Comments?
I'd love to hear!A Puzzle for Egoists
In
debating the merits of ethical egoism, one thing that should be
agreed on all sides is that, in understanding what is in our
interests, we need to be referring to long-term interests. No
remotely plausible ethical theory holds that what we ought to act on
is our short-term interests.
This, however, raises some
interesting questions about the weight or importance to be attached
to future harms and benefits. It is something economists deal with
under the label of “time-preference.” It is a pervasive fact
about human motivation that, in general, we would rather have a good
thing now instead of later (and a bad thing later instead of now).
Part of the explanation for this can be given in “ordinary”
terms: there are considerations of risk, uncertainty, opportunity
costs and the like that make it reasonable to prefer present benefits
to future benefits, to prefer $100 today to $100 next week. However,
there’s also considerable reason to think that such “ordinary
explanations” do not account for all the phenomena of
time-preference. I shall not discuss those arguments because they are
not germane here. All that needs to be pointed out for the sake of
the argument to come is that people differ in their
time-preference: some weigh future costs and benefits heavily in
deciding what to do, while others do not.
Now, suppose that
you have a person who has a high time-discount-rate. That is,
he places a relatively low weight on future harms and benefits
compared to current harms and benefits. In everyday language, he is
short-sighted.
Suppose also that he is an egoist. What reasons
can be given to him for taking the more distant effects of his
actions into account? I hope the problem is obvious. It won’t do to
say that it is in his interests to take the more distant consequences
into account – because his short-term focus partially defines
what he takes to be in his interests. A cost that doesn’t show up
in the short term isn’t, as far as he can tell, a cost at all. A
gain that doesn’t show up in the short-term isn’t, as far as he
can tell, a gain at all. The rate of time-preference with which he
operates determines what he takes to be in his interests or not.
Now, broaden the scope a little bit. Different egoists can
have the same conception of what counts as a benefit (money,
health, friendship, longevity, etc.) and operate with the same
information, yet reach different conclusions about what they
have self-interested reason to do if they have different rates of
time-preference.
Where does this lead? Egoism, it seems, even
for fully informed and rational persons, yields indeterminate advice
about what to do unless you also make some assumption about what the
“correct” rate of time-preference is.
And interestingly,
there can be no argument that a particular rate of time preference is
in your interests, because some assumption about the time-preference
rate is needed to derive any conclusions about what is in your
interests.
How might this problem be dealt with? I can think
of two possibilities, one “clean” (but hard to argue) and one
“messy” – neither of which fits comfortably with
egoism.
First, the “clean” possibility: One could argue
that there is some rational principle requiring one to adopt a
particular rate of time preference – perhaps one that counts all
benefits and harms equally apart from what were called above
“ordinary explanations” of time-preference (one could discount
for risk, etc., but not for anything else).
The problem with
this for an egoist, of course, is that it cannot be defended in terms
of self-interest because it partially defines what self-interest is.
If it really is a rational requirement on our deliberation and
decision-making, there is at least one rational requirement on action
that does not flow from self-interest.
Second, the “messy”
possibility: A person, even a short-sighted person, could come to
care about the welfare of another for its own sake. But if that other
has a lower rate of time-preference, then caring about how that other
is doing may involve partially incorporating the other’s rate of
time-preference in deciding about what are the likely outcomes of
actions. A person’s rate of time-preference may be adjusted
in the direction of taking greater account of long-term consequences
because of others he cares about.
This is messy because
there’s no guarantee that the short-sighted person will run into
and end up caring about people who are more far-sighted than he –
but it does provide a route along which the short-sighted person’s
consideration for the consequences of his action may be adjusted –
provided that he is not an egoist.
Either way, it appears that
there is no reason that can be given to a pure egoist to
adjust the weight he attaches to future costs and benefits. Hence,
though ethical egoists constantly insist that they are talking about
long-term self-interest, that must, on their theory, either be an
arbitrary choice or lead them beyond egoism.
