Incentives

Taylor sees in human beings four basic incentives of action or four possible objectives that an agent might try to achieve. These are (1) one's own well-being, (2) one's own injury, (3) the well-being of another and (4) the injury of another. He calls these incentives (1) self-love or egoism, (2) self-hatred, (3) compassion and (4) malice. Self-love or egoism, Taylor believes, is the incentive on which most actions are based, yet he believes that the others, though not as common, are the actual incentives of people as well.

Egoism is the first incentive that Taylor discusses because he believes that it is the one most readily acted upon. It is, quite simply, the incentive to promote and preserve one's own well-being. This sort of self-love exists in all people and is the basis for most of our actions. Some philosophers, such as Hobbes, have taken it to be the only incentive that people act upon, yet Taylor does not think that this adequately explains human action. Though one can explain to some degree how a group of people who are entirely self-serving could found a community and cooperate with one another, such things can not be explained in the hard cases i.e. giving to charity, helping the disabled and, more or less, simply doing things for others with no hope for compensation or gain. One can explain the great majority of a man's actions in terms of self-love, but not all can be explained that way.

For example, it is not at all odd that a person, upon seeing a young bird which has fallen from its nest, would lift up this bird back to its nest. Actions such as these, where there is clearly no gain for the actor, are extremely important to Taylor and what he believes are alone what provide the basis for claiming there to be a moral dimension in human life. Actions done on this basis are done out compassion or for the well being of another living thing. These actions are those that either give no benefit to the actor or even hurt him while doing some good to some other being.

The fourth incentive [I will not talk about the second because it is largely irrelevant for morality] is what Taylor calls malice and is action done for the purpose of injuring another when no benefit will result for the actor and even when harm for the actor may result.

There does not seem to be a problem here as far as I can see as this part is pretty simple. Of course, it should be noted that Taylor does not take these four incentives to be the only ones on which people act upon. What I think he means is that they are simply the basic incentives meaning that they are, in some way, at the root of all actions. One might describe the reason why someone acted as he did by appealing to something other than these four incentives, such as hunger, yet the incentive for one's own well-being is implicit here. One satisfies his hunger because he believes that it will serve his well-being. So then, Taylor's basic understanding of human action, as I understand it, is that there are four basic incentives that one chooses to act upon as a result of his will (or desires/wants/etc.).