Bentham's answer, probably influenced by Hume's view of the matter, is that the self-preference principle is a sound generalisation.
In this respect, the validity of the "self-preference principle"—the assumption that self-interest is the motivation of all human action is questionable.
Yet the current proposed commitments would have the reverse effect and effectively legalise Google's abusive self-preference," President of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV), Helmut Heinen, said today.
These types of evaluations, although informative on the partiality of users, cannot ensure a verifiable measure of the impacts of imagery on perception, as human judgement of self-preference and performance provides many opportunities for internal error and/or bias.
However, if not all action is motivated by self-interest in the narrow or strict meaning of the term, then how far can the self-preference principle be considered a reliable guide for the legislator in constructing motives?
In Aquinas' classical view, one's reason (as distinct from some of one's customary ways of thinking) naturally understands the primary or basic goods as good for anyone, and further understands that it is good to participate in the many forms of friendship which require that one set aside all merely emotionally motivated self-preference.
In chapter IV of The Subjection of Women, Mill goes so far as to claim that "[a]ll the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women" (Mill, Subjection of Women, 86).
As he explained it in the Constitutional Code, even if the self-preference principle "held good in no more than a bare majority, of the whole number of instances, it would suffice for every practical purpose, in the character of a ground for all political arrangements" (1838 43, IX, 6).
The primary purpose of punishment thus can reasonably be to restore that disturbed balance by depriving convicted offenders of their unfairly gained advantage excess freedom of action by imposing upon them measures, punishments, whose precise purpose is to restrict their freedom of action, whether by fines or imprisonment, proportionately to the degree to which they indulged their self-preference.
Manipulation of search results, for self-serving preferencing and de-preferencing, in order to promote political friends and allies, and to harm or hide opponents and Google's own misdeeds, could still be a problem.
