Even granting agent-relative reasons, couldn't there still be agent-neutral reasons — and a "best possible world" that we should strive for *all else equal*, when we haven't anything personal on the line — in addition?
Possibly! I do have a lot of unresolved questions around the nature of the duty towards beneficence and how it might work within the sorts of universalization-based ethics that I lean towards. It’s unclear to me whether you can get to a truly agent-neutral good-in-itself from a duty-first approach. I.e., to what extent does our duty to other agents depend on the fact that we are *both* agents (and/or share some other relevant property for universalization purposes)? After all, non-agents (babies, animals) don’t really have duties towards agents, so what is the thing that binds agents to have duties to non-agents? Consciousness? Idk.
But I certainly agree with the idea that doing more good (as the concept is generally understood) is, in fact, good. However, I also think that once you start evaluating tradeoffs and opportunity costs of beneficence, other duties start to impinge, and the question of whether it is your place or right to assert what you *believe* is good on others becomes quite fraught.
Agent-relative reasons are inescapable when a person turns to making moral choices for himself. His primary operating question then, that which moves him, is not “Which option should be chosen?” but rather “Which should I choose?” The latter does not simply locate where the choice is to be made (in me); it can also bring along the substantive, specific properties and relations I have as the individual person I am. If they do and I’m conscious of that, and if I’m ambitiously choosing to be thoroughly consistent and base all my moral decisions this way, thus choosing a morality, I will be choosing ethical egoism.
Mmmm, I like the “Which option should be chosen?” vs. “Which should I choose?” contrast. Will probs use that in the future.
That being said, I don’t think answering “Which should I choose?” necessarily devolves into egoism. I think one can still have an obligation to act in ways that are contrary to your all-things-considered self-interest. E.g., a parent that would rather blow their kid’s college fund on a Vegas vacation is still wrong to do so.
I had in mind, in the terms of your counter-case, that the agent’s being a parent is something he chooses in order to better his life, which would commit him, if he’s consistent, to the requirements of being a parent, which could include maintaining the college fund. Cases like this are difficult because it’s often not clear, as here, whether the agent is in fact considering all things he believes relevant to his self-interest. Also, there’s the question of whether the egoist is promoting his own benefit or his own life, which are not the same; life is wider than benefit.
I think even if the agent tries to reject their status as a parent (maybe they would be happier and better off if they weren’t a parent; maybe they didn’t even want the kid), they still have obligations to the child by virtue of being their parent. So long as the child is their ward (i.e., hasn’t been put up for adoption), they have agent-relative responsibilities to that child that are irrespective of their desire to fulfill them or whether fulfilling those responsibilities leaves the agent “better off”.
You can invoke a claim that “actually, every parent is ipso facto better off if their child thrives” but then that’s just sneaking in non-egoist duties under the guise of objective good-for (And one must then ask: how are we determining what that objective good-for is? Because that sure looks like some application of non-egoistic moral principles).
I certainly agree that agents are obligated by consistency and some sort of objective normative standard to provide for their children; but I disagree that we should classify those obligations as “egoistic”. After all, if an agent 1) doesn’t believe they are better off if X, 2) does not want X, and 3) would, in fact, consider themselves worse off if X were to obtain, then it hardly seems sensible to say that they have an egoistic reason to effect X.
Instead, they have an agent-relative, yet non-subjective (i.e., desire-grounded) reason to act a certain way. In other words: a duty.
I should have said in my original reply to your post that “OTHER THINGS EQUAL, I will be choosing egoism.” I hadn’t intended to drag you into a conversation about egoism but now I think I should say a few things about how I understand it.
Egoism is usually said to be about the goals of acts: if I care about nothing except gaining some good or benefit or advantage for myself, my act is egoistic. This conception is too narrow. There are acts I might perform that would (1) benefit me and (2) produce good from someone else’s standpoint, (3) the latter an increment of good that would not benefit me additionally, (4) an act I would not choose to perform unless I were motivated in part by that good from someone else’s viewpoint. Consider two options both of which would accomplish a certain goal of mine. In option A, I would benefit only myself; in B, I would benefit myself and another person as per conditions 1-4. Since B would benefit me fully, there is no good reason to exclude it from egoism.
My landlord rings my bell and asks me to take him to the drugstore to pick up a prescription. My ultimate, or framing, goal in my action overall is my own well-being. But in calculating what to do now (my operational goal), (a) I’m friendly with my landlord but not intimate, so I have an interest in his health (although not as strong as his); (b) I have nothing in particular I plan to do this morning; (c) I figure that my ultimate interest is equally served either way: if I drive him and if I don’t drive him; and (d) since I have an interest in (care about) his health, I drive him.
