To probe people's motives is almost an occupational malaise amongst psychologists. And it is not one that can be nursed in private. It intrudes constantly into discussion of acquaintances, into moral assessments of people's actions and their responsibility for them, and into pronouncements on the proper operation of law. On this account psychologists are treated with suspicion, often with derision and resentment, by their academic colleagues. Of course, like Jehovah's witnesses, they come to expect, even to relish, the reception they (...) receive. For has it not been written that we all have a strong resistance to such revelations, our real motives being often those which we are ashamed to admit? But there may be good grounds for this resistance as well as psychological explanations of it. My hope in this paper is to set out the sorts of grounds that there may be for our resistance to this scrutiny of our motives and to the theories of motivation which lend some kind of scientific respectability to it. (shrink)

A discussion of egoism and altruism as related both to ethical theory and moral psychology. Williams considers and rejects various arguments for and against the existence of egoistic motives and the rationality of someone motivated by self-interest. He ultimately attempts to give a more Humean defense of altruism, as opposed to the more Kantian defenses found in Thomas Nagel, for example.