QuestionsAre humans good by nature?Self-love: our virtues are vices in disguise
Are humans good by nature?Prone to evil

Self-love: our virtues are vices in disguise

Self-love; the Maxims; "interest speaks all sorts of tongues"; "our virtues are vices in disguise"

François de La Rochefoucauld 1613 · 1680Self-love hides behind almost all our virtues: our virtues are most often vices in disguise.
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What it claims

Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise: self-love is the root of almost everything, and man is prone by nature to prefer himself to everyone else.

Why

Love of self hides, even from us; what we take for virtues is often only a collection of interests.

The same idea through history
François de La Rochefoucauld1665The Maxims appear without author's name in 1664-1665, then in editions revised by La Rochefoucauld up to the fifth, in 1678. He removed some maxims of the first edition, among them the longest, a portrait of self-love, kept here.
Immanuel Kant1793Kant takes up the maxim about our best friends' misfortune, without naming La Rochefoucauld, in the "long melancholy litany" that serves to prove that the propensity to evil is universal.
In short

"Self-love: our virtues are vices in disguise" is an argument by François de La Rochefoucauld (Maxims, 1665-1678 (motto, nos. 1, 39, 171, 264 and suppressed maxim no. 1), 1665) on the question "Are humans good by nature?" (answer: prone to evil). Its claim: Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise: self-love is the root of almost everything, and man is prone by nature to prefer himself to everyone else. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Maxims, 1665-1678 (motto, nos. 1, 39, 171, 264 and suppressed maxim no. 1)
Valid with an implicit premise

La Rochefoucauld does not write a treatise: he writes short maxims, in the salons of the seventeenth century. But they turn around a single idea. Behind our virtues, our friendships and even our pity, he sees self-love: the love of oneself and of all things for oneself. This self-love is clever, changes masks, and hides even from the one who feels it. He does not say that all virtues are false: he writes "most often", "often", "in most men". His thesis is therefore that of a universal but measured suspicion: love of self is the root of almost everything, and we believe we act from virtue when we act from interest. The P1 to P5 form is our reconstruction, from several maxims.

P1Self-love is the love of self and of all things for self. It makes people worshippers of themselves, who would be tyrants over others if fortune permitted, and it rests on others only as bees do on flowers, to draw from them what is its own.
P2It disguises itself and hides, even from ourselves: interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters, even that of disinterestedness.
P3What we take for virtues is often only a collection of various actions and various interests. It is not always from valour or chastity that men are brave or women chaste.
P4Even pity is often a reflection of our own ills in the ills of others, a clever foresight: we help others so that they will help us in like cases.
P5 · implicit premiseIf love of self is first, universal and hidden, and if most acts held to be virtuous can be explained in this way, then the nature of man is to prefer himself, and his virtues are most often vices in disguise.
Therefore our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise: self-love is the root of almost everything, and man is prone by nature to prefer himself to everyone else.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where self-love is universal and hides, and virtues can be explained by interest, but where there are also real virtues that cannot be reduced to interest: the conclusion "most often vices in disguise" no longer follows.
With its five premises, the conclusion follows. Two points call for attention. First P5, which moves from "it can be explained by self-love" to "that is what lies behind". A possible explanation is not a true explanation. Then the word "disguised": to say that self-love hides explains why we do not see it, but also deprives us of a means of checking the thesis. The maxims say "often", not "always": the conclusion therefore does not say that every virtue is false.
Analogy. A card player who smiles when losing. You think he is a good sport. La Rochefoucauld asks you to look at his hand: perhaps he smiles so that people will say he is. You can never be sure it is not the case, and he himself does not always know.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

David Hume 1751 · attacks premise 5

Hume writes that the simplest and most obvious cause that can be assigned for a phenomenon is probably the true one. When a philosopher is obliged to have recourse to very intricate and refined reflections, and to suppose them essential to the production of a passion, we have reason to be on guard: the hypothesis is fallacious. Yet to pass friendship or pity off as self-love requires a chemistry of this kind.

