What follows is an excerpt from Everett Halls Modern Science and Human

Values, a 1956 book with a lot of material about the history of ethics, science,
and psychology. This discussion of the anti-selfishness theory of 18th
Century English Bishop, Joseph Butler is from page 375ff:

[Those who think we always act out of selfishness] seem to have

supposed that, since all my desires are mine, and consequently all the
gratifications of them are mine, their objects are simply my satisfactions.
There is, in this, a failure to distinguish between the object desired and
the satisfaction of attaining that object. It is supposed that, since all
satisfactions are satisfactions of the person having the desire, all desire is
directed toward self-satisfaction and is therefore selfish. Butler grants
that people only act from desire; that the pleasure coming from the
fulfillment of a desire is always the pleasure of the person having the
desire. But he contends that this admission does not force one to deny
the obvious fact that we desire many different things, not merely our own
individual pleasure. That it is a confusion to identify the pleasure of
gratification of desire and the object desired becomes clear as soon as we
note the fact that we get such pleasure upon attaining the object desired.
The pleasure, so far from itself being the object desired, presupposes that
there are such objects already desired antecedent to the experience of
gratification. Take away desire for food, for company, for intellectual
insight, for any and every particular sort of thing toward which humans
are motivated, and no pleasure of getting what is desired could arise.
Butler does not mean to deny that we are sometimes motivated by selflove, that is by a general desire for our own happiness. He simply wishes
to insist that this is a derived or secondary desire. Without desires for
particular things, this generalized desire would be empty; it is essentially
the desire to get as many of ones desires fulfilled as possible.
Among the particular desires for particular external things is
benevolence, the desire to good to someone else. Just as my desire for
food is my desire and its gratification is my gratification, so is my
benevolence mine and its gratification also. But it does not follow that
what I desire in the case of benevolence is my pleasureI desire the good
of someone else.

Hall also says that there is a glaring fault in any account that claims that the
ultimate end of all of our actions is our own happiness:
[S]ometimes men desire things which by no stretch of the imagination can
be considered causes of future pleasure to the agent. Suppose a man has
seen great honors paid to heroes slain in battle. He might, through

associated pleasure, come to desire a heros death, but hardly as a means

to his future pleasure, especially if he does not believe in personal
immortality. Pleasure may induce him to seek this heroic death, but it is
not the end for which his death is a means.

When we think of Kants insistence that we should always act in compliance

with a duty which is universalizable and that we can consider cases in which
somebody is doing this and somebody else isnt, it certainly seems like its
possible for one person to act selfishly and another person not to. Anyhow,
Hall concludes with this:

Suppose it is a fact that originally all motives are selfish. What

implication does this have for ethics? Directly, none whatever! This is
just another way of saying that factual statements do not answer
normative questions. It might be morally better to seek the good of
others than ones own, even though no one as a matter of fact does so, or
even though people can be convinced to do so only through the
establishment of appropriate associations.