Michael St Jules 🔸 comments on The Life-Goals Framework: How I Reason About Morality as an Anti-Realist

[Michael St Jules 🔸]

Self-oriented vs. other-regarding. Self-oriented life goals concern objectives such as optimizing one’s well-being or achievements. By contrast, other-regarding life goals are about doing things for others.

Are these meant to be exhaustive? Can a life goal just be oriented towards an object? Or would you just consider that self-oriented?

Morality-inspired life goals: Of particular interest among other-regarding life goals are life goals inspired by morality. Building on the motivation to act morally, they are about doing what’s good for others from an “impartial point of view.”

Given that some people care morally about things that aren’t “others”, e.g. nature or beauty, should morality-inspired life goals necessarily be other-regarding?

There are also ways to care morally about others that aren’t impartial:

1. They can be partial, e.g. family- or community-focused, as people may believe they have special moral duties to particular individuals.

2. Neither impartial nor partial could really be applicable, e.g. someone could care about the survival of species (including humans), but not because of the value of particular individuals.

[Lukas_Gloor]

Are these meant to be exhaustive?

I didn’t explicitly intend them to be exhaustive, but we can make the following argument for why it seems pretty exhaustive:

• As you point out in another comment, there’s a sense in which everything we do is “self-oriented” in some way

• Still, “altruism” remains a meaningful concept. People are “altruistic” if the thing that gives them personal meaning includes helping others

So, life goals would be self-oriented by default, but some life goals are self-oriented and other-regarding.