I’d widen egoism further. I (egoist) would be justified in supporting a regime of rights, as Loren Lomasky calls it, where I benefit from (certain) moral rights being honored throughout society more than I am pinched when I happen to run afoul of those rights as possessed by other people. In such cases I can, as an egoist, support rights against myself (operational sense) while I benefit from the general honoring of the rights (my overall interest). This is a no-brainer since I’m serving my best interests here, by my judgment, everything considered. But further, I can be concerned with how well schools in my town, courts and various other institutions are meeting their respective responsibilities even though I don’t deal with them, because I figure they are required for the kind of town/state/society where it’s in my best interest to live. And finally (in this list), I can think it incumbent on me to abide by certain responsibilities attaching to certain of such institutions when I do step into them—as in being a parent who, as such, is to care for his children, my part in getting the new generation off to a good start (in addition to my loving the kids).
In short, and all things considered, I’m signing up for a way of life and not only specific ways depending on circumstances (usually construed as unscrupulous) of getting what I want.
But terminologically and on a cautionary note, I would distinguish agent-relativity from agent-exclusivity (in my sense, egoistic reasons are agent-relative but not necessarily agent-exclusive); interest from desire; and, in various cases, impartiality from agent-neutrality. I’d distinguish the general principle of a morality, including egoism, from an indefinitely long list of prescriptions that I call a theory of interests for the morality (generated by applying the general principle to agent’s circumstances). I wouldn’t define egoism as the morality in which the agent (or qua patient) ought to have what he wants. And I wouldn’t test egoism by imagining that the egoist wants something very badly that he can only get if he does something nefarious to somebody else, concluding that obviously that’s what he ought to do because that’s what he wants.
The jump from moral concern to proposed omnicide is the one that baffles and enrages me. How did it become consensus among wild animal welfare people that animals' lives are definitely not worth living?
Nice piece, although to put my concerns concisely, I have no idea what "Each counts for one. That is why more count for more." is supposed to be doing logically, as pithy as it is. In a world where Whitehead and Russell tirelessly worked for hundreds of pages to show that 1 and 1 are 2, I would hope we can do better.
Well to do that you need the whole rigamarole of how a duty to another entity even emerges in the first place. But the answer is likely some combo of agency, consciousness, potentia for either of the former two, or some sort of relationship to the agent (personal relationship, similarity, etc). I think probably all of them matter, and result in different types of concern warranted.
If you’re just deciding the X amount of agency or consciousness is necessary for moral worth, then it’s going to be arbitrary and I don’t see how that arbitrariness can translate to objectivity.
I'm not convinced the axioms are conditions on moral reasoning rather than conditions on a particular abstraction of it. An abstraction chosen precisely because it is mathematically tractable. Failure to conform to the model is then read as a failure of rationality rather than of the abstraction. Every counterexample is reframed as bias.
Even granting agent-relative reasons, couldn't there still be agent-neutral reasons — and a "best possible world" that we should strive for *all else equal*, when we haven't anything personal on the line — in addition?
Possibly! I do have a lot of unresolved questions around the nature of the duty towards beneficence and how it might work within the sorts of universalization-based ethics that I lean towards. It’s unclear to me whether you can get to a truly agent-neutral good-in-itself from a duty-first approach. I.e., to what extent does our duty to other agents depend on the fact that we are *both* agents (and/or share some other relevant property for universalization purposes)? After all, non-agents (babies, animals) don’t really have duties towards agents, so what is the thing that binds agents to have duties to non-agents? Consciousness? Idk.
But I certainly agree with the idea that doing more good (as the concept is generally understood) is, in fact, good. However, I also think that once you start evaluating tradeoffs and opportunity costs of beneficence, other duties start to impinge, and the question of whether it is your place or right to assert what you *believe* is good on others becomes quite fraught.
Agent-relative reasons are inescapable when a person turns to making moral choices for himself. His primary operating question then, that which moves him, is not “Which option should be chosen?” but rather “Which should I choose?” The latter does not simply locate where the choice is to be made (in me); it can also bring along the substantive, specific properties and relations I have as the individual person I am. If they do and I’m conscious of that, and if I’m ambitiously choosing to be thoroughly consistent and base all my moral decisions this way, thus choosing a morality, I will be choosing ethical egoism.
Mmmm, I like the “Which option should be chosen?” vs. “Which should I choose?” contrast. Will probs use that in the future.
That being said, I don’t think answering “Which should I choose?” necessarily devolves into egoism. I think one can still have an obligation to act in ways that are contrary to your all-things-considered self-interest. E.g., a parent that would rather blow their kid’s college fund on a Vegas vacation is still wrong to do so.
I had in mind, in the terms of your counter-case, that the agent’s being a parent is something he chooses in order to better his life, which would commit him, if he’s consistent, to the requirements of being a parent, which could include maintaining the college fund. Cases like this are difficult because it’s often not clear, as here, whether the agent is in fact considering all things he believes relevant to his self-interest. Also, there’s the question of whether the egoist is promoting his own benefit or his own life, which are not the same; life is wider than benefit.
I think even if the agent tries to reject their status as a parent (maybe they would be happier and better off if they weren’t a parent; maybe they didn’t even want the kid), they still have obligations to the child by virtue of being their parent. So long as the child is their ward (i.e., hasn’t been put up for adoption), they have agent-relative responsibilities to that child that are irrespective of their desire to fulfill them or whether fulfilling those responsibilities leaves the agent “better off”.
