Fun post! I like Parfit's argument from analogy, but don't think either horn of your first argument really works:
1. God could reward irrationality. In that case, it would be rational to *acquire* this irrational state. But it doesn't make the state itself rational.
2. I don't think it's "clearly irrational" to have extra degreed concern in proportion to degrees of similarity (possibly in combination with the right kind of causal connectedness). When I think about Parfitian identity-spectrum cases, for example, it seems entirely intuitive to think that my degree of prudential concern for the resulting person should be proportional to how much of "me" survives in them. It also seems that I have more self-interested reason to care about the myself of next year than the (more different) myself of decades hence.
Very interesting post, I'm glad I read this! But this all relies on moral realism being true (I think?): If morality is subjective, then your moral goals (e.g minimising suffering) are just things that you desire rather than objective moral obligations. So if you buy a coffee for $5 instead of donating it, even if you consider yourself utilitarian, then that is selfish (according to your own subjective moral axioms/beliefs) - But it can't be irrational because you're just doing what you desire in the moment, which might be all that morality is. I believe you're a moral realist anyways, but do you think this logic holds if we assume moral anti-realism for a second?
I am a philosophical altruist, but I will make a devil's advocate argument for egoism based on personal identity. While it might be true that we are in some sense a "different person" than we were when we were 8, and will also be different by the time we're 80, there is something past and future selves have relative to us that truly other people don't. That is a continuous stream of first-person perspective. My 8 year old self took part in a stream of qualia that I still have memory of now, and when I am 80 I will likewise have memory of present qualia. Meanwhile, qualia of truly other people are completely off-limits to me. They will never be part of my stream of consciousness nor will I remember them. So long as we recognize that there is some first-person experiential subject that experiences "its own" qualia over time, but never those of other people, there is a sense in which it is sensible to privilege the past and future self over true others. Simply put, I have felt and will feel my share of the world's experience, and will never feel that of anyone else, so it makes sense to privilege benefiting my own experience over that which I will never feel.
Point 1 doesn't work, because either are unselfish out of gratitude, you love because he first loved us, or you are unselfish out of fear, and that cannot work long term because the fear of eternal punishment or missing out on external rewards just isn't strong enough. Even then this is stupid because a lot of people come to God because they are broken or flawed and need him; they aren't full to begin with to be able to act unselfishly, and it may be a sign of God that they change even a little over time.
Point 2, ugh. seriously, this is stupid. Yes, people change over time, but they don't change into an entirely different person. That's just a figure of speech meaning they believe different things. Even if your brother changes, he is still recognizable as your brother and still has the history and memories that link you to him. A seed for an oak tree will not grow into a cat.
Point 3 is kind of dumb also, if people can't manage even to take care of themselves, who they do know, how can they do so with someone they barely know in part? They would need to fix themselves then worry about others, because it's harder to help people you don't know than people you do.
You need to be careful about trying to solve everything intellectually. Effective Altruism is turning into ineffective altruism because it's doing stuff like this argument; shearing things like unselfishness from the real world and turning them into intellectual concepts divorced from existence. You can try to be a little better, you can't just be something even Jesus Christ wasn't.
I worry about thought experiments which don’t justify their relevance. You can’t turn me gradually into Barbara. You can turn 4 year old me gradually (a day at a time) into 40 year old me. They aren’t equivalent.
If I cut off your leg and Barbara's leg and grafted Barbara's leg onto your body, the overlap between your new atoms and pre-amputation-Barbara's atoms would be much greater than the overlap between 4-year-old you's atoms and 40-year-old you's atoms.
But this is a discussion about gradual change. The point I’m trying to make about thought experiments is you need to show they are actually relevant for the argument.
Im a christian but still a little bit puzzled by your 'if God exists' scenario. Morality (to me at least) seems tobe obviously decided by intentions. Setting out to be less selfish because God will reward you for it does not seem like a good intention because you still have selfish intentions, you are just being optimally selfish by helping others.
