Egoism and amoralism

* ‘The egoist believes that whether some future person will be me is crucial to whether I should care about that person’s well-being. But personal identity is not so important as all that.’ Discuss. (2019 Q5)

‘The answer to the question “Why be prudent?” is neither more nor less clear than the answer to the question “Why be moral?”’ Is that true? What does your answer imply, if anything, about the plausibility of egoism as opposed to moralism? (2020 Q5)

• Yes, this is true. Both individual rationality and morality seem like they might have reason-giving force, but it’s no easier to explain why one or the other should motivate you to act. This blunts attacks aimed at the amoralist, but does not affect the compelling arguments against ethical egoism, who has already accepted that moral reasons have force.
• Note that it’s perhaps a category error to talk about egoism as opposed to moralism – one could be a moralist but hold that what we morally ought to do is exactly that which maximises our self-interest.
  • Perhaps you think this fails to satisfy some requirements of morality, e.g. that it sometimes requires self-sacrifice, or respects the principle “if person P morally ought to do X, then that’s a consideration in favour of person Q not stopping them from doing X” (Baier)
    • It doesn’t produce a neutral ranking over states of affairs; it doesn’t respect the public nature of morality.
• The challenge from the amoralist is exactly the question “why be moral?”. She might recognise moral reasons, but is unmoved by them.
  • It’s very difficult to reply to her; Sidgwick’s duality.
  • Raz on Ava the amoralist, whom he claims ultimately does recognise moral reasons (i.e. the intrinsic value of persons) by virtue of her friendships with others, if you agree with his claim that relational value depends on non-relational value.
    • i.e. the argument goes:
    • 1. It is in Ava’s prudential interests to have true friendships
    • 2. A true friendship involves valuing the other person for their own sake
    • 3. So Ava’s true friends must have qualities that make them worthy of being valued as an end
    • 4. Anyone with similar qualities would also be worthy of being valued as a friend
    • 5. So Ava is committed to the intrinsic value of persons other than herself
• Parfit about the irrationality of egoism – this is a more promising way to show that ethical egoism seems mistaken, but it can’t address the amoralist.
  • Irrational because we’re only psychologically connected with our future self, not identical, and that relation also bears with other humans
  • But, counterargument that continuity is required as well as connectedness.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Worth digging into how the answers are equally unclear, not just equally clear.
• Raz’s project isn’t primarily aimed at the amoralist, it’s mostly to dissolve the prudence/morality distinction. So he’s very relevant to this.
• Distinguish more carefully between three positions:
  • Ethical egoism – standard moves give arguments against ethical egoism, e.g. not qualifying as a moral theory, seeming to just deliver highly unintuitive verdicts
  • Rational egoism – the subject of Parfit’s argument; it’s not reasonable to take it as the default (why be prudent?)
  • Amoralism – does remain as a difficulty, but Raz can dissolve some of it

(a) ‘There is no essential conflict between morality and self-interest because a good life is one that involves attention to the interests of others.’ Discuss.

