During a walk through campus last weekend, a friend told me that she figured out the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals, she said, feel personally hurt when they see someone else who is underserved or unfairly burdened. Conservatives just don’t. So, in her mind, the complicated political philosophies of each camp are simply intellectualized justifications for a deep-seeded emotional reaction — or lack thereof — to what’s going on around them.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable agreeing with her categorical distinction of liberals and conservatives, but I think it raises an interesting question about what motivates our political and social beliefs and behavior. Do our unsophisticated and conditioned feelings about the world and ourselves inform our dazzling and neatly packaged sets of ideals? And if that’s the case, is it even possible to act without the primary intention being to gratify those basic — and sometimes barbaric — intuitions?

One argument might be that everyone is ultimately motivated by self-interest and that even the most generous, spirited person wouldn’t perform such generosity unless it gave him or her pleasure. With this view, the most socially conscious political activist is no more altruistic than the demonized 1 percent. The activist is fundamentally motivated by his or her experience of pleasure when advocating for the underrepresented. The tax-evading millionaire is similarly motivated by his or her experience of pleasure when accumulating wealth. Perhaps both have come to experience pleasure from their respective behaviors because, in their communities, such behavior earned them praise and high esteem.

So the activist’s political stance is no more legitimate than his desire to be well liked by his friends — and no less self-focused than the millionaire’s tendency to vote on financial policies that benefit him or her and seriously burden the majority of his or her fellow citizens. But, intuitively, this picture seems to be wrong. And, according to philosopher Joel Feinberg’s critique of this theory of egoism, it is.

A desire can be unselfish, even if the feelings that motivate it and the pleasure experienced when it’s acted upon reside within the individual. Selfishness, Feinberg argues, concerns the aim of a desire, not its origin. Because the activist’s desire is to advance the interests of someone outside himself, he is unselfish — even though he is, as a by-product, emotionally benefitted by the satisfaction of that desire. The millionaire, on the other hand, wishes only to advance his or her own interests.

So when our complicated political philosophies intend to advance the interests of others, our convictions to affect policy are unselfish, no matter how personally satisfied we feel when we win. But what if we intellectually recognize the importance of behaving unselfishly politically and otherwise, and our emotional selves don’t follow suit? What happens when we know that we ought to care about a particular issue, but we simply can’t make ourselves feel the conviction?

The same friend who got me started on this thought is a passionate and strongly informed vegetarian. Her views on the issue of food and animal rights are nuanced and sophisticated. She’ll never make an aggressive attempt to convert a meat-eater and she won’t grimace if you order a hamburger when you’re out to dinner with her. If you ask her why she stopped eating meat, she’ll explain that the overwhelming evidence — from a political, environmental and ethical perspective — convinced her that there were more reasons not to eat meat than to eat meat.

She relayed her evidence to me (because I asked), and I found myself similarly convinced. But I told her that, for whatever reason, this issue didn’t arouse any feeling in me and that I’d likely keep eating meat because I just didn’t care enough to change my habitual behavior. She said that she thought of me as someone who was especially capable of acting in accordance with principles rather than convenience. What ultimately compelled me to commit to a (mostly) vegetarian lifestyle was that I wanted to honor and act upon my distinctly human capacity for rationality.

We would exhaust ourselves if we attempted to ensure that every instinct and intuition we have matched our rational understanding of how we ought to feel and behave. But in our political stances and social behavior, we should make an effort to introspect as to what, exactly, motivates us. Reflection and critical thought is, after all, human nature.

Libby Ashton can be reached at eashton@umich.edu.