Does helping others only for your selfinterest make you better than a person acting selfishly only for their selfinterest?
True but that does not really answer my question. Of course it would be better for the world if a person did a good thing with purely selfish motivations but it would not make him a better person right?
"So then if atheism is true, personal identity is sufficiently unreal not to be the source of reasons."
I think this proves too much, and not for reasons that specifically have to do with personal identity. Personal identity isn't *unusually* vague or indeterminate compared to lots of other stuff we care about. The logical endpoint of this style of argument is that the only thing we can rationally care about is the distribution of fundamental particles, or what the state of the universal wave function is, or some other type of fact for which we have some kind of strong guarantee that no vagueness/indeterminacy could arise. But none of our actual concerns are like that.
Alternatively, the atheism horn of the argument, if successful, hits a lot more than just selfishness!
With the other things, I think there's some potentially important joint-carving specification. E.g. doesn't seem bad to assign some modest intrinsic value to friendship given some specific way of defending it.
This is one of the better arguments for hedonism imo--that pleasure is most plausibly joint-carving.
Friendship will be just as vague and indeterminate--more so, no?--than identity. The same spectrum/sorites style arguments Parfit uses to argue that identity can be vague/indeterminate will work for friendship too. Start with a case where you're friends with someone, modify it bit by bit to end up with a case where you're enemies, hard to say just when you stop being friends. (Of course, you can think of friendship as a matter of degree, which is very natural, but you can make the same sort of move to save self-interested concern, as Richard suggests above.)
As for hedonism, I agree, with the important caveat that this sort of argument only works for a very particular sort of non-materialist about the mind. You need to think, not just that mental facts are fundamental (so all forms of materialism are out), but pleasure facts are among the metaphysically fundamental mental facts. Maybe that's not a big bullet to bite if you already like dualism/idealism, I'm not sure.
Your argument depends on what you mean by "selfishness." If you mean valuing yourself at 100% and everyone else at 0%, then it works for these and lots of other reasons. If you mean valuing yourself at 100% and everyone else at 100% then this gives no guidance at all. For example, giving all your money (or all your money above the world average) to others would be equivalent to moving your money from one pocket to another (or one bank to another). That seems silly.
I think a better model would be that others should simply enter into your utility function. For example, your utility function would be U(X,P) = U(X) + sum of U(p sub i)*alpha sub i, where X is a large vector of the state of the world for you (all goods and services you consume, now and in the future) and P is a vector of every other person (p sub 1, p sub 2, ... p sub n) multiplied by alpha sub i (0 <= alpha sub i, and probably <= 1 for almost everyone but perhaps > 1 for someone you love). That is, you include everyone else's utility function in yours.
The strong version of your argument is that alpha = 1 for everyone. This seems incorrect, certainly descriptively and probably normatively. I don't think God will punish you or fail to reward you in the afterlife for not giving away everything above the world average. And I don't think people are unable to distinguish meaningfully between themselves and others, despite the fact that there are an infinite number of small changes between you and Barbara and you and your 4-year-old self.
But setting alpha = 0 for everyone is pure selfishness and irrational.
One interesting question is whether alpha can have different values for different people. Can we value our children, parent, family, friends, community more than distant strangers? I think so. How much more? Tricky question.
Separate question: can alpha be negative for someone? That is, can we value the disutility of an enemy?
All of these are arguments for the second thing. "I don't think God will punish you or fail to reward you in the afterlife for not giving away everything above the world average"
There's some reasonable chance of getting reward proportional to the effort put in.
I am incredibly sympathetic to the arguments here, and am grateful for the post, but I have trouble resolving some counterarguments to the "atheism" points (having not read Parfit).
I can think of one distinguishing property that seems to be a "genuine reason" to care more about your future self over others: your continuous stream of subjective experience. "I care about me more because I know that I will have that person's experience and personally suffer the consequences!"
