Psychological Egoism and Its Critics

I will present what I think is the best argument for the version of psychological egoism under consideration here, and explain why I think even that argument fails to go much distance toward establishing it. It turns out, though, I will caution, that defeating that argument means only that we are right to reject psychological egoism as extremely implausible; it does not entitle us to claim to have shown the thesis itself to be either confused and senseless or false. However, my main goal in this paper is neither to refute nor to defend psychological egoism, but rather to show how it, even in a very strong form, manages to survive a number of common objections both to itself and to arguments meant to support it.