” and that “the scientific enterprise is based on the belief that there are consistencies or laws that can be uncovered” (p. 40). Likewise, Stanovich (2004) teaches that “scientific observation is termed systematic because it is structured so that the results of the observation reveal something about the underlying nature of the world” (p. 10, italics added). The purpose of psychological research into human behavior, then, is to uncover the orderly and stable structure of causal governance that lies behind the overwhelming complexity, and often seemingly chaotic diversity, of actual human experiences and behaviors.

Ultimately, any explanatory endeavor that takes this causal approach to explanation seriously (as traditional mainstream psychology most certainly does) reduces human beings to (a) behavioral results, (b) the bearers of behavioral influences, or (c) some complex combination of the two. However, to do this is to make people like things, placing them in categories as “things falling prey to” particular influences or forces (see, e.g., Williams, 1990). Indeed, the person comes to be understood, in the words of Stanley Milgram (1992), not as a moral agent capable of making and effecting genuine choices or meaningful acts but as “the reactive individual, the recipient of forces and pressures emanating from outside” (p. xix).

One immediate danger of this sort of causal explanation is, however, that persons come to be thought of as mere instances of some more fundamental process or as particular representatives of some more basic category of things. Once the network of casual influences is laid out and fully understood, there is nothing left over to be explained. Or, if there is something left over, it is conceived of as little more than “error variance” rather than as an essential constituting feature of human existence.

Unfortunately, once a person’s behavior is stripped of its intentional, relational, and moral qualities, and is explained as merely the necessitated outcome of processes or states in which the person plays no essential originative role, such behavior can no longer be held to be genuinely meaningful. This is not to say that human beings cease to experience their behavior as meaningful, rather only that once behavior is understood as the product of causal forces extrinsic to the agent herself, all actions happen to persons, and all meanings lie outside their purview. Thus, the final explanation of the meaning of a human act is simply the causally descriptive account of the causal forces of which the act is the result, and any actor’s own account of the meaning of the act is rendered suspect, the product of individual subjectivity or post hoc rationalization, and, thus, in an important sense, not really real. As a number of scholars have shown, meaning requires genuine possibility (see, e.g., Guignon, 2002; James, 1897/1956; Slife & Williams, 1995; Williams, 2005). That is to say, for an event to be considered meaningful it must be genuinely possible for that event to have been otherwise than it in fact was. Events that are necessarily determined to be as they are and which cannot, therefore, be in any way otherwise than they are have no genuine meaning. Such events simply are.

For example, consider the motion of certain plants, the leaves of which slowly and mechanically bend and change position relative to the location of the sun as it moves across the sky. As a necessarily determined event this phenomenon is simply what it is and, as such, has no inherent meaningfulness. Granted, someone very interested in plants and their “behavior” might find the movement meaningful to him or her, for some scientific, aesthetic, or practical reason. Or, someone might find in the movement evidence for “sun worship.” However, that some movement can be meaningful to a particular subjectivity external to the organism actually doing the moving does not render the movement itself meaningful. Only if there is the genuine possibility that a given event could be otherwise than it is does it make sense to consider that event as having genuine (as opposed to merely subjectively imputed) meaning. Thus, in the case of human behavior, only if persons are in some fundamental sense capable of behaving otherwise than they do, only if they are genuinely capable of both intending and acting otherwise, is it possible for there to be any genuine meaning ascribed to actions. Insofar as contemporary psychological theories of all stripes invoke determinism to account for behavior, they deny the possibility that human behavior or intention can be otherwise than it is, thus making it impossible to understand human behavior in any way that does not rob it of any inherent meaningfulness.

Finally, although many schools and subdisciplines of psychology purport to address the question of social relationships and social life, it seems clear that in most cases contemporary psychological theories of social existence see others as important chiefly as purveyors of possible influence, acting in concert with the network of other natural forces and influences that compose the social world. It is the presence of the other person—whether actual, imagined, or implied—that is taken to be important and influential in the thought, feeling, and behavior of the individual under study. The presence of others in psychological theory and explanation is not necessarily, nor even most important, the presence of other, real human beings with whom one is genuinely related in a meaningful or morally profound way. Rather, the other person is usually thought to be little more than a unique stimulus configuration that possesses varying degrees of certain attributes that exert some manner of causal influence in given situations. Accordingly, necessary determinism reduces the other to being merely a source of causal input influencing (or generating) our conduct. In this way, the actual personhood of the other is dismissed and others, like the self, are rendered as mere things possessing potential influence in the ongoing causal operations of the world.

