Slote, Michael - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

94 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Tanner</strong> <strong>Lectures</strong> on Human Values
man psychology) of dissatisfaction and insufficiency. So at least
some of the reasons for our low opinion of egoistic individuals -
the reasons deriving less from our moral and altruistic feelings
and more from our sense of what is properly and self-respectingly
human - mirror our earlier criticisms of the optimizing temperament,
and I believe the interplay and analogy between what philosophers
find it natural to say about the opposition between
egoism and altruism and what I have here suggested about the
opposition between moderation and optimization may help to
clarify and support the picture I have been offering.
Both altruism and moderation are traits requiring cultivation
within the individual. In some sense they do not come naturally,
and parents, teachers, and others have a difficult task on their
hands when they attempt to overcome or mitigate children’s insatiable
selfishness and greed. <strong>The</strong> typical simplified picture of
how a child develops intrinsic concern for others involves the
assumption that children need to go through an intermediate stage
where they see a concern for others as furthering their own interests;
and a similarly simplified picture of the attenuation of
childhood demandingness and greediness might well depict the
child as having to go through a stage where moderation was seen
(in the Epicurean manner) merely as a means to greater overall
satisfaction (the cake will spoil your dinner or give you a tummy
ache). But just as the development of some degree of intrinsic
concern for others is typically regarded as a form of moral progress,
I believe that the development of some degree of noninstrumental
moderation is also a good thing, a kind of human
progress.
This is not, of course, to deny that moderation for its own sake
can be overdone or that instrumental moderation is useful and
sometimes admirable. Asceticism, certain forms of puritanism,
and the Stoic indifference to the goods of this world all seem
examples of moderation gone haywire; and what I have been
recommending, or at least commending, is something soberer that