Thanks, this is interesting. I’m trying to understand your ideas. Please let me know if I represent them correctly.
It seems to me that at the start, you’re saying:
1. People often have strong selfish preferences and weak altruistic preferences.
2. There are many situations where people could gain more utility through engaging in moral agreements or moral trade—where everyone promises to take some altruistic action conditional on everyone else doing the same. That is because the altruistic utility they gain more than makes up for the selfish utility they lose.
These claims in themselves seem compatible with “altruism being about consequentialism”.
To conclude that that’s not the case, it seems that one has to add something like the following point. I’m not sure whether that’s actually what you mean, but in any case, it seems like a reasonable idea.
3. Fairness considerations loom large in our intuitive moral psychology: we feel very strongly about the principle that everyone should do and have their fair share, hate being suckers, are willing to altruistically punish free-riders, etc.
It’s known from dictator game studies, prisoner’s dilemma studies, tragedies of the common, and similar research that people have such fairness-oriented dispositions (though there may be disagreements about details). They help us solve collective action problems, and make us provide for public goods.
So in those experiments, people aren’t always choosing the action that would maximise their selfish interests in a one-off game. Instead they choose, e.g. to punish free-riders, even at a selfish cost.
Similarly, when people are trying to satisfy their altruistic interests (which is what you discuss), they aren’t choosing the actions that, at least on the face of it (setting indirect effects of norm-setting, etc, aside), maximally satisfy their altruistic interests. Instead they take considerations of fairness and norms into account—e.g. they may contribute in contexts where others are contributing, but not in contexts where others aren’t. In that sense, they aren’t (act)-consequentialists, but rather do their fair share of worthwhile projects/slot into norms they find appropriate, etc.
Thanks, this is interesting. I’m trying to understand your ideas. Please let me know if I represent them correctly.
It seems to me that at the start, you’re saying:
1. People often have strong selfish preferences and weak altruistic preferences.
2. There are many situations where people could gain more utility through engaging in moral agreements or moral trade—where everyone promises to take some altruistic action conditional on everyone else doing the same. That is because the altruistic utility they gain more than makes up for the selfish utility they lose.
These claims in themselves seem compatible with “altruism being about consequentialism”.
To conclude that that’s not the case, it seems that one has to add something like the following point. I’m not sure whether that’s actually what you mean, but in any case, it seems like a reasonable idea.
3. Fairness considerations loom large in our intuitive moral psychology: we feel very strongly about the principle that everyone should do and have their fair share, hate being suckers, are willing to altruistically punish free-riders, etc.
It’s known from dictator game studies, prisoner’s dilemma studies, tragedies of the common, and similar research that people have such fairness-oriented dispositions (though there may be disagreements about details). They help us solve collective action problems, and make us provide for public goods.
So in those experiments, people aren’t always choosing the action that would maximise their selfish interests in a one-off game. Instead they choose, e.g. to punish free-riders, even at a selfish cost.
Similarly, when people are trying to satisfy their altruistic interests (which is what you discuss), they aren’t choosing the actions that, at least on the face of it (setting indirect effects of norm-setting, etc, aside), maximally satisfy their altruistic interests. Instead they take considerations of fairness and norms into account—e.g. they may contribute in contexts where others are contributing, but not in contexts where others aren’t. In that sense, they aren’t (act)-consequentialists, but rather do their fair share of worthwhile projects/slot into norms they find appropriate, etc.