• The underlying thought here is something like: if our self-interest aligns with what is moral, then there is no essential conflict.
  • But this is mistaken in two ways: first, they do not align, and second, even if they did align there would be conflict in an important way.
• An important distinction: what we mean by attention to interests of others.
  • If it’s: not wholly disregarding them, then yes, sure, it seems reasonable that a good life involves that. In particular, per Raz, we might think that a good life needs to have friendship, which in turn needs attention to the interests of others.
    • Although, consider Colin the grass-counter; he might genuinely be perfectly contented without any attention to others’ interests. And who are we to say that his life would be better were he to have preferences for attention to others / to pay attention? → Seems quite elitist / unjustified.
    • Moreover, distinguish a good life from the best life. While maybe you can’t have the best life without, say, excellent health, why shouldn’t a good life be attainable without that? Similarly, why shouldn’t a good life be attainable without friendship, even if we grant that there is an objective sense in which friendship improves a life?
    • However, for this part of the argument to go through, it would be sufficient if only the best lives require friendship, since then self-interest would lead us to have attention to others’ interests. And that seems pretty plausible.
  • But attention to the interests of others is ambiguous between several readings:
    • Being aware of others’ interests.
    • Attending to those interests, in the sense that they factor into one’s decision making.
    • Weighting others’ interests in a significant way, perhaps up to the importance one assigns to prudential interests.
  • And while morality plausibly demands (3) of us (e.g. if act-utilitarianism is correct), it seems like friendship does not.
    • Consider some instances of uncompensated sacrifice, e.g. soldier dying in battle, or George the chemist.
• Even if friendship (or another component of the best life) demanded that we weigh interests in such a way, it seems like there still is conflict between morality and self-interest.
  • Take Aristotle’s position that eudaimonia consists in living well, which is fulfilling the human function – namely, rational activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
  • It seems like there’s an important difference between an agent who does the actions demanded by morality moved by self-interest and one who does those actions moved by concern for others. That is, it’s not enough to take other-benefitting actions, nor even enough to factor others into one’s decision-making, if ultimately this is aiming at one’s own good.
• It’s notable that many philosophers, going all the way back to Aristotle, and more recently Raz, have tried to make an argument along these lines. It’s attractive because we’d like to have an answer to Glaucon’s challenge: why be just? But it seems a priori surprising that they align perfectly, unless there is – for example – some God which settles up the moral balance such that interests really are aligned. An evolutionary debunking argument might apply here: it’s adaptive to believe that morality and self-interest are aligned, since this makes us more cooperative, and increases fitness.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Foreground the word “essential”.
  • There’s a difference between:
    • Necessary conflict (i.e. always)
    • Contingent conflict
    • Essential conflict, i.e. at the foundations.
  • To talk about the essential conflict, you want to explain why even if they might converge sometimes / often, there’s some difference in principle.
    • Sidgwick’s dualism on wisdom would’ve been good to use as the framing here! Even if morality and self-interest overlap substantially, they are fundamentally different sources of reasons.
• Spend some more time on the Aristotelian/Razian case – in particular, why our nature as social animals might explain why a human’s flourishing would depends on their standing in certain social relations with others.
  • You can appeal to Raz’s relational vs non-relational value more; also bring in Ava & Ben example (it bites against egoists as well as amoralists)
• Could also mention Hurka on egoism in virtue ethics specifically (this is implicitly there in the argument contra Aristotle)
• Previously examiners’ reports have talked about shallow vs deep self-interest distinction.
  • Roughly, shallow self-interest is concerned with things like preference satisfaction / hedonic welfare; deep self-interested is about eudaimonia.
  • The former clearly doesn’t align with morality, but possibly the latter does.

* (b) ‘A person’s virtues are called good with respect to their presumed effects not on him but on us and society—the praise of virtues has always been far from “selfless”, far from “unegoistic”! […] The neighbour praises selflessness because it brings him advantages! […] Hereby we hint at the fundamental contradiction in the morality that is very much honoured just now: the motives to this morality stand in opposition to its principle!’ (NIETZSCHE) Discuss. (2021 Q9)

* ‘Far from being able to assess the relative value of options for an agent by their possible contribution to his well-being, we cannot judge their contribution to his well-being except by reference to their value.’ (JOSEPH RAZ) Is this the basis of a successful response to the amoralist? (2022 Q8)

* ‘The activity of justifying morality must surely get any point it has from the existence of an alternative—there being something to justify it against. The amoralist seems important because he seems to provide an alternative.’ (BERNARD WILLIAMS) Discuss. (2023 Q9)

‘The fact that something will be good or bad for me is neither more nor less obviously relevant to the question about what I should do than is the fact that something will be good or bad for you.’ Is that so? (2024 Q5)

