Psychological Egoism

Thanks YYW.My opponent makes many good points, and I will be forced to concede much of what he says. My objections to his examples did nothing more than bring things to the middle ground of 'we can never know for sure'. Ditto for my objections to the scientific claims. However, there is one point that went mostly ignored by my opponent, and, after lots of deep thought over the past days, I believe this point proves Psychological Egoism to be true, however trivially so. But, before that:"..to the extent that the doing of some behavior that advances other's welfare subjects the performer of that behavior to risk, it is inferable that that behavior is altruistic. That is because exposure to risk comes both at one's imminent expense and likewise to the benefit of another. So, if someone exposes themselves to mortal risk, in service to others it is at least more probable than not that the particular behavior's motivation was genuinely altruistic."Note that his standard doesn't even claim certainty, so we can't really trust as proof anymore than you could trust my objections to the scientific claims as proof for Psychological Egoism. Anyways, with this proposition of evaluating the altruistic nature or lack thereof of an action, my opponent is assuming that humans are always acting under rational thought. He is assuming that people can't value the good feelings that would come with doing something 'good' over the possible loss of their lives. This line of thought comes up again with his refutation of the soldier on the grenade: "..conflates acting out of one's rational best interest with acting to fulfill one's desires because desiring death is diametrically opposed to the advancement of anyone's rational self interest."He proposes that the jumping on of a grenade must be altruistic, because one cannot rationally say that taking the blast of a grenade is in your interests. I would contend that itself (we can rationally that years of extreme guilt would be worse than dying), but the fact is that the definition of Psychological Egoism says nothing about people acting in a way that is rationally perceived as their self-interest. Instead, it says that people act in a way that THEY perceive to be in their own interests. Their perception does not have to be one of a rational perspective, and since my opponent's standard is based on the idea that an action cannot be egoistic if the end result is not one that is rationally perceived as self-benefiting, his standard does not prove that altruistic actions exist anymore than I have so far been able to prove that egoistic actions are the only things that exist, which, I am about to change. WHY I AM TRIVIALLY RIGHTWhy I am trivially right is seen at the end of my third round. I say:"Therefore, even if your want is to help people, the fact that you are acting to satisfy a want means you are acting in your interests, so even then, your act can be considered, at its deepest level, to be self-centered."If you imagine all the various motivations that play into taking an action as the layers of an onion that we've been peeling back, this is the very last layer. This statement is true for all things we do. Even if the urge to act has been generated from an altruistic source, or at least not an egoistic source, the fact is, the urge generates an egoistic urge to have the desire to see that thing happen fulfilled. Some of you may be saying, 'Ok, you've proven that on one level there's a self-satisfying urge. But there's also an altruistic/not egoist urge too, so how are you right?' I am right because of the way we interpret what falls under Psychological Egoism. We have always tried to find the deepest layer of motivation, the 'ultimate', the last 'layer of the onion'. For instance, let's say you like cats. There's a cat in the road, and it looks like it's going to be hit by a car. You know you will feel bad if that cat gets hit, so you go save it. Even though one of the 'upper layers' of motivation was that you like cats, the layer of motivation, the deeper one, that you would've felt guilt if you hadn't acted, is the one that we treat as what qualifies this action as an example of something that falls under Psychological Egoism. Now let's look at the soldier. As has been shown, my opponent cannot prove an altruistic motive and I can't prove an egoistic motive. That question mark of a motive is, relatively speaking, in the same position as 'you like cats' in the last example. The fact that you have an urge to see your buddies saved, and you will act to satisfy this urge of yours, therein creating an egoistic motive for acting, is, relatively speaking, in the same position as the possible guilt in the above example. It is the deeper layer, the deepest layer in fact. So, while there may be two motivations present, the fact that the 'deeper layer' is one related to self-interest, and given the fact that we take the deepest layer as the prover/refuter of an act's acceptability under Psychological Egoism, we can see that all actions are, at their deepest level, motivated by self-interest, and thus, Psychological Egoism is trivially true. So that's all for me. One thing I would like to say, to those of you considering giving my opponent points for sources because he used 7, whereas I used none, keep in mind that the majority of his sources were unnecessary. We didn't really need proof that in 2008 a man's family took the Medal of Honor on his behalf for his act of jumping on a grenade. Nor did we need to know the names or specific circumstances surrounding the doctors in his Ebola example. Thanks for reading!