A counter to this might then be: "but why does it matter that you will experience it personally rather than someone else?," in which case one might reply "because I care about my future self more due to the continuous experience stream", and it's not clear how this is resolved.
And for those of us who consider the existance of a creator as beyond proof or disproof we realise how little it matters. So understanding ourselves and the people around us we recognise that everyone is equally unimportant and act on that to do our best to care about everyone equally.
However, if God exists, then one may still choose to adopt a sense of personal identity based on relatedness, which tends to defuse any arguments based on infinite rewards. My identity is so fundamentally driven by finite time, finite memory, and finite happiness that any being without those limitations is effectively a different person, even if they start with my memories and my soul (whatever that is). I wish that being well, but I don’t adopt their utility as my own.
Fun essay! don't quite see how theism resolves the considerations that push Parfit to reductionism. Theists like John Finnis conceive of the soul as a bare substrate onto which memories and personality traits are imprinted. Parfit calls this the Featureless Cartesian view of the soul, and offers this memorable reductio to show its unintelligibility:
"On this Featureless Cartesian View, while you are reading this page of text, you might suddenly cease to exist, and your body be taken over by some new person who is merely exactly like you. If this happened, no one would notice any difference. There would not be any evidence, public or private, showing whether or not this happens, and, if so, how often. We therefore cannot even claim that it is unlikely to happen. And there are other possibilities. On this view, history might have gone just as it did, except that I was Napoleon and he was me. This is not the claim that Derek Parfit might have been Napoleon. The claim is rather that I am one Cartesian Ego, and that Napoleon was another, and that these two Egos might have 'occupied' each other's places."
If the God branch of your dilemma can't be made intelligible, we're left the athiest branch, and the conclusion that selfishness is less rational than we generally suppose. Of course, one could attempt to show that there are utilitarian arguments in favour of selfishness, or in favour of developing psychological traits that may entail a degree of selfishness. Rawls understands your good as a living a life ordered around a rational long-term plan; satisfying considered desires over the course of lifetime. It seems to me that this conception of the good might be rational irrespective of whether reductionism is true.
These don't seem bad to me! It does actually seem like it could be that you were replaced with an exact mental and physical clone! So I don't take this to be a reductio--I take it to be a supporting example.
I just don’t see how you could know, or believe with any confidence whatseover, that your featureless Cartesian soul exists. As Parfit puts it,
“When the belief in Cartesian Egos is in this way cut loose from any connections with either publicly observable or privately introspectible facts, the charge that it is unintelligible becomes more plausible. ”
The "God" section fails because given there is a god, we have no evidence what kind of god it is. It's equally likely that it would punish us for selfless behavior as that it would reward us.
No, Smart People™ believing in Pro-Selfless gods does not constitute evidence towards those gods existing. Smart people don't have divine insight.
The "Atheism" section fails because identity being complicated doesn't prove that selfishness is irrational. Yes, it's mushy, so what? We can't pin down identity and subjective experience scientifically, so what? We still experience it day to day. I have the experience of going from a middle schooler to a high schooler to an adult, and I am reasonably sure I will experience the future of this body as well. On the other hand, I will *not* feel what it's like to be some guy from the other end of the earth. This is a rational argument for selfishness.
Note that I don't endorse selfishness, I'm just saying that it's not any less rational than your (and my!) utilitarianism.
Fun post! I like Parfit's argument from analogy, but don't think either horn of your first argument really works:
1. God could reward irrationality. In that case, it would be rational to *acquire* this irrational state. But it doesn't make the state itself rational.
2. I don't think it's "clearly irrational" to have extra degreed concern in proportion to degrees of similarity (possibly in combination with the right kind of causal connectedness). When I think about Parfitian identity-spectrum cases, for example, it seems entirely intuitive to think that my degree of prudential concern for the resulting person should be proportional to how much of "me" survives in them. It also seems that I have more self-interested reason to care about the myself of next year than the (more different) myself of decades hence.