• Yes, it is so.
  • Need to explain what we mean by relevance – i.e., the extent to which it provides reasons.
  • The fact it is sunny today is not very relevant to the question of whether I should give you money – a well-reasoning agent would put minimal weight on that in their deliberation. But the fact it is (perhaps) bad for me and good for you does seem like it would come into the consideration.
• Some cases:
  • Trivial Inconvenience: I can move my car in order to allow an elderly woman to park nearer the supermarket.
  • Large Sacrifice: I can give my car away to a needy family and (comfortably) purchase myself another one.
  • Intuitively, there is some balancing that we can do between what is good for me and what is good for others. Many would conclude that in the first case I should move my car, but in the second case I would be perfectly justified in keeping my car.
  • Both facts do seem relevant – but it’s not obvious in what proportion they should be balanced.
    • For example, Scheffler on agent-centred prerogatives.
• Sidgwick dualism – there are two kinds of reasons which might weigh on our decision-making: prudential reasons, and impartial reasons.
  • The question of what I should do is answered by whatever I have most reason to do.
  • But it’s not clear why we should factor prudential reasons into our decision-making any more than impartial ones, or vice versa.
• The question is getting at whether we should accept egoism, reject it, or suspend judgement. If the statement is correct, then we have to suspend judgement – someone could reasonably make decisions based on whether X is good for themself, or equally whether it is good for others.
• There are attempts to rebut egoism. We need to do this to maintain the titular claim (since the egoist asserts that only whether it’s good for me is relevant):
  • Time preference: “good for me” is ill-defined – does it mean “good for present-me”, or “good for me over my lifetime”?
    • If the latter, and we take an R-relation account of personal identity, than it seems like reasons can come from goodness for persons non-identical to myself.
    • But then, you might claim, it’s incoherent to fail to have regard for the goodness for other persons.
    • The problem is that perhaps the person needs to be continuous with me for it to generate reasons. You might disagree with the intuition – but it’s not obviously wrong.
• Alison Hills asymmetric epistemology?

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• There are two very different positions that “yes” is compatible with:
  • Impartialism – good-for-me and good-for-you are on the same agent-neutral scale, and perfectly commensurable
  • Sidgwickian dualism – we have incommensurable, mutually irreducible reasons principles of rational egoism and universal benevolence, and must suspend judgement.
• It does seem perhaps more obvious that my pain matters than a stranger’s pain mattering.
  • The egoist rejects that your pain matters; nobody rejects that mine does. You won’t find anybody promoting anti-egoism (i.e., the claim that the interests of everyone but me matter).
• For (un)equal relevance, some (anti)symmetry arguments we can make:
  • Perhaps we think there isn’t much of a non-arbitrary way to divide up between myself and everyone else. So why is one obviously any more or less relevant than the other?
    • The rebuttal here is quite easy: per Sidgwick, clearly I do have a special relationship with my own projects and goals, in a way that I evidently don’t with anybody else’s
  • Nagel on agent-relative vs agent-neutral reasons: if pain’s badness is agent-neutral, then bad for me and bad for you do generate the same kind of reason. But, we can get asymmetries from agent-relative reasons concerning pursuing projects (like being a pianist).
• The Hills asymmetric epistemology point goes like: moralists aim at true conclusions on their own; egoists just aim at knowledge.
  • So in the case of a disagreement between the moralist and the egoist about a premiss like [H]: I should help people when it is easy for me to do so, the moralist can hold firm rather than suspend judgement.
  • And this means that even if the claim is true due to Sidwick’s dualism, the moralist might not need to leave it there – she can press that [??]
• Conclusion could be: it seems like both are relevant, and pure egoism is mistaken – but this isn’t obvious, and Sidwick’s dualism demonstrates that we can’t be sure about how to adjudicate.

→ hmm, I feel confused still. Like the bare facts on their own presumably matter less than the amounts by which they differ? Maybe it’s like: knowing simply that X is, say, good for me and bad for you, what does this tell me about what I should do? How obvious is that?