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.
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.
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.
How do you get objective answers to the question of which entities are worthy of moral concern?
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.
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.