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Two Kinds of Moral Reasoning: Ethical Egoism as A Moral Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jesse Kalin
Jesse Kalin*
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

Ethical egoism, when summarized into a single ethical principle, is the position that a person ought, all things considered, to do an action if and only if that action is in his overall self-interest. The criticisms standardly advanced against this view try to show either that it is subject to some fatal logical flaw or else that, even if logically coherent, it can give no account of the basic parts of morality. Both these objections are mistaken, however, and it is the point of this paper to make this clear. Central to my argument is the distinction drawn in Section 1 between two kinds of moral reasoning and hence two kinds of moral reasons. I call these ‘traditional’ and ‘nontraditional’ (the latter could be termed ‘conventional’ or ‘institutional’ without much change of meaning). Both are present in the writings of contemporary moral philosophers but have not been emphasized or seen as crucial.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 1975 , pp. 323 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1 For the purposes of this paper, I shall accept this distinction as valid and consider 'moral’ to have a technical philosophic sense excluding egoism. See note 3 and Section 8.

2 Modern writers presenting a version of this conception include Grice, Russell in The Grounds of Moral Judgement (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, who tries to use it to establish a form of utilitarianism; Baier, Kurt in The Moral Point of View (New York; Random House, 1965)Google Scholar; Brandt, Richard in “Rationality, Egoism, and Morality,” journal of Philosophy, v. 69, no. 20, Nov. 9, 1972, pp. 681-697CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scriven, Michael in his chapter “Morality” from Primary Philosophy(New York; McGraw-Hill, 1966).Google Scholar

3 It is because of this variability in determinate principles that content is not a defining feature of morality. Rather, something is a morality in the technical sense used by this paper in virtue of the presence of most of a set of interpersonal activities which include praising, blaming, advising, punishing, excusing and justifying, and which are a necessary background for such moral attitudes and emotions as remorse, resentment, repentance, forgiveness, and vengeance. Thus, “adopting the moral point of view” is best understood as engaging in and submitting to these activities thereby making oneself vulnerable to their accompanying attitudes and emotions.

4 Rawls, John “Justice as Fairness,” Philosophical Review, v.67, 1958, pp. 169–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Previous defenses of egoism in the literature which are relevant here include my articles: “On Ethical Egoism,” American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph No.1, 1969, pp. 26-41; “In Defense of Egoism,” in Gauthier, David ed., Morality and Rational Self-Interest(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 64- 87Google Scholar; and “Baier's Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Philosophical Studies, v. 22,1971, pp. 74-78.

6 Campbell, Richmond”A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Canadian journal of Philosophy, v. 2, no. 2, Dec.1972, pp. 249-54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘lEE’stands for Impersonal Ethical Egoism, “the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation”(p. 249).

7 This argument is even more persuasive if one substitutes for ‘it ought to be the case that M do X in S', ‘X ought to be done in S'. Then, if (i) were not correct one could conclude that “X ought to be done in S and -X (or Y) ought to be done in S.” And, indeed, Campbell understands the argument in this way: “This use of 'ought’ is, I take it, unconditional or categorical in that it entails that both X and Y ought to be done, together, and hence that it is possible for both to be done either simultaneously or in sequence” (p. 252).

8 See Baier's The Moral Point of View, pp. 95-96, and my ‘'Baier's Refutation of Ethical Egoism.” In a recent reply to this article, Baier, has substituted the principle “One ought never to aim at preventing another from doing what he ought“ (see “Ethical Egoism and Interpersonal Compatibility,” Philosophical Studies, v. 24, 1973, pp. 357–368).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Quinn, Warren “Egoism as an Ethical System,” Journal of Philosophy, v. 71, no. 14, Aug. 15,1974, p. 460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I have altered Quinn's formulation here, and in the next principle, by dropping the ‘morally’ from before the ‘ought’ to keep it consistent with premise (i). This use of ‘moral’ is discussed in Section 8.

10 Quinn, p. 460. Kant uses a similar principle in the fourth illustration of the Categorical Imperative.

11 Carlson, George R. “Ethical Egoism Reconsidered,” American Philosophical Quarterly, v. 10, no. 1, Jan. 1973, pp. 25-33.Google Scholar Carlson is referring to my article “In Defense of Egoism.“

12 Warren Quinn, “Egoism as an Ethical System,” pp. 465-466.

13 If my analysis shows that P4 is not sound, then Quinn's argument fails, for on the basis of it he wishes to show that “the egoist must admit the moral desirability of other people doing as they, all things considered, morally ought” and must therefore “further recognize a moral consideration in favor of his helping to make it the case that they do so” (p. 469). But it might be that my analysis is irrelevant to P4. Even though Quinn presents himself as demonstrating that directives in an ethical system such as egoism must imply some kind of goodness, in which case counter-examples are relevant, it may be that P4 is true merely in virtue of Quinn's special understanding of ‘impersonal system'. Unless I have missed something, he seems to say that a system 5 must be an evaluative system and that it is an impersonal one if it contains” approbatives” of the form “It is good (bad, etc.) that P” (see pp. 462-63). If this is what makes P4 true, then Quinn must also show that ethical egoism is necessarily an impersonal system in his sense. This he tries unsuccessfully to do in section VI of his paper (see pp. 351-2 below for a discussion of this argument). In either case his argument fails.

14 Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 98–99.Google Scholar

15 An attempt to make Moore's argument work is made by Nagel, Thomas in The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1970), Part Three, pp. 79-146.Google Scholar I believe it fails for essentially the same reasons given in this section.

16 Kurt Baier, “Ethical Egoism and Interpersonal Compatibility,” pp. 358–62.

17 Baier notes that the egoist might reply in this way and says that this account of “right” will fail. though he does not in this article say why (p. 362). I do not see what his argument could be unless it in some way involves the view that reasons cannot be person-relative and I’ commits one to II'.

18 That Quinn does not mean ‘correct’ or ‘justified’is shown by his subsequent remark: “Moreover, the goodness involved in rightness is obviously a result of the good aspects of the right act …. Thus, moral rightness must derive from a type of moral goodness which … would seem to be impersonal” (p. 472).

19 Principia Ethica, pp. 24-25 (the emphasis on ‘mean’ is mine). The subsequent quotes from Moore are also from this work. A similar view is advanced by Narveson, Jan in Morality and Utility (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 268- 71.Google Scholar

20 Frankena, William “The Concept of Morality,” Journal of Philosophy, v. 63, no. 21, Nov. 10, 1966, pp. 688-96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 The egoist will accordingly modify Frankena's definition of the narrower sense by adding to the third condition the phrase “within the activity of interpersonal reasoning.“

22 It is now misleading to say ‘prudential’ theory and ‘prudential sense of” ought“' because all our ordinary talk about prudence occurs within a strong, interpersonal context, where it is implicit that such reasons are limited in force. Morality, that is, recognizes prudence as a virtue among other virtues, and treats it accordingly. Prudence is founded, for instance, not on I', but on the moral obligation to look after our own well-being as well as the well-being of others. Hence it does not deny the soundness of II'. Ethical egoism, while related, is not prudence in this sense. Baier, for instance, frequently refers to egoism as that part of practical discourse which is “prudential” (see “Ethical Egoism and Interpersonal Compatibility,” pp. 362-67) and it may be this misclassification which makes him so convinced that moral reasons are always superior to egoistic (or ethical) ones, since moral reasons are always superior to (merely) prudential ones.