Thank you, Javier Palau Salsas, for such a selfless question!
I don’t think there are strong reasons to believe that this is true. It seems plausible that our ego can help us get things done, but it seems equally plausible that our ego can stop us from getting things done. I’ll explain a bit more below, but first I’d like to make a caveat.
I do not think that this question can be answered satisfactorily from the armchair. In order to fully address the question we would have to (i) take a representative sample of humans, (ii) measure their ego and their laziness, (iii) DESTROY THEIR EGO WITH FIRE and (iv) measure the difference in laziness. Moreover, we should make sure that we did not affect anything besides their ego when destroying it with fire. If, for example, we burned their eyebrows in the process, any subsequent change in laziness could very well be due to a lack of eyebrows, rather than a lack of ego. Come to think of it, other methods than destruction by fire might fare better. Perhaps we should just adjust the ego, control for other factors such as eyebrows, and see what happens. Actually, even without using fire, the relevant experiment is probably unethical. In the end, we’d have to measure people’s ego and their laziness over time, leave them unharmed, and see whether changes in ego correlate with changes in laziness in such a way as to suggest that a lack of ego causes laziness.
However, this does not mean that there is no armchair work to be done here. One thing we can do is make sure the relevant terms are well-defined: What is ego? Is it different from self-esteem? Does it require arrogance? Does it require pride? What is laziness? Are you lazy if you put off things that aren’t pressing, but could still be done today? Are you lazy if you do things, but you know all of these things to be useless? Answering all these questions will be drudgery, I promise. Even so, they would need answering, and this could be done from the armchair.
A more interesting armchair job is to develop hypotheses about the interaction between ego and laziness. Here are some none-too-crazy ideas. First, sometimes our ego inspires us to do things: you want to bake a cake because you want to prove that you bake the best cakes. Second, sometimes our ego inhibits us from doing things: you don’t want to scrub the floor, because you think it is below you. Third, sometimes we do things just because they need doing: you scrub the floor because it needs scrubbing (not because you believe you are the best scrubber). Fourth, sometimes you do things just because you want to: you go running because you want to get rid of energy (not because you want to be the best runner). In order for these hypothesis to remain credible, we’d have to test them empirically. But in the absence of damning evidence, I think the ego-less need not be lazy.
What do you think? Does a lack of ego make us lazy? Let us know in the comments.
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I am a researcher at the University of Cologne. Many topics in analytic philosophy intrigue me, but my main interest is in the philosophy of causation. I am especially excited about the idea that causation is just a pattern of correlation that is insensitive to different kinds of disturbances. My PhD dissertation argued that such a view on causation helps to resolve an age-old puzzle: if mental phenomena are not physical, how can they affect our behaviour? Currently, I investigate other puzzles about causation, such as ‘can absences cause?’ and ‘why does causation never go backwards in time?’