tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post3611998553434702851..comments2023-10-24T04:29:23.693-06:00Comments on Atheist Ethicist: Enlightened Self-InterestAlonzo Fyfehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05687777216426347054noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-72030293131195477702011-10-17T03:38:18.348-06:002011-10-17T03:38:18.348-06:00Unless a person is a sociopath it is impossible to...Unless a person is a sociopath it is impossible to cleanly separate interest IN self from interest OF self. People do not live in isolation. Even the most selfish among us realize we have needs in common with others. To deny this is mental illness. Even if only a small number of your desires mesh with society in general anything that benefits you benefits all. You can draw a line between "Enlightened" and "self interest" but it is an irrational self destructive line. Society can exist without me but I can not exist without society.paulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14126048901592750085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-69533132384583085202011-06-17T16:24:24.126-06:002011-06-17T16:24:24.126-06:00A lot of this comes down to whether you think cate...A lot of this comes down to whether you think categoricity is a part of morality or not. You say not, but I'm not all that clear of your argument. You have a just-so story:<br />"Morality was adopted and embraced as a technique for fulfilling desires. At some point some theorists came along and asserted that its principles are categorical, but that never made it into the meaning,"<br />but that's all it is; a story. If your argument is:<br />1. Morality is real.<br />2. Categoricity is not real.<br />3. Therefore morality cannot involve categoricity,<br />then we seem to have a case where one man's ponens is another man's tollens; we either accept 1 and reject 3 or vice versa.<br /><br />Of course, you claim not to be that interested in the meaning of moral terms. I maintain you have to be; the meanings of words aren't up for grabs like that! But if you're serious, why not just drop the word "morality" altogether. If you're right, and desirism was really what people were using all along, then talking about "desires that people have strong reasons to change" etc. will convey exactly what you need to convey, with no ambiguity. However, I strongly suspect that most people will just give you funny looks and go, "Yes, but is it right?"<br /><br />As for the content of your second post; I apologise, I think the fault lies with me being unclear. I didn't mean "enlightened self-interest" in the sense you seem to think I did. It wasn't meant to be a *theory* of any kind, rather a category in which we place certain kinds of reasoning. What I had in mind was rather the following: granted that the only reasons that people have are desires, often people acting in "self-interest" (where this just means according to their desires, but I would say also perhaps in conflict with any moral imperatives; of course, you would disagree...) can be quite short-sighted, and ignore complex interactions that may nonetheless be relevant to the fulfilment of their desires. For example, the high-level facts that desirism talks about. When we explain why someone performed an action that doesn't obviously lead directly to something they desire, then we often say they acted in "enlightened self-interest", that is, they realised their aims could be furthered by, say, helping others, even if that was not one of their aims itself. And that kind of reasoning seems to include the kind that desirism would count as "moral".<br />Whereas, in fact, moral reasoning seems to be a quite different category of reasoning.<br /><br />Apologies for the long posts!MichaelPJhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11079832732345647724noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16594468.post-41706909266242271682011-06-17T16:23:29.954-06:002011-06-17T16:23:29.954-06:00I see you've split your response to me into tw...I see you've split your response to me into two posts, which makes sense. I'm just going to respond entirely here, if you don't mind, just to avoid repeating myself and so on.<br /><br />Firstly, I think you're strawmanning me a little bit. In particular, moral anti-realism is a philosophical position. I'm not sure it means anything much at all to most people, and in the philosophical context it *certainly* doesn't indicate the loss of all restraint. It may indeed indicate the loss of *some* restraints, but in particular anti-realists certainly don't deny the existence of desire-based reasons to act, or even of the higher level reasons that you're calling "moral". Moral anti-realists *do* often deny, for example, that there is anything that can give us a reason independent of our desires; something which you agree with!<br /><br />(By the way, I've remembered about <a href="http://jetpress.org/v21/blackford3.htm" rel="nofollow">this</a>, which although it's a review, lays out a lot of the anti-realist's points pretty well. In case you're interested.)<br /><br />Now, the fact that desirism, say, actually *does* a lot of what we expect from morality is again *precisely* what you often see as a kind of "second phase" of anti-realism: pointing out that there are reasonable substitutes for morality such that most of what we do still makes sense.<br /><br />Even if you don't accept the position, I'd like to persuade you that the claim that "morality" doesn't exist, but that there's something very close, but lacking the categoricity is very similar to your claim that morality exists, it just never involved categoricity in the first place.<br />(Compare: "phlogiston doesn't exist, but we have something almost as good in terms of oxidation"; vs "phlogiston does exist, it's just that we were talking about oxidation all along") <br /><br />Lo, my comment is too long; more following.MichaelPJhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11079832732345647724noreply@blogger.com