¹ Annas, Julia, “Prudence and Morality in Ancient and Modern Ethics,” Ethics, vol. 105 (1995), p. 242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² See chapter 15 of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan.

³ Annas, “Prudence and Morality,” p. 257.

⁴ Ibid., p. 245ff.

⁵ I do not subscribe to eudaimonism as such. My own view is that morality has more than one core and that something like eudaimonism is one of them. The next section elaborates

⁶ Note that self-interest need not be viewed as inherently individualistic. We sometimes speak in terms of corporate self-interest or national self-interest. Likewise, in economic models that assume all agents are purely self-interested, it sometimes turns out that “self-interest” allows for concern for the well-being of one's household or family as well as oneself.

⁷ For more on this theme, see Badhwar, Neera Kapur, “Altruism versus Self-interest: Sometimes a False Dichotomy,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 90–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ A rough draft of this essay had the skeptic caring only about money, but then it struck me that money is too easy–too self-congratulating–a target for philosophers. Better, I thought, to try for an example that hits a bit closer to home.

⁹ DeBruin, Debra, “Can One Justify Morality to Fooles?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 25 (1995), pp. 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Such people need not be Fooles. They will, as the text explains, have no reason to care whether morality can be grounded in eudaimonic self-interest, but that does not mean they will have no reason to be moral. They may be compassionate by nature, they may want to be faithful to the teachings of their parents, they may believe that accounts will be settled in the next life, and so on.

¹¹ I doubt that any professional philosopher has ever defended ethical egoism so construed, but in any case that seems to be the theory that the textbooks attack.

¹² Simon Blackburn, “Kant versus Hume on Practical Reasoning,” manuscript.

¹³ I will be borrowing and trying to develop points from my book Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

¹⁴ I do not think the idea is as puzzling as referring to a corpse as a “good corpse,” but it is a bit puzzling, and “good moral theory” is more puzzling still. “If someone says of a thing that it's a good swimmer or a good hammer, we know what is being predicated of the thing; if someone says of a thing that it's a good pebble or a good molecule or a good corpse, we find ourselves at a loss–what does the speaker have in mind?” See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Goodness and Utilitarianism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 67 (1994), p. 9.

¹⁵ The suggestion that we focus on the act of calling something moral rather than on morality per se is inspired by Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Perhaps this begs the question against those who say that the moral point of view is essentially self-effacing, taking other people's interests into account while ignoring one's own. I allow that things we might endorse from such a perspective often would be moral, but I do not think we can safely say such a perspective defines the moral perspective. For a powerful argument that failing to take one's own interests seriously can be a moral failure, see Hampton, Jean, “Selflessness and the Loss of Self,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 135–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Insofar as the Foole openly proclaims his rejection of obligations that the rest of us endorse from a plural perspective, we could argue that the Foole is not part of the group in the way the rest of us are.

¹⁸ If this is what taking a moral perspective is like, then it is easy to see why different people, honestly trying to do what they believe (and believe with some justification) is right, could end up bitterly opposed to each other. There is nothing about taking the moral perspective that can guarantee convergence on substantive conclusions.

¹⁹ Annas, “Prudence and Morality,” p. 253.

²⁰ Christine Korsgaard notes that, on Hume's account of sympathy, the sentiments of others are contagious. The sentiments that others have about us tend to “get under our skins.” So when people show disdain for knaves, it will be hard for knaves not to feel disdain for themselves. Even when the knave does not get caught, knowing that others would feel disdain if they understood his true nature will be enough to make it hard for the knave not to feel disdain for himself. See Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), lecture 2.

²¹ This is not to deny that a gap may remain between morality and self-interest. Self-interest, perhaps even the eudaimonistic form of self-interest that focuses on developing a socially and psychologically integrated character, can weigh in favor of respect and concern for one's inner circle to the exclusion of those outside the circle. Morality cannot. Morality need not counsel concern for outsiders, but it certainly counsels a measure of respect. This gap is a problem for any theory that tries to reduce all of morality to eudaimonic self-interest. It is less of a problem for my theory, since my theory does not try to ground the obligation to respect others in self-interest. My theory's eudaimonistic strand pertains to a different issue: the choice of personal goals to pursue within the constraints set by morality's interpersonal strand. See my Rational Choice and Moral Agency, ch. 8.

²² Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, “On Why Hume's 'General Point of View' Isn't Ideal–and Shouldn't Be,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1994), p. 222. In this difficult but fascinating and important essay, Sayre-McCord argues that the point of moral sentiments and moral discourse, for Hume, is to help people achieve harmonious social life. Sympathy is part of the key to harmony, but uncorrected sympathy cannot deliver on the promise to help us achieve harmony (p. 217). It does not produce accord. Thus, we need to correct for biases and idiosyncrasies in our sympathetic reactions and attachments. We need a general point of view that is mutually accessible and thus constitutes a common ground on which we can come to an accord. However, Sayre-McCord insists that this general point of view is not and should not be the view of an Ideal Observer. The perspective of an Ideal Observer is a perspective to which no one has access. Those who affect the stance of an Ideal Observer just end up projecting their own uncorrected sympathies onto the Ideal Observer. Their resulting misguided smugness makes it harder rather than easier for them to achieve accord with anyone, especially each other.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ David Brink, in his essay in this volume, develops the view that proper self-love requires a concern for others proportional to the degree of “interpersonal psychological continuity” that exists between oneself and others. This seems plausible. My point here is only that it can be immoral to be led by a close identification with others to treat their interests as being on a par with one's own. The degree of psychological continuity between my wife and me (having lived with her since we were teenagers) is substantial; nevertheless, there are things I get to do to myself that I do not get to do to her, notwithstanding our close identification with each other.

²⁴ I concede that going along with social pressure sometimes is a matter of calculated self-interest. Most people's political opinions seem to depend a lot on what they think their current audience wants to hear, for example. Thus, giving in to pressure is sometimes like trying to catch the social wind in one's sails. At other times, though, the social wind blows people away. We should not ignore the difference. Those who feel a need to insist that all action is self-interested may want to say that caving in to pressure to do what is not in our interest is (psychologically) impossible, in the same way that genuine altruism is (psychologically) impossible. What looks like altruism, or like caving in to pressure, must–no matter what–be thought of as a subtle manifestation of self-interest. Suffice it to say that the eudaimonistic notion of self-interest I am using here is not vacuous. It leaves conceptual and psychological room for action driven by something other than self-interest so conceived.

²⁵ Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 6.Google Scholar