laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Paul Torek) (09/27/83)
The header is still too baroque for my taste. people who are still confused as to how Paul Torek can be in Maryland and Toronto at once -- it works by magic. (and has the side-effect of confusing the newsstats, gotta keep working on those side effects!) Laura Creighton ************ begin forwarded article ***************** The following is from Paul Torek. Send replies to ..umcp-cs!prometh!paul A while back, I promised two arguments justifying the practice of having the benefit of others as one of one's purposes. The first argument, recall, was that the alternative of pure selfishness is self-defeating, because a truly selfish person couldn't love. However, the debate over what I just said after "because" -- the controversial "impossibility thesis" -- has been slow and difficult. I postponed the second argument because, I am afraid, it is even more difficult and probably more controversial. ------------------------ Imagine a world with at least two selfish people, Ann and Bob, who are complete strangers. Ann thinks to herself, "My welfare is more important, at the fundamental level, than Bob's." Bob thinks to himself, "My welfare is more important ... ". A contradiction can be deduced from these two statements. One or both of them must be wrong. But are these judgements implied by Ann's and Bob's selfishness? It may seem that Ann needs, to be selfish, only to think that her welfare is more important *to her*. (Similarly for Bob.) And there is no contradiction between the ideas that Ann's welfare is more important *to her* and Bob's *to him*. So, by refraining from making any categorical claims of importance, a universal ethical egoist would seem to avoid inconsistency. (A universal ethical egoist is one who thinks that everyone, not just herself, ought to be selfish.) What is the force of the words "to me" -- what could it mean to say that something is important (good, valuable) "to me"? It could mean that it is good *according to* me -- i.e., that I think "It is good (period)" -- but that would not solve the above problem. There are only two other possibilities, which should be considered at length. "Important to me" could mean that I: care about it, want it, choose it, am prepared to act for its sake, etc. -- that is, "important to me" could be a report of certain affective responses and dispositions. But in order to be justified, an evaluation must be generated on the basis of some feature(s) of the *object* of one's attitude(/disposition), rather than the mere fact that one *has* the attitude. "Important to me" could mean, finally, that something *benefits* me. But, first, it is questionable whether the notion of benefit, of something being good for me, is understandable without the prior notion of something being simply good (period). Can we understand the notion that "X benefits me" (where X is, e.g., pleasure, freedom, or whatever you hold to be worthwhile for its own sake) without first understanding "X is good (period)"? Second, and even more important, this approach reduces "my welfare is important *to me*" to "my welfare benefits *me*", and that in turn is equivalent to "my welfare is *my* welfare" -- tautologous. This tautology lacks the normative force had by the statement "my welfare is good (period)." One can realize that one's welfare is one's benefit, without realizing that one should promote it. True Altruism is (unfortunately) possible. In order to logically infer "I ought to promote X", one must accept "X is good, period", not merely "X is good *to me*". But then one must face up to the fact that if X is good, then anything similar to it in relevant ways must also be good. A person who attributes value to something must attribute similar value to anything like it, or else point out the difference there is which justifies different attributions of value. If I deny that the welfare of others is good at the fundamental level, then I must point to an objective difference between me and them, for I cannot accept that they would be justified in denying that *my* welfare is good -- that would contradict the idea that it *is* good. Whatever reality and importance your well-being has, the well-being of every similar subject has the same reality and importance. Not to grasp this is to fail to stand back from oneself and see oneself simply as one person among many -- that is, objectively. If you recognize -- and to be effective, it must be a deep recognition -- the reality and importance of the well-being of others; if you are vividly aware that they are subject to joy and suffering just as you are, then you will be motivated to act accordingly. The case is not too different from that of prudence, concern for the welfare of one's future self. Sometimes it requires effort to be prudent, as when one must suffer pain now in order to avoid more in the future; but if one succeeds in deeply recognizing the equal reality of one's future self and its pain, one will *want* to do the prudent thing. [The point is, and I'm not sure it's coming out clearly, that nobody needs to be forced to be nonselfish, any more than they need to be forced to be prudent.] Humans commonly suffer a kind of myopia; one's own well-being in the present looms larger than anything else, or so it sometimes seems. At least we are prodded to prudence from time to time by our memories, which make us realize the reality and importance of past experiences and may encourage us to see that the present is not special. We have far less prodding to make us see the importance of the experiences of others -- we only observe from the outside or hear their verbalized feelings. But this only *explains* why people tend to care more about their future selves than about others -- it does not *justify* it. And nothing can. We have exactly the same justification for caring about both. I will pursue this last point further in "approach #2", which I'll get around to writing eventually. --Paul Torek, ..umcp-cs!prometh!paul
norm@ariel.UUCP (N.ANDREWS) (09/29/83)
Re Ann and Bob's supposedly contradictory views: Neither of them really says "My welfare is most important". What they really say is "My welfare is most important TO ME", and there is no contradiction in that. They both can say that, and can both be correct. Don't fall into Torek's fallacy of using standards of importance that are "intrinsic" or that are outside of the individual frames of reference of Ann and Bob. There is nothing non-objective in refering values to the standard of an individual living beings personal welfare... --Norm Andrews, AT&T Information Systems, Holmdel, New Jersey