Implications

Given the foregoing analysis, then, we can see that many in contemporary psychology paint human beings as little more than passive objects, or the sites at which various causal influences converge to generate particular thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Additionally, rather than seeing human beings as inherently social and moral in nature, beings capable of genuinely acting out of concern for the welfare of one another, many contemporary theories account for human motivation solely in terms of psychological egoism. In keeping with their commitment to psychological egoism, and the instrumentalist perspective it entails, many psychological theories reduce human social acts such as altruism to being only “seemingly social,” acts in which human beings are conceptually relegated to being mere means to individual ends, mere sources of possible gratification or frustration. Rather than acknowledging that altruism—like selfishness—may be but one of many genuinely social and morally meaningful possibilities incumbent in human relationships, much current psychological theorizing has instead wedded itself to an explanatory framework capable of seeing social life only as just the necessitated product of certain mechanical and causal forces relentlessly driving fundamentally egoistic individuals in a quest for self-maximization. ³

Aside from the unsettling picture this conceptual framework offers of both the self and the other, there are other significant consequences for the possibility of an intellectual viable scientific psychology that are entailed in such a framework. Indeed, perhaps the most problematic consequence of such a framework is the self-stultifying way in which it eliminates the very epistemic grounding necessary for the possibility of scientific theorizing in the first place. After all, if it is true that those human beings who are the subjects of psychological research are the sorts of beings who must always act out of self-interest, even as all of their acts are determined for them by the various casual forces that happen to be operating on them, then does not this “fact” rebound to the psychologists investigating their behavior in order to frame the laws which govern it? That is, if the psychological researcher is—as a human being like all other human beings—motivated solely out of self-interest (as controlled and dictated by certain causal conditions), then is not her theory that all human behavior is the product of psychological egoism (operating in the context of universal causality) itself merely the happenstance expression of certain self-interested desires operating within a particular causal system?

In short, then, anyone who claims that all human acts are solely the result of self-interested motivations and causal necessity must also admit that their own human act of stating that all human acts are solely the product of self-interested motivation and causal necessity is itself nothing more than product of self-interested motivation and causal necessity and not simply an objective truth about the world discovered by means of dispassionate reason or observation. Put crudely, if one takes the theory that all human behavior is motivated out of self-interest seriously, then the only consistent reason one could give for believing it to be true is that believing it seems to serve what one takes to be one’s own self-interest, regardless of any considerations as to the actual truth or falsity of the theory. However, if one wishes to claim that one’s theories are the product of one’s careful observations and rational deliberation about evidence and counterevidence, then one must either (a) abandon the notion that all human behavior is driven by self-interest and causal necessity or (b) exempt oneself (simply by virtue of being a scientist) from the universality that one’s theory was supposed to establish in the first place. In this light, one is reminded of George Kelly’s (1963) trenchant observation:

It is customary to say that the scientist’s ultimate aim is to predict and control. This is a summary statement that psychologists frequently like to quote in characterizing their own aspirations. Yet, curiously enough, psychologists rarely credit the human subjects in their experiments with having similar aspirations. It is as though the psychologist were saying to himself, “I, being a psychologist, and therefore a scientist, am performing this experiment in order to improve the prediction and control of certain human phenomena; but my subject, being merely a human organism, is obviously propelled by inexorable drives welling up within him, or else he is in gluttonous pursuit of sustenance and shelter.” (p. 5, italics in the original)

Clearly, theories that are able to account for themselves only in terms inescapably self-serving subjective desires should not be accorded the status of genuine scientific theories. After all, such theories are self-stultifying insofar as they imply that it is not the actual truth value of the theory that is important in any assessment of its worth, but only its instrumental utility to the psychologist who has proposed it and those who happen to believe in it. Of course, it could be argued that this consequence is not as damaging to the scientific enterprise in psychology as it may at first glance appear. Perhaps, one might argue, it just always is in the best interest of any psychologist to posit theories that are objectively true and which can bear replication and subsequent confirmation. However, such an argument is only persuasive if we forget that in the framework being proposed (i.e., psychological egoism) the scientific ideals of objectivity and the careful testing of hypotheses in the context of replication are themselves only the products of the underlying self-interested motives of scientists. In other words, if psychological egoism is taken to be true, then the very concepts and procedures that underlie any particular psychological theory—as well as any conception of science and its requisite features—are themselves the contingent products of fundamentally self-interested motives. To break free of the destructive consequences of such thinking requires that we attain a level of human inquiry and conduct that is not fundamentally motivated by self-interest. However, in the explanatory framework of psychological egoism, the attainment of such a level of action is simply not possible because the self can never break free from the grip of self-concern.

