From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Sat Apr 27 2002 - 13:10:50 MDT
"J. Goard" wrote:
>
> At 12:16 PM 4/25/02 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> >> (Dave Sill)
> >> If altruism wasn't one of J R Molloy's useless hypotheses, it should
> >> have been. All motivation is ultimately selfish. Caring more about the
> >> welfare of others is irrational, if not insane.
>
> With all due respect to Mr. Sill and the many "psychological egoists" out
> there, I believe they employ a definition of "interest" which makes their
> position trivially true, but which doesn't accord with common usage. This
> definiton (roughly, that interest = motivation for action) is quite useful
> in theoretical economics, where interesting a priori truths can be derived
> from trivial axioms. In ethics, however, I think it just leads to a lot of
> talking at cross purposes. When someone believes that an altruistic act
> has taken place, they don't believe that [The act was motivated by
> something which is not a motivation for action.] They use a different
> concept of "interest", which they may not be able to define very clearly
> but which seems to be effectively used in our society, and which doesn't
> yield such contradictions.
>
When something is not clearly defined, it is rather easy for it to fail
to contradict something else. Don't mistake imprecision for accuracy.
Just cause you killed the bird with a shotgun at ten paces doesn't make
you a marksman, nor does eliminating Yellow Fever with nuclear warheads
make you a humanitarian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:40 MST