Selfism and Partiality

Several moral systems spend a great deal of effort in trying to resolve issues of conflict between the self and others. Indeed one of criticisms against consequentialism is that it lacks accommodation for partiality (people’s inherit tendency to give special moral weight to themselves, family and friends, etc).

However on what basis is the issue of partiality supported? If we try to define what “others” are we inevitably have to give an account of the make up of “others” is, which ends up being individual selves, which ultimately are the moral agent that can make moral decisions and the moral recipients that can benefit or be harmed by consequences. So let’s look at the self.

Take me for example. I am a self and I have to answer the question. How much of my moral concern should be assigned to myself and my interests versus the interests of others? I better have some idea of what I am first. It seems however that the more one examines what one is, the self has a way of getting constrained by the very strict logical necessity of identity a = a. I shall explain.

Assume a physical world that dismisses of a soul or any sort of supernatural entity.What I am at any at any given time (tP , the smallest time measurement) is a particular arrangement of particles. A collection of fundamental particles that ultimately make up our brains but which are indistinguishable from the fundamental particles that makes up everything else except for their general location and interactions with other particles. It seems natural and intuitive(not that these are good reasons to) for us to just delineate those particles in space and call the brain shaped arrangement above our shoulders “myself”. So for now let “M” be an exact description of all the particles inside that delineation. Let’s us also remember that “M” contains, all our memories, concepts, reasoning powers, personality, tastes. Every single thing that uniquely distinguishes you is by definition contained in “M”

Here’s the problem, let there be a time period ∆t = 50 years. what will “M” look like then? Different. that’s a good enough answer here. M(initial) != M(final). And if we let ∆t approach 0. There will be a minimum ∆t in which M(initial) != M(final). I of course have absolutely no clue what that time period would be, but it exists. Perhaps it’s a nanosecond, or less or more, for the purposes of this article the exact number isn’t relevant.

If we use these definitions, then literally we not the same self from one moment to the next. What appears to be happening then is that at every minimal ∆t a very high fidelity copy, extremely similar to previous self exists, it has nearly all the attributes of the previous self but no quite all of them and as ∆t increases those attributes accumulate and the difference in selves becomes magnified. Your memory, personality, mode of thinking, tastes, ideas they change over time this much seems also obvious.

At this point you might just reject the above definition of a self, but as over simplistic as this might seem, the constraints seem inescapable. How would you define a self without a delineation of particles in space? How would that self exist over time and process information without changing? These appear to be necessities for a physical, thinking, being like us to exist over time.

Now let’s go back to the question of how much of my moral concern should be assigned to myself and my interests versus the interests of others? The answer should be completely obvious now. We should place 100% of our moral concern in others because we quite literally, strictly speaking, can only care others.

When looked at in this way any preferential treatment we give to future copies of our present selves by virtue of them being future copies of ourselves is reduced to a simple unjustified discrimination. For example a 20 year old who spends all his energies to be retired rich at 60 might be quite literally just giving special consideration to a series of people none of which are him. This is done under the false assumption that somehow the 20 year old persists and is still in existence when the 60 year old retires. Consider now that a person might change so much in 40 years that by the time they retire at 60 there is some other person in the world who is more similar in attributes to the 20 year old self than that person is now at 60. How then does it make sense for the 20 year old to work solely to benefit that 60 year old who is less similar to him than someone else at that time might be?

So I’d like to call this what it appears to be. it’s just a discrimination without good reason. The word selfism seems easy enough to adopt here under this definition:

Selfism: The preferential treatment of a certain people for the reason that they are later iterations of one person.

Preempted Criticism:

1 ) But I am still historically me, there’s an unbroken history between myself at this moment and all the previous moments in my life. Doesn’t that make me uniquely me?

This is true but then it begs the question why does the historical line of yourself matter?

However similar you are to your previous version it still doesn’t make you the same person. Is a special history enough to justify special regard for someone? I wouldn’t think so. I think what should matter in justifying how we treat others at time is solely the consequences of treating them in a certain way. What consequences are important? that we can discuss later.

2 ) Are you saying then that we should treat everyone equally?

No, not necessarily we still might be justified in having a basis for preferential treatment of some people over others. For example 100 cancer researchers vs 100 unskilled, uneducated people. The point made here though is that the basis by which we discriminate among people should be something better than well that person will be a similar copy to what I am now so they get more moral status.

  1. What you’re saying is too counter-intuitive to be taken seriously, why should I care then if I walk in front of a bus? by the time the bus hits me it won’t be me?

(I’ve actually heard this, not building straw man here)

Of course we still have moral responsibility towards others and you should do the most you can for the benefit of others and it’s very dubious in most cases that stepping in front of a bus has an overall benefit to anybody. If your morals disappear because a persistent self disappears then you need to reexamine your moral system.

  1. This sounds like crap to me, it has no practical use in the world even if we accept it all as true we cannot live this way. What’s the point?

I readily accept that we might just not be able to live rationally according to the premise that we are not persistent selves.I think however that reflection and mass acceptance of this idea could have the effect of changing at least long term thinking in people. Shifting focus from individualism and self interested pursuits. This I think would be a good thing. For example, a college student deciding on picking a career path might take in consideration the idea that it’s foolish of him to become an investment banker to benefit a particular old man(his future copy) that will exist in the future and who will definitely not be him. The college student might instead pick a career that will just benefit others the most.

Bonus point:

This view of the self seems to “fix” the problem of teleportation. The worry some people have that you can never be teleported because wouldn’t that just be creating a copy of myself and destroying me? Well no, teleportation would in this view consist of nothing more than creating a parallel iteration of your self that is displaced in space and as long as you trust that the copy made somewhere else is sufficiently high fidelity it is just as good as your next iteration if you just standing somewhere not being teleported. It would be just a psychological hurdle to overcome to allow one copy of yourself to be vaporized, trusting the high fidelity copy has been created.