Finally, as if such consequences were not sufficiently toxic to the possibility of fruitful psychological inquiry, the idea that all human action is completely determined has exactly the same effect on the epistemic foundations of science. It has already been pointed out that within the modernist framework of scientific psychology rationality is equated with instrumental thinking. The claim that all human action is necessarily determined is toxic to the conduct of scientific inquiry, in general, and psychological understanding of human behavior, in particular. Scientific rationality requires, at minimum, a being capable of attaining epistemic distance—that is, scientific objectivity in the most general sense—from the object of its inquiry. However, such epistemic distance can only be achieved if the rationality of the scientist conducting the inquiry is not dominated by the object of inquiry. In other words, if the reasoning of the scientist is such that whatever questions, theories, explanations, ideas, or insights he formulates in the course of scientific inquiry are themselves taken to be just the products of the particular causal forces, states, or processes operating on the scientist at a given time and in a given place, then those things are themselves neither rationally derived nor rationally defensible. Rather, they are simply particular classes or instances of “behavior” in exactly the same way that the heliotropic movements of the plants mentioned earlier are behaviors.

To preserve a rational grounding for the scientific enterprise in psychology we must conceive of the psychologist as the sort of being who is capable of freely deliberating about and selecting from a variety of possible ways of conceptualizing whatever subject matter is under investigation. What is required is, therefore, a being whose thoughts and actions are not simply the products of causal necessity, that is, a being who can reflectively stand back and freely choose from among a variety of competing hypotheses and explanations. This basic capacity for free and critical deliberation is a central feature of the sort of rationality on which all of scientific epistemology must proceed. ⁴ Unfortunately, within the deterministic explanatory framework of much of contemporary psychology this is the very thing that is missing.

In the end, the ultimate result of this type of thinking in psychology is that human social relationships, altruism, and meaning are taken to be illusory in nature, convenient fictions that serve to hide the truth of an essentially mechanical existence in which we are governed by forces of unyielding selfishness and in which the very epistemic foundation of science itself is eroded. If we wish, however, to preserve the possibility of genuine altruism—as well as the meaning and moral depth of all our other aspects of social life—then our psychological accounts of human action must be grounded in the assumptions of moral agency and possibility rather than instrumental egoism and necessary determinism. To this end, we propose a brief look at of some of the principle contours of the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.

Being-for-the-Other: The Levinasian Alternative

It should be clear from the analysis thus far that a hallmark of modernist psychological accounts of human nature has been the ontological priority that is granted to the individual or Cartesian self. As essentially isolated egos—it is often argued—we encounter one another as a peculiar sort of objects of perception, each of us occupying distinct and independent realms. Because of this, the being of the other—the perspective and conscious life of the other—must be reconciled somehow with the immediacy of our own conscious life and perspective. The classical philosophical problem of “other minds” is one result of this ontological priority granted to the individual self.

Most attempts to solve this problem—that is, “other minds”—usually begin by inferring that the other is essentially like the self, simply another instance of the self—literally, an alter ego. My esteem for the other, my concern for her welfare, is an inference ultimately grounded in self-esteem and self-concern, a result of my projecting my own cares, anxieties, fears, and hopes onto the other. Furthermore, inference from an individual subject to the general population of other subjects requires, at minimum, that the individual (from which the inference is made) is representative of the population. In the use of inferences to establish the conscious life of others, the intended result at the end of the inference—the result that motivates the inference in the first place—is the demonstration that others are essentially like the self. In other words, the intended result must be already assumed in order to grant any efficacy to such inference in the first place. All such inferences to the minds of other people suffer from this central problem (see, e.g., Maslin, 2007).

Levinas, however, reverses the ontological priority, grounding the existence of the self and, thus, in important ways, the very ontological status of the self, in the prior existence of the other. In this way, the problem of “other minds” is rendered as a pseudo-problem. Furthermore, Levinas maintains that our everyday experiences and concepts are ruptured in the experience of the other, the concrete other person, who exceeds our concepts, prejudices, and attempts at categorization. For Levinas, the experience of the other person in which one’s prejudices (whether benign or hostile) and preestablished conceptualizations are challenged, and in which one’s own meanings are brought into question and exceeded by the ethical reality of the presence of the other as other, is more than one more meaning among all other meanings. Such experience is what Levinas describes as the encounter of the face (Levinas, 1985). The experience of overflow or rupture that occurs in the encounter of the face of the other reveals the fundamental alterity (otherness) of the other that is prior to all particular experiences (Levinas, 1969, 1985).

