Most Ethical Dilemmas are Actually a Conflict of Selfish Interests with Altruistic Interests
Ethicists seem to value systems of ethics (I will also call those moral systems) that are rational or applicable in all contexts in which they would indicate a choice of action. For example, utilitarianism gets a lot of flack in some unlikely thought experiments where it seems unintuitive or self-contradictory.
I believe that the common alternative to rational (enough) moral or ethical action is amoral or selfish action. If you apply a moral system to making some decisions, surely you apply an amoral system to the rest, and that amoral system lets you serve selfish interests.
If so, then it’s important to make that explicit. For example, “Yeah, so I was trying to decide this with my usual ethical heuristics, like, let’s maximize everybody’s utility in this situation, but then it seemed hard to do that, and so I went with what I’d like out of this situation.”
And that’s my main suggestion, just don’t deceive yourself that your ethical system has you in knots. It’s probably your selfish interests in conflict with your altruistic interests.
For more of that, read on.
A good question would be whether it was genuinely difficult to decide what to ethically do, or whether it wasn’t that difficult, but the decision conflicted with your selfish interests. Did the ethical choice make you feel bad? Was it unfulfilling? Did it seem like it might harm you somehow? If so, then your selfish interests got in the way.
There’s even models of how to negotiate among competing moral paradigms now. As if you are really in a position to arbitratewhichmoral system you will use!? To me it’s absurd to believe that people apply their choices among ethical systems with any honesty, when they already have so many problems behaving ethically according to any system.
My heuristic based on extensive personal experience as well as repeated observation of people is that when serious ethical dilemmas come up, it is because a person is facing a choice between selfish and moral interests, not because they face a conflict between two ethical systems to which they give partial credence.
People can figure out what the right thing to do is pretty easily, but they have a hard time figuring out when they’re being self-serving or selfish.
To me, you can drop your moral reasoning at any time and choose your selfish reasoning, but not because that’s OK , moral, or reasonable. Instead, it’s because the application of ethical systems is more of an empirical question than anything else.
There are only a few linguistic and emotional confusions that people have around morality and selfishness. Take the word “care.” It’s confusing. If I care about someone, is it because:
their interests matter to me
my interests depend on their experience or behavior
If you take away my causal experience of the person:
their lovableness
the infectiousness of their happiness
their positive treatment of me
their personal significance in my life and memory
then what’s left to care about? Just them, and that’s not compelling me anymore with all the effects of that person’s experience and behavior gone. Then what should I do? Well obviously, keep being ethical toward them is the ethical thing to do.
And it seems you have to take away all those positive dependencies, all those effects someone has on you, just to hear someone say something like:
“Oh well then, you better balance what you do for them with some things you do for yourself, or you’re going to get hurt.”
Yeah, but that’s entirely too late to note that most decisions are about selfish and ethical interests, and that those two sets of interests are orthogonal. You can satisfy either or both or neither with every decision you make. If your goal in analyzing ethical systems is to be a better decision-maker overall, that probably starts with recognizing what interests are actually in play in your decisions all the time.
As an observer of my actions, keeping track of the consequences of my actions is a better proxy for my use of a moral system then keeping track of my stated intentions of my actions. However, as a performer of actions, I have to keep track of action intentions and action consequences, and try to align them as I get feedback on the outcomes of my actions.
There’s no moral argument for satisfying your own interests aside from how you might satisfy other’s interests somehow. Similarly, there’s no selfish argument for satisfying other’s interests aside from how you might satisfy your own interests somehow. Most of the hard work in discussion of ethical interests is in how to separate selfish interests from altruistic interests.
Most Ethical Dilemmas are Actually a Conflict of Selfish Interests with Altruistic Interests
Ethicists seem to value systems of ethics (I will also call those moral systems) that are rational or applicable in all contexts in which they would indicate a choice of action. For example, utilitarianism gets a lot of flack in some unlikely thought experiments where it seems unintuitive or self-contradictory.
I believe that the common alternative to rational (enough) moral or ethical action is amoral or selfish action. If you apply a moral system to making some decisions, surely you apply an amoral system to the rest, and that amoral system lets you serve selfish interests.
If so, then it’s important to make that explicit. For example, “Yeah, so I was trying to decide this with my usual ethical heuristics, like, let’s maximize everybody’s utility in this situation, but then it seemed hard to do that, and so I went with what I’d like out of this situation.”
And that’s my main suggestion, just don’t deceive yourself that your ethical system has you in knots. It’s probably your selfish interests in conflict with your altruistic interests.
For more of that, read on.
A good question would be whether it was genuinely difficult to decide what to ethically do, or whether it wasn’t that difficult, but the decision conflicted with your selfish interests. Did the ethical choice make you feel bad? Was it unfulfilling? Did it seem like it might harm you somehow? If so, then your selfish interests got in the way.
There’s even models of how to negotiate among competing moral paradigms now. As if you are really in a position to arbitrate which moral system you will use!? To me it’s absurd to believe that people apply their choices among ethical systems with any honesty, when they already have so many problems behaving ethically according to any system.
My heuristic based on extensive personal experience as well as repeated observation of people is that when serious ethical dilemmas come up, it is because a person is facing a choice between selfish and moral interests, not because they face a conflict between two ethical systems to which they give partial credence.
People can figure out what the right thing to do is pretty easily, but they have a hard time figuring out when they’re being self-serving or selfish.
To me, you can drop your moral reasoning at any time and choose your selfish reasoning, but not because that’s OK , moral, or reasonable. Instead, it’s because the application of ethical systems is more of an empirical question than anything else.
There are only a few linguistic and emotional confusions that people have around morality and selfishness. Take the word “care.” It’s confusing. If I care about someone, is it because:
their interests matter to me
my interests depend on their experience or behavior
If you take away my causal experience of the person:
their lovableness
the infectiousness of their happiness
their positive treatment of me
their personal significance in my life and memory
then what’s left to care about? Just them, and that’s not compelling me anymore with all the effects of that person’s experience and behavior gone. Then what should I do? Well obviously, keep being ethical toward them is the ethical thing to do.
And it seems you have to take away all those positive dependencies, all those effects someone has on you, just to hear someone say something like:
Yeah, but that’s entirely too late to note that most decisions are about selfish and ethical interests, and that those two sets of interests are orthogonal. You can satisfy either or both or neither with every decision you make. If your goal in analyzing ethical systems is to be a better decision-maker overall, that probably starts with recognizing what interests are actually in play in your decisions all the time.
As an observer of my actions, keeping track of the consequences of my actions is a better proxy for my use of a moral system then keeping track of my stated intentions of my actions. However, as a performer of actions, I have to keep track of action intentions and action consequences, and try to align them as I get feedback on the outcomes of my actions.
There’s no moral argument for satisfying your own interests aside from how you might satisfy other’s interests somehow. Similarly, there’s no selfish argument for satisfying other’s interests aside from how you might satisfy your own interests somehow. Most of the hard work in discussion of ethical interests is in how to separate selfish interests from altruistic interests.