Without want no action: want is my want: I do what I want; and therefore, whatever my outward act may be, my motive and my heart is selfish; and for morals the act is qualified by the heart and motive.
Such is the ground we may assign for the theory of selfishness, and we shall see that, in a certain sense, that ground is firm. What would be the answer of the practical man?
The practical man, I suppose, would say something of this sort: ‘True it is that a man does what he has a mind to, or, if you will, what he wants to do; but I call a man selfish or not according to what it is that he wants and likes. Some men care to do the right, others to do only what they want, to please no one but themselves; and the moral character of each depends on the nature of what pleases him.’ If we pressed him further and said, ‘Yes, but the difference is superficial; what pleases a man is what he desires, and hence in all cases alike he must do what he likes, and because he likes it: why he does it is the point, and the ‘why’ is his personal desire or aversion; hence he is always at bottom selfish,’—then I think our supposed practical man would imagine you wished to impose upon him. These questions about the ‘why’ he would take to be misleading nonsense. He accepts it as a fact that some men want good and others mere pleasure, and he feels sure that for that fact there is no further reason, in the sense we have suggested. He believes that we are trying to persuade him that he and others seek the good and avoid the bad, in all cases, with an ulterior object,—as a means, that is to say, to something else which is the end: and this idea he indignantly repudiates. He considers our question of the motive either an idle triviality, because asking what everybody knows; or an attempt to mislead, because presupposing what is palpably false.
And he is right. That I do what I want to do, is an idle proposition. That it should lead to a new result would be strange, unless truth were to be found in the barest tautologies. Like the doctrine of the ‘relativity of knowledge,’ what significance it has, it has only as the negative of unmeaning fictions, and, as a positive result, it has no significance at all. ‘I know what I know,’ ‘I experience what I experience,’ ‘I want what I want,’ indeed ‘here