According to Levinas (1985), without the otherness of the other—the other than self—founding the self, there are no reasons for the self to “be,” and no grounds or context within which the self can appear at all—at least, insofar as the self is thought of in terms of the traditional Cartesian ego. Indeed, as Gantt (1996) has pointed out,

One cannot even begin to recognize one’s own consciousness sufficient to comprehend and name it for oneself except in contradistinction to the absolute priority of that which is other than oneself; the infinite surplus of the existence of an-other, in the face of whom I discover my own humanity. (p. 134)

Similarly, as Paul Ricouer (1992) notes in his landmark work, Oneself as Another, “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other” (p. 3). Ultimately, for Levinas, the essence of the humanity that we discover in the face of the other is an infinite ethical responsibility to not only have our own projects and wants called into question by them but also to care for them. Our immediate relationship to the other is one of fundamental ethical obligation, that is, a profound sense of responsibility that not only constitutes us as the particular being we are, but also, and in the same instant, reveals the other as other.

For Levinas, the primordiality of the other revealed in the phenomenon of the face is not as an instrument of our own purposes or an object of gratification. Rather, the other calls us to ethical response in a way that instruments, tools, and objects do not and cannot, that is, from the authority of moral height that demands our attention by calling our projects and intentions into question. In this way, Levinas offers an alternative to instrumental egoism as a fundamental motivation. Our being as social beings is not some “pseudo-quality” derived from or reducible to more basic egoistic self-concern, it is not merely some means to individual ends. Self-concern is, in the Levinasian perspective, a response—one among many possible responses—that is made possible by our inherent sociality, by the perception, occasioned as it is by the presence of the other, that we are in competition with others for scarce resources. Thus, in the experience of the face of the other we do not simply see an isolated ego reflected back at us. Rather, in the phenomenon of the face we receive the possibility for acting as selves, as oneself-for-an-other (Levinas, 1969). Ironically, it is in this process of being thus “called out” of ourselves that the self emerges. The self—that part of us we experience as ourselves—is the product of an innately and profoundly social experience. Sociality, for Levinas, predates individual identity and self-awareness both logically and chronologically.

It is important to note that even though Levinas describes personhood in this radically social manner, he does not entirely dissolve the self—for example, into some system of determinate variables or underlying structural reality of language or culture. As Kunz (1998) points out,

This radical challenge to individualism does not, I must quickly add, support collectivism, as defenders of extreme individualism might fear. The self as the-Other-in-me challenges both the vision of the isolated individual driven by pure self-interest, as well as the notion of the person as a mere piece of a larger social structure, trapped inside determining systems. This ethical philosophy of the-Other-in-me is indeed an individualism, but a particular kind of individualism, one that attends not to the privilege of the ego, not to the rights of the ego, but to the particular and personal responsibility of the “I” for the Other. (p. 33)

To dissolve the self requires a radical diffusion of individual identity that would ultimately destroy the very possibility of the ethical nature of selfhood and identity that Levinas seeks to defend. Rather, the Levinasian perspectives reflects a commitment to what DeRobertis and Iuculano (2005) have termed a personalistic metaphysics that stands “between those who essentialize the self and those who desire to marginalize and displace the self from reflection” and which “views human beings as responsible agents in-the-world-toward-others” (p. 246).

Therefore, Levinas begins with and preserves interiority even in the midst of grounding our being in obligation to the other. This interiority does not, of course, reduce to the subjectivity of the isolated modern ego, thought to be the product of the isolated modern brain. Rather, it is metaphysically innocent. Interiority is that sense, incumbent in each person, that he or she is not merely the byproduct of larger processes, but distinctly individual, and thus ethically—because socially—responsible. In fact, it is because our ethical obligations are so exquisitely particular, they are intensely ours, and cannot be diminished by appeal to abstract principles of fairness and reciprocity, nor by shunting them off to others. It is, Levinas (1985) says, knowing that “I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a non-interchangeable I” (p. 101). Such interiority and distinctiveness—our very individuality—requires other people. It requires sociality. One can only be an individual by virtue of occupying a unique situation—being called into relationships uniquely by others to whom one is uniquely confronted: I am who I am by virtue of my relatedness with others; I am the father of this child, the husband of this wife, the teacher of this student, the neighbor of this stranger, and so on. Each of these relationships calls me, and only me, to ethical response. My identity is my responsibility, and my responsibility is the fundamental feature of a shared, primordial sociality.