Very interesting post, I'm glad I read this! But this all relies on moral realism being true (I think?): If morality is subjective, then your moral goals (e.g minimising suffering) are just things that you desire rather than objective moral obligations. So if you buy a coffee for $5 instead of donating it, even if you consider yourself utilitarian, then that is selfish (according to your own subjective moral axioms/beliefs) - But it can't be irrational because you're just doing what you desire in the moment, which might be all that morality is. I believe you're a moral realist anyways, but do you think this logic holds if we assume moral anti-realism for a second?
Agree the arguments work better on realism. But they also give some reason to think an anti-realist's reflective values would be selfless.
I am a philosophical altruist, but I will make a devil's advocate argument for egoism based on personal identity. While it might be true that we are in some sense a "different person" than we were when we were 8, and will also be different by the time we're 80, there is something past and future selves have relative to us that truly other people don't. That is a continuous stream of first-person perspective. My 8 year old self took part in a stream of qualia that I still have memory of now, and when I am 80 I will likewise have memory of present qualia. Meanwhile, qualia of truly other people are completely off-limits to me. They will never be part of my stream of consciousness nor will I remember them. So long as we recognize that there is some first-person experiential subject that experiences "its own" qualia over time, but never those of other people, there is a sense in which it is sensible to privilege the past and future self over true others. Simply put, I have felt and will feel my share of the world's experience, and will never feel that of anyone else, so it makes sense to privilege benefiting my own experience over that which I will never feel.
Point 1 doesn't work, because either are unselfish out of gratitude, you love because he first loved us, or you are unselfish out of fear, and that cannot work long term because the fear of eternal punishment or missing out on external rewards just isn't strong enough. Even then this is stupid because a lot of people come to God because they are broken or flawed and need him; they aren't full to begin with to be able to act unselfishly, and it may be a sign of God that they change even a little over time.
Point 2, ugh. seriously, this is stupid. Yes, people change over time, but they don't change into an entirely different person. That's just a figure of speech meaning they believe different things. Even if your brother changes, he is still recognizable as your brother and still has the history and memories that link you to him. A seed for an oak tree will not grow into a cat.
Point 3 is kind of dumb also, if people can't manage even to take care of themselves, who they do know, how can they do so with someone they barely know in part? They would need to fix themselves then worry about others, because it's harder to help people you don't know than people you do.
You need to be careful about trying to solve everything intellectually. Effective Altruism is turning into ineffective altruism because it's doing stuff like this argument; shearing things like unselfishness from the real world and turning them into intellectual concepts divorced from existence. You can try to be a little better, you can't just be something even Jesus Christ wasn't.
I worry about thought experiments which don’t justify their relevance. You can’t turn me gradually into Barbara. You can turn 4 year old me gradually (a day at a time) into 40 year old me. They aren’t equivalent.
If I cut off your leg and Barbara's leg and grafted Barbara's leg onto your body, the overlap between your new atoms and pre-amputation-Barbara's atoms would be much greater than the overlap between 4-year-old you's atoms and 40-year-old you's atoms.
Sounds like a very strong argument against materialism, since it is obvious he will not resemble Barbara more after that grafting.
However, I recall that people that receive heart transplants do gain traits from the donor.
But this is a discussion about gradual change. The point I’m trying to make about thought experiments is you need to show they are actually relevant for the argument.
Im a christian but still a little bit puzzled by your 'if God exists' scenario. Morality (to me at least) seems tobe obviously decided by intentions. Setting out to be less selfish because God will reward you for it does not seem like a good intention because you still have selfish intentions, you are just being optimally selfish by helping others.
Does helping others only for your selfinterest make you better than a person acting selfishly only for their selfinterest?
I agree that it would reflect a bad disposition. But it would be better to help others for selfish reasons than not to help them at all.