You can invoke a claim that “actually, every parent is ipso facto better off if their child thrives” but then that’s just sneaking in non-egoist duties under the guise of objective good-for (And one must then ask: how are we determining what that objective good-for is? Because that sure looks like some application of non-egoistic moral principles).
I certainly agree that agents are obligated by consistency and some sort of objective normative standard to provide for their children; but I disagree that we should classify those obligations as “egoistic”. After all, if an agent 1) doesn’t believe they are better off if X, 2) does not want X, and 3) would, in fact, consider themselves worse off if X were to obtain, then it hardly seems sensible to say that they have an egoistic reason to effect X.
Instead, they have an agent-relative, yet non-subjective (i.e., desire-grounded) reason to act a certain way. In other words: a duty.
I should have said in my original reply to your post that “OTHER THINGS EQUAL, I will be choosing egoism.” I hadn’t intended to drag you into a conversation about egoism but now I think I should say a few things about how I understand it.
Egoism is usually said to be about the goals of acts: if I care about nothing except gaining some good or benefit or advantage for myself, my act is egoistic. This conception is too narrow. There are acts I might perform that would (1) benefit me and (2) produce good from someone else’s standpoint, (3) the latter an increment of good that would not benefit me additionally, (4) an act I would not choose to perform unless I were motivated in part by that good from someone else’s viewpoint. Consider two options both of which would accomplish a certain goal of mine. In option A, I would benefit only myself; in B, I would benefit myself and another person as per conditions 1-4. Since B would benefit me fully, there is no good reason to exclude it from egoism.
My landlord rings my bell and asks me to take him to the drugstore to pick up a prescription. My ultimate, or framing, goal in my action overall is my own well-being. But in calculating what to do now (my operational goal), (a) I’m friendly with my landlord but not intimate, so I have an interest in his health (although not as strong as his); (b) I have nothing in particular I plan to do this morning; (c) I figure that my ultimate interest is equally served either way: if I drive him and if I don’t drive him; and (d) since I have an interest in (care about) his health, I drive him.
I’d widen egoism further. I (egoist) would be justified in supporting a regime of rights, as Loren Lomasky calls it, where I benefit from (certain) moral rights being honored throughout society more than I am pinched when I happen to run afoul of those rights as possessed by other people. In such cases I can, as an egoist, support rights against myself (operational sense) while I benefit from the general honoring of the rights (my overall interest). This is a no-brainer since I’m serving my best interests here, by my judgment, everything considered. But further, I can be concerned with how well schools in my town, courts and various other institutions are meeting their respective responsibilities even though I don’t deal with them, because I figure they are required for the kind of town/state/society where it’s in my best interest to live. And finally (in this list), I can think it incumbent on me to abide by certain responsibilities attaching to certain of such institutions when I do step into them—as in being a parent who, as such, is to care for his children, my part in getting the new generation off to a good start (in addition to my loving the kids).
In short, and all things considered, I’m signing up for a way of life and not only specific ways depending on circumstances (usually construed as unscrupulous) of getting what I want.
But terminologically and on a cautionary note, I would distinguish agent-relativity from agent-exclusivity (in my sense, egoistic reasons are agent-relative but not necessarily agent-exclusive); interest from desire; and, in various cases, impartiality from agent-neutrality. I’d distinguish the general principle of a morality, including egoism, from an indefinitely long list of prescriptions that I call a theory of interests for the morality (generated by applying the general principle to agent’s circumstances). I wouldn’t define egoism as the morality in which the agent (or qua patient) ought to have what he wants. And I wouldn’t test egoism by imagining that the egoist wants something very badly that he can only get if he does something nefarious to somebody else, concluding that obviously that’s what he ought to do because that’s what he wants.
The jump from moral concern to proposed omnicide is the one that baffles and enrages me. How did it become consensus among wild animal welfare people that animals' lives are definitely not worth living?
I wrote a response to this, I hope you enjoy / aren't too offended (I was maybe a little aggressive??) -
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/your-daughter-vs-1-million-strangers
Nice piece, although to put my concerns concisely, I have no idea what "Each counts for one. That is why more count for more." is supposed to be doing logically, as pithy as it is. In a world where Whitehead and Russell tirelessly worked for hundreds of pages to show that 1 and 1 are 2, I would hope we can do better.
How do you get objective answers to the question of which entities are worthy of moral concern?
Well to do that you need the whole rigamarole of how a duty to another entity even emerges in the first place. But the answer is likely some combo of agency, consciousness, potentia for either of the former two, or some sort of relationship to the agent (personal relationship, similarity, etc). I think probably all of them matter, and result in different types of concern warranted.
If you’re just deciding the X amount of agency or consciousness is necessary for moral worth, then it’s going to be arbitrary and I don’t see how that arbitrariness can translate to objectivity.
I'm not convinced the axioms are conditions on moral reasoning rather than conditions on a particular abstraction of it. An abstraction chosen precisely because it is mathematically tractable. Failure to conform to the model is then read as a failure of rationality rather than of the abstraction. Every counterexample is reframed as bias.