This radical alternative suggested by Levinas begins its analysis of human being not in the isolated ego but with the alterity of the other that grounds both identity and experience. It, thus, reflects a fundamentally alterocentric—or heteronomous—conception of the self (see, Levinas, 1969). ⁵ Levinas suggests that our being, our identities as individuals, are emergent in the embodied, face-to-face relation with the other. In other words, our life comes to have meaning and take on character only insofar as we first respond to the other and our fundamental relatedness to him or her. Furthermore, this relationship is immediately, and primordially one of obligation. Life is a being-for-the-other. It is the other to whom I must answer for my being, to whom I must render an accounting of my existence, as it is only because of the other that I have achieved an existence at all. And in that moment, the moment of awakening, of being brought forth in the call of the other in the face-to-face relation, I must respond to the ethical demands placed on me by that call. Human subjectivity, then, is a continuous questioning and answering, and must to be understood as both congenitally moral and inherently meaningful, in that it can never take place outside of sociality with others. According to Levinas (1985), it is “discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility which is this authentic relationship” (p. 88).

For Levinas, we are always faced with a choice regarding how to respond to the needs of the others with who we are in relation. We can either act consistently with the obligation we have toward these others, and thus live in a manner that is congruent with our ethical and moral sensibilities, or we can refuse and betray the gift of humanity with which we have been endowed by these others. In any given situation we, as moral agents, are able to choose to deploy ourselves in such a way as to fulfill the expectations of others and thus submit ourselves to their control. On the other hand, in responding to the ethical obligation, we may choose to deploy ourselves in very different ways—for example, by attending directly to another’s needs, acting without manipulation or cumbersome artifice simply because there is no reason to do so. In yielding to this obligation our conduct in the moment of ethical response is shaped in a way that can be devoid of the presumably inescapable self-interest or manipulative stratagems that are posited by so many mainstream psychological theories of human behavior and relationship. How we choose to respond to the ethical obligation incumbent on us as social beings gives life to the many possible ways in which we can be-in-the-world meaningfully, morally, and intimately with others. In this conceptual approach, then, because ethical obligation and responsibility are the source of identity, and lie prior to abstract philosophical or scientific conceptualization, sociality is genuinely fundamental to the human way of being. Grounded in this obligation, then, psychology might truly become a science (i.e., a careful and critically reflective way of knowing) of the social and the moral, and nontrivially so (for a more detailed examination of just what this sort of psychology might look like, see Downs, Gantt, & Faulconer, 2012; Williams & Gantt, 2002).

In this light, then, altruism in its genuine form becomes not merely possible at times of extreme duress or environmental emergency, but it becomes the essential prototype of human social life and relationship. Clearly, this turns the conceptual tables on mainstream psychological theories of altruism and motivation. Under the regime of current theorizing, the question most often directing research has been how to understand and arrange the egoistic and determinative conditions under which something as normally unexpected as altruism might emerge in the inescapable and self-interest driven give-and-take of the social arena (see, e.g., Batson & Powell, 2003). Or, more generally, to articulate how altruism could possibly exist in the context of psychological theories that presuppose an indigenous selfishness and a universe of causal variables acting on us at the level of this very nature. It is for these reasons that altruism is, and has long been, a particularly vexing conundrum for mainstream psychological theory.

Given an alternative grounding in the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, however, altruism can now be seen to be the expected response to the call of the other, a call to ethical response and relationship that predates our own sense of self as self. For a psychology informed by Levinasian thinking, the central conceptual and empirical problem is articulating how people come to be oblivious to the ethical obligation to act in the interest of others, and understanding the social and personal machinations by which this basic sense of obligation is extinguished. In such light, psychology would be, as Williams and Gantt (2002) have characterized it, a “science of the ethical,” wherein persons are understood to be fundamentally social beings rather than isolated egos seeking self-maximization while under the relentless onslaught of external causal forces, but as moral agents navigating a world of meaningful possibilities and deeply rooted in ethical obligation. Put in its harshest terms, then, for such a psychology the problem is not so much how to explain to conundrum of altruism, but rather, how to explain the tragedy of murder.