Rochefoucauld replies
Rochefoucauld What La Rochefoucauld says of hidden self-love (suppressed maxim no. 1)
Summary: La Rochefoucauld writes that self-love is often invisible to itself. It conceives, nourishes and rears without knowing it numberless loves and hatreds, so monstrous that when it brings them to light it disowns them or cannot resolve to avow them. It follows that not feeling any calculation in oneself does not prove there is none.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hume writes seventy years later and does not cite La Rochefoucauld; he targets the philosophers of the "selfish system" in general, including Hobbes and Locke. La Rochefoucauld's reply has a limit that Hume sees: if self-love hides even from the one who feels it, no inner experience can refute the thesis. Hume adds that, in any case, we distinguish between characters (see the next objection).
Where the debate stands (our summary)A disputed point: is a thesis that explains every apparent virtue by a hidden interest too general to be tested, or merely hard to test? Both camps admit that love of self is powerful; they differ on its place.
David Hume 1751 · attacks the conclusion

Hume writes that even if all inclinations are admitted to be self-love turned in another way, this turn of imagination is not the same in everyone. That is enough, even on the "selfish system", to make the widest difference between characters: one is called virtuous and humane, another vicious and meanly interested. To say that virtues are disguised vices therefore changes the words, not the differences.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1751, after the author's death (1680).
The debate goes on (our summary) La Rochefoucauld does not deny that there are differences: he writes "most often", "often". The disagreement is about the word: saying "disguised vice" assumes that an interest that ignores itself is worth less than frank virtue. Hume would answer that someone whose love of self turns towards others is precisely what we call virtuous.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Basic disagreement: if the deep motives are the same in everyone, does the gap between virtue and vice disappear, or does it remain entire in the way interest is directed?
Rousseau 1755 · attacks premise 1

Summary: Rousseau says that amour-propre is only a relative, artificial feeling born in society, which leads each individual to make more of himself than of any other and inspires all the harm people do to one another. He distinguishes it from amour de soi, the natural feeling of self-preservation. La Rochefoucauld thus describes a real feeling, but not that of nature.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1755, after the author's death (1680).
The debate goes on (our summary) Rousseau and La Rochefoucauld agree on the portrait: a desire to prefer oneself, which seeks consideration, changes masks and does all the harm. They differ on its origin. La Rochefoucauld, who lives at court, makes it the core of man. Rousseau makes it the effect of social comparison. Neither has a proof the other accepts.
Where the debate stands (our summary)A basic point of disagreement: does the need for esteem precede life in society, or is it born with it? It is one of the questions that developmental psychology and the study of stateless societies try to shed light on, without a definitive answer.
C
C. Daniel Batson 1981 · attacks premise 4

Summary: from experiments in which one could help a person receiving electric shocks by taking her place, Batson and colleagues argue that empathy produces a motive to help that aims at the good of the other and not at relieving oneself. In his experiments, people feeling empathy help even when they could easily escape the scene. Pity would therefore not be only a reflection of our own ills.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1981, after the author's death (1680).
R
Robert Cialdini and colleagues defender of the argument · 1987
Summary: Cialdini and colleagues reply that empathy-based helping can be explained by the desire to reduce one's own sadness, caused by seeing someone suffer. In their experiments the effect of empathy disappears when participants believe their sadness has already been relieved in another way. They conclude that helping would be motivated by self-interest, at least in part.
C
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues 1989
Summary: Batson and colleagues test the idea again in three studies where participants expect their mood to be soon improved by something else. They find that people feeling empathy help all the same, which does not fit the explanation by self-relief. They see this as support for the hypothesis of genuine altruism.
Where the debate stands (our summary)A debate still open in social psychology: does empathy produce a motive distinct from interest, or a subtler interest? Experiments exist on both sides, and both camps criticise the other's protocols.