True but that does not really answer my question. Of course it would be better for the world if a person did a good thing with purely selfish motivations but it would not make him a better person right?
"So then if atheism is true, personal identity is sufficiently unreal not to be the source of reasons."
I think this proves too much, and not for reasons that specifically have to do with personal identity. Personal identity isn't *unusually* vague or indeterminate compared to lots of other stuff we care about. The logical endpoint of this style of argument is that the only thing we can rationally care about is the distribution of fundamental particles, or what the state of the universal wave function is, or some other type of fact for which we have some kind of strong guarantee that no vagueness/indeterminacy could arise. But none of our actual concerns are like that.
Alternatively, the atheism horn of the argument, if successful, hits a lot more than just selfishness!
With the other things, I think there's some potentially important joint-carving specification. E.g. doesn't seem bad to assign some modest intrinsic value to friendship given some specific way of defending it.
This is one of the better arguments for hedonism imo--that pleasure is most plausibly joint-carving.
Friendship will be just as vague and indeterminate--more so, no?--than identity. The same spectrum/sorites style arguments Parfit uses to argue that identity can be vague/indeterminate will work for friendship too. Start with a case where you're friends with someone, modify it bit by bit to end up with a case where you're enemies, hard to say just when you stop being friends. (Of course, you can think of friendship as a matter of degree, which is very natural, but you can make the same sort of move to save self-interested concern, as Richard suggests above.)
As for hedonism, I agree, with the important caveat that this sort of argument only works for a very particular sort of non-materialist about the mind. You need to think, not just that mental facts are fundamental (so all forms of materialism are out), but pleasure facts are among the metaphysically fundamental mental facts. Maybe that's not a big bullet to bite if you already like dualism/idealism, I'm not sure.
Self-interest being a matter of degree seems a lot weirder than friendship being a matter of degree!
Your argument depends on what you mean by "selfishness." If you mean valuing yourself at 100% and everyone else at 0%, then it works for these and lots of other reasons. If you mean valuing yourself at 100% and everyone else at 100% then this gives no guidance at all. For example, giving all your money (or all your money above the world average) to others would be equivalent to moving your money from one pocket to another (or one bank to another). That seems silly.
I think a better model would be that others should simply enter into your utility function. For example, your utility function would be U(X,P) = U(X) + sum of U(p sub i)*alpha sub i, where X is a large vector of the state of the world for you (all goods and services you consume, now and in the future) and P is a vector of every other person (p sub 1, p sub 2, ... p sub n) multiplied by alpha sub i (0 <= alpha sub i, and probably <= 1 for almost everyone but perhaps > 1 for someone you love). That is, you include everyone else's utility function in yours.
The strong version of your argument is that alpha = 1 for everyone. This seems incorrect, certainly descriptively and probably normatively. I don't think God will punish you or fail to reward you in the afterlife for not giving away everything above the world average. And I don't think people are unable to distinguish meaningfully between themselves and others, despite the fact that there are an infinite number of small changes between you and Barbara and you and your 4-year-old self.
But setting alpha = 0 for everyone is pure selfishness and irrational.
One interesting question is whether alpha can have different values for different people. Can we value our children, parent, family, friends, community more than distant strangers? I think so. How much more? Tricky question.
Separate question: can alpha be negative for someone? That is, can we value the disutility of an enemy?
All of these are arguments for the second thing. "I don't think God will punish you or fail to reward you in the afterlife for not giving away everything above the world average"
There's some reasonable chance of getting reward proportional to the effort put in.
And you you're a two-boxer...maybe if you look at Parfit's "Traveling Hitchhiker" rather than Newcomb's transparent box?
I don’t care
I am incredibly sympathetic to the arguments here, and am grateful for the post, but I have trouble resolving some counterarguments to the "atheism" points (having not read Parfit).
I can think of one distinguishing property that seems to be a "genuine reason" to care more about your future self over others: your continuous stream of subjective experience. "I care about me more because I know that I will have that person's experience and personally suffer the consequences!"
