Abstract
James Sterba argues for morality as a principled compromise between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons (Morality as Compromise) and that either egoists or altruists, who always give overriding weight to self-regarding and other-reasons, respectively, can be shown to beg the question against morality. He concludes that moral conduct is “rationally required.” Sterba’s dialectic assumes that both egoists and altruists accept that both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations are genuine pro tanto reasons, but then hold that their respective reasons always outweigh. Against this, I argue that egoists would most plausibly deny that non-self-regarding considerations have even pro tanto weight. I argue, also, that even if both sides grant the pro tanto weight of their opponent’s reasons, Sterba is mistaken in holding that only Morality as Compromise provides a “non-question-begging resolution” of what it is rational to do when self-regarding and other-regarding reasons conflict, since it might be that it is rational to act on either. It might be that the weightiest self-regarding and the weightiest other-regarding reasons in the case are both sufficient reasons for acting without either being conclusive. The essay ends with a sketch of arguments against egoism that I take to be more plausible than Sterba’s. As I have argued elsewhere, what makes an agent’s own welfare or her own concerns or interests normative for her simultaneously makes them normative for others as well.
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Notes
I take it that Sterba uses “prima facie” in the same way W. D. Ross does in his phrase “prima facie duty.” Many philosophers now speak of “pro tanto reasons” and duties, to make clear, as Ross insisted, that the notion to which they are referring is non-epistemic (Ross 2003: 18).
I take this term from Parfit (2011).
See Darwall (2002) for this distinction.
I develop this argument in much greater detail in Darwall (forthcoming).
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