Scholars' Award: Human Motives - Egoism, hedonism, and the science of affect

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Motivational hedonism is the view that all human actions are undertaken in pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of displeasure. (Pleasure and displeasure are here understood broadly to cover all positive and negative affective states, including not just sensory pleasures and pains, but emotions of joy, happiness, pride, and enjoyment, as well as those of guilt, fear, sadness, and boredom.) It has a long and distinguished history, but has undergone a resurgence recently with the current explosion of work in affective science and neuroscience. Many in the field think that people make decisions by anticipating the positive and negative emotions they are likely to experience in the future, and by choosing to maximize the balance of positive over negative feelings. The upshot is a form of egoism: all decisions are ultimately taken to benefit oneself, to create good and avoid bad feelings in oneself. Even someone donating a kidney to a stranger is really just acting to feel good for having done so. This result is morally and socially destructive. The present project aims to show that the scientific findings have been misinterpreted, thereby securing a place for genuine altruism.The goal of the project is to develop an extended argument against motivational hedonism, but one that is grounded in affective science. The view that pleasure and displeasure (more technically described as positive and negative valence) are the common currency of all decision making will not be challenged, but endorsed. However, the project will examine different accounts of what valence is—for example, whether it is a felt property attaching to our experiences that we seek to maximize (hedonism), or rather whether it is a representation of the value we assign to the experienced objects and events themselves (which would secure altruism). The project will proceed in part by integrating and explaining a wide range of results from affective science and neuroscience, and in part through careful analysis of the nature of representation in cognitive science generally.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.