A counter to this might then be: "but why does it matter that you will experience it personally rather than someone else?," in which case one might reply "because I care about my future self more due to the continuous experience stream", and it's not clear how this is resolved.
You said before that you accepted that Souls exist and this was before you accepted theism.
And for those of us who consider the existance of a creator as beyond proof or disproof we realise how little it matters. So understanding ourselves and the people around us we recognise that everyone is equally unimportant and act on that to do our best to care about everyone equally.
Issues of nationalism get in the way for many.
However, if God exists, then one may still choose to adopt a sense of personal identity based on relatedness, which tends to defuse any arguments based on infinite rewards. My identity is so fundamentally driven by finite time, finite memory, and finite happiness that any being without those limitations is effectively a different person, even if they start with my memories and my soul (whatever that is). I wish that being well, but I don’t adopt their utility as my own.
Well there's a non-zero chance that they're the same entity. And there's infinite reward in finite time.
Fun essay! don't quite see how theism resolves the considerations that push Parfit to reductionism. Theists like John Finnis conceive of the soul as a bare substrate onto which memories and personality traits are imprinted. Parfit calls this the Featureless Cartesian view of the soul, and offers this memorable reductio to show its unintelligibility:
"On this Featureless Cartesian View, while you are reading this page of text, you might suddenly cease to exist, and your body be taken over by some new person who is merely exactly like you. If this happened, no one would notice any difference. There would not be any evidence, public or private, showing whether or not this happens, and, if so, how often. We therefore cannot even claim that it is unlikely to happen. And there are other possibilities. On this view, history might have gone just as it did, except that I was Napoleon and he was me. This is not the claim that Derek Parfit might have been Napoleon. The claim is rather that I am one Cartesian Ego, and that Napoleon was another, and that these two Egos might have 'occupied' each other's places."
If the God branch of your dilemma can't be made intelligible, we're left the athiest branch, and the conclusion that selfishness is less rational than we generally suppose. Of course, one could attempt to show that there are utilitarian arguments in favour of selfishness, or in favour of developing psychological traits that may entail a degree of selfishness. Rawls understands your good as a living a life ordered around a rational long-term plan; satisfying considered desires over the course of lifetime. It seems to me that this conception of the good might be rational irrespective of whether reductionism is true.
These don't seem bad to me! It does actually seem like it could be that you were replaced with an exact mental and physical clone! So I don't take this to be a reductio--I take it to be a supporting example.
Also doesn't seem that weird that you and Napoleon could swap. If your experiences can change over time, why can't you have the experiences that Napoleon has? Seems strange but not inconceivable. For more, see https://capturingchristianity.com/do-humans-have-souls-yes-for-two-reasons/ and https://capturingchristianity.com/two-more-arguments-for-substance-dualism/
I just don’t see how you could know, or believe with any confidence whatseover, that your featureless Cartesian soul exists. As Parfit puts it,
“When the belief in Cartesian Egos is in this way cut loose from any connections with either publicly observable or privately introspectible facts, the charge that it is unintelligible becomes more plausible. ”
The "God" section fails because given there is a god, we have no evidence what kind of god it is. It's equally likely that it would punish us for selfless behavior as that it would reward us.
No, Smart People™ believing in Pro-Selfless gods does not constitute evidence towards those gods existing. Smart people don't have divine insight.
The "Atheism" section fails because identity being complicated doesn't prove that selfishness is irrational. Yes, it's mushy, so what? We can't pin down identity and subjective experience scientifically, so what? We still experience it day to day. I have the experience of going from a middle schooler to a high schooler to an adult, and I am reasonably sure I will experience the future of this body as well. On the other hand, I will *not* feel what it's like to be some guy from the other end of the earth. This is a rational argument for selfishness.
Note that I don't endorse selfishness, I'm just saying that it's not any less rational than your (and my!) utilitarianism.