Online research in philosophy

Egoism is the doctrine that one ought to act only for self-interested reasons. I shall be concerned with the presupposition of egoism: acting only for self-interested reasons is in one's long-term interest. I shall be concerned with this presupposition's truth with respect only to cases in which one's interests conflict with those of others. So I shall be concerned with this affiliated egoistic doctrine (call it the 'doctrine of advantage'); in cases of conflict between one's interests and those of others, acting only for self-interested reasons tends to be in one's long-term interest. With respect to conflict of interests' cases, I refer to one's best all-things-considered interests at the time. However, no one or few people know accurately their actual, all-things-considered, long-term interests and perhaps few their all-things-considered immediate interests. Also, by 'advantage', I refer both to the acquisition of Moorean-type intrinsic goods and common naturalistic goods like wealth, power, pleasure, etc. By 'naturalistic goods', I mean some human ends considered valuable by reasons reducible to natural selection and, possibly, social conventions. I also assume that conflicts of interests occur regularly throughout everyone's lifetime, owing to different human needs and wants, scarcity of resources, etc.

Many teachers in teacher education programs are cursorily introduced to Dewey's ‘epochmaking’ ideas on interest and effort through discussions based on the need for child-centered pedagogies that utilize students' interests. Unfortunately, this strategy often tacitly encourages teachers to over-rely on students' interests. In this paper, I recommend a way of introducing Dewey's conception of interest that avoids the common pitfall of over-reliance on students' interests. I argue that if we focus on the changes Dewey made to the expression of his philosophy during a seventeen-year period, we can help illuminate the force of his theory while protecting against unfortunate misinterpretations.

This paper examines whether non-human animals have a moral right not to be experimented upon. It adopts a Razian conception of rights, whereby an individual possesses a right if an interest of that individual is sufficient to impose a duty on another. To ascertain whether animals have a right not to be experimented on, three interests are examined which might found such a right: the interest in not suffering, the interest in staying alive, and the interest in being free. It is argued that while the first two of these interests are sufficient to ground animal rights against being killed and made to suffer by experiments, the interest in freedom does not ground a general animal right not to be used in experimentation.

Although the idea of the public interest features prominently in many accounts of deliberative democracy, the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest is rarely spelt out with any degree of precision. In this article, I identify and defend one particular way of framing this relationship. I begin by arguing that people can deliberate about the public interest only if the public interest is, in principle, identifiable independently of their deliberations. Of course, some pluralists claim that the public interest is an implausible idea, which casts doubt on the idea that there might be something for people to deliberate about. Yet while, following Brian Barry, we can get around this problem by defining the public interest as an interest in which everyone shares qua member of the public, what still needs to be explained is why people should be prepared to privilege this particular capacity. I argue that the account of political equality with which deliberative democracy is bound up offers a compelling explanation of this sort, even if it also gives rise to some difficult questions of feasibility. I conclude by considering the charge that any political scheme that framed the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest in this way would be undesirable.

For many, it is far from clear where the prerogatives of parents to educate as they deem appropriate end and the interests of their children, immediate or future, begin. In this article I consider the educational interests of children and argue that children have an interest in their own well-being. Following this, I will examine the interests of parents and consider where the limits of paternalism lie. Finally, I will consider the state's interest in the education of children and discuss a familiar view that argues that we have a central obligation to cultivate good citizens. The article will focus on the tensions which inevitably arise from the sometimes conflicting interests between them.

Worries about the possibility of consent recall a more familiar problem about promising raised by Hume. To see the parallel here we must distinguish the power of consent from the normative significance of choice. I'll argue that we have normative interests, interests in being able to control the rights and obligations of ourselves and those around us, interests distinct from our interest in controlling the non-normative situation. Choice gets its normative significance from our non-normative control interests. By contrast, the possibility of consent depends on a species of normative interest that I'll call a permissive interest, an interest in its being the case that certain acts wrong us unless we declare otherwise. In the final section, I'll show how our permissive interests underwrite the possibility of consent.

It is plausible to hold that ethical obligations are concerned with bringing about the existence of things that have value, where something is of value if and only if it is in the interest of some entity. Here the notion of an interest may be defined as whatever contributes to the well-being of a morally significant entity. I argue that interests are limited to individuals with the capacity for affective response. After briefly distinguishing between various different types of value, I defend this emotocentric theory of interests against objections raised by Paul Taylor and Gary Varner, both of whom grant interests to a larger class of entities. I argue that there are serious problems with attempts to associate interests with mere goaldirectedness or with the mere possession of biological functions.

Philosophical discussions of the conflict between morality and self-interest typically proceed on the assumption that we have a relatively unproblematic understanding of self-interest. That assumption can be challenged by asking how to relate acts of self-interest and acts of integrity. I argue that when we are talking about motivations, it is better to keep the motivation of self-interest distinct from the motivation of integrity. But the term “self-interest” can also be used to refer to an end, and acts of integrity may sometimes serve the end of self-interest. Against an identity-independent conception of interests (which gives to acts of integrity a possible instrumental value in achieving some interests), I argue in favor of an identity-dependent conception of interests that makes interests relative to the evaluative perspective of someone with a particular identity that acts of integrity help to preserve.

Several philosophers opposed to animal rights have recently sought to justify their opposition by arguing that the epistemic differences between human and animal interests (often referred to as “taking an interest” vs. “having an interest”) constitute a morally significant difference. In this paper, I first detail the various forms ofhaving an interest and oftaking an interest. I then evaluate the moral significance of these differences from both utilitarian and deontological viewpoints. The conclusion of this analysis is that the epistemic differences between human and animal interests are not morally significant.

The basic concept of Bentham's moral and political philosophy was public utility. He linked it directly with the concept of the universal interest, which comprises a distinctive partnership of the interests of all members of the community. The ultimate end of government and aim of all of morality is ‘the advancement of the universal interest’. This essay articulates the structure of Bentham's notion of universal interest and locates it in his theory of value.