Notes

I think that something else still needs to be said about moral motives. It is, at least generally, a morally acceptable reason to do something because it is right. However, if one does something because it is right, one is presumably thereby not doing it out of inclination. My moral observation compels me to believe that this girl helped this person for the right reasons. Yet at the same time, the act seems clearly to have been performed out of inclination. I would not claim that just any inclination, however, would be of moral worth. It is for this reason that it is perhaps worth exploring more deeply what consistutes a good inclination. Suppose that one were to ask this girl why she helped this person. If she said, "Because it gave me pleasure," that is not a moral reason. But note also that if she said, "Because I felt like it" or even "Because I felt sorry for her", I do not consider those moral reasons either. But if she said "Because she was up...

On Friday I decided that one treated people as ends in themselves by not harming them. Is that all that is required in order to treat people as ends in themselves? Peter Singer would surely claim that we also had duties to help people. But I do wonder whether any such duty is really consistent with treating people as ends in themselves. We are simply considering this from the point of view of the helper. But what about the helpee? If I found myself down on my luck, then would it not be selfish for me to expect that anybody else had a duty to help me? One difficulty here is that I have never been in a situation where I have felt like I actually needed anybody else's help. I don't think that I have ever asked anybody for help in my life, and I probably would feel selfish if I did anything like that. I am not the only person to have this sentiment. I think that we have all heard of people who are too proud to accept charity. I certainly do not refuse help if someone offers it to m...

I think we want to elaborate on a philosophical point from yesterday. I would examine further what it actually means to treat people as ends in themselves. It is a rather vague phrase. I actually think that it may be clearer to think of it as the negation of treating people as mere means to ends. I have much clearer intuitions about what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. The run-over fat man from yesterday's entry is clearly being treated as a mere means to an end. It also clarifies what I think is wrong in various other counterexamples to utilitarianism that I have heard over the years. One of them, for example, involves killing someone so that her organs can be used to save the lives of four other people. She is also being used as a mere means to an end. What do these two instances have in common with each other? Given them, I can see two different ways of interpreting what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. First, it could be that they are be...

Would you say that helping someone out of sympathy is not an act of self-interest? I know that I said something similar to this in my Masters' thesis. I don't know. It seems to me to be an act of self-interest, because you are technically acting out of concern for your own interests. But I still consider that it is importantly different from the kind of self-interest that is thought to negate moral worth in actions. First, it is not mere self-interest. You are clearly also acting out of concern for the interests of the other person. Unless other people have some kind of intrinsic value in your motivations, then I do not believe that those motivations could ever be called "moral". Second, those other people's interests are necessarily connected with your own self-interest. A proper motivation of empathy cannot fail to feel something of others' joys and sorrows as if they were your own. Hence, your own interests cannot contradict the interests of the other peo...

I have thought of an objection to my counterexample from yesterday. Specifically I am thinking of the claim that the girl did not approach the crying woman out of pleasure. On the one hand, I am sure that she did it out of sympathy, which is importantly different from pleasure. On the other hand, I can still see a Kantian objection to which that motive would be vulnerable. One could argue that in feeling this sympathy she felt something of the woman's pain. It does not sound like it would be of moral worth if the girl did what she did in order to relieve her own pain. If that was indeed the motive, then I seem to be forced to agree with this. It is not morally praiseworthy to do something simply because it is in one's own interests. And yet, look at how different this kind of motive is from what some egoists call "enlightened self-interest". Enlightened self-interest involves acts of reciprocity. Hence, there is a gap in the time between when the other person's in...

I saw a convincing counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth this morning. While we were still riding through the Inner West on the train, a woman in front of me burst into tears. She was talking to someone on her mobile phone. Her sobs were so great that I could make out almost none of what she was saying. But it seems that she had just found out that someone close to her had died. She was going to call work and then she was going to go straight back home. As the train was starting to empty at Central, a girl on the other side of the aisle took her by the shoulder and asked her if she was okay, and whether she would like a glass of water. The woman started to talk to her a little about what had happened. Again, I could make out very little of it, but the girl decided to sit with this person and unpack her things by her. Apparently she was going to say with her until she got onto a train back to the Mountains. It seemed obvious that this was an act performed out of inclination...