Yes, these are the self-regarding reasons I imagined you had in mind. My point stands, however, that the behaviour is at least seemingly other-regarding, and it is still action to which the term ‘moral’ appropriately applies. The kinds of things you are surmising about here are for the realm of meta-ethics and moral psychology; not normative and applied ethics. It might well be that I am only motivated by self-interest to act seemingly morally in accordance with consistency (crudely, that ‘egoism’ is true), but this says nothing as to what this moral system or what consistency requires.
Maybe I’m confused, but I think there’s a crux in there. Sure, you CAN define “moral” as “other-regarding”, and it’s an operational-ish classification. But that doesn’t resolve the problem that actual decisions and behaviors do not make this distinction very sharply. Both practical/self-regarding and other-regarding aspects are part of decision criteria, but even worse, MOST considerations blend them in confusing-to-introspect ways.
You end up with EITHER “separate moral reasoning domain is unhelpful” or “morals may be fairly straightforward, but they don’t fully apply to most situations”.
Yes, these are the self-regarding reasons I imagined you had in mind. My point stands, however, that the behaviour is at least seemingly other-regarding, and it is still action to which the term ‘moral’ appropriately applies. The kinds of things you are surmising about here are for the realm of meta-ethics and moral psychology; not normative and applied ethics. It might well be that I am only motivated by self-interest to act seemingly morally in accordance with consistency (crudely, that ‘egoism’ is true), but this says nothing as to what this moral system or what consistency requires.
Maybe I’m confused, but I think there’s a crux in there. Sure, you CAN define “moral” as “other-regarding”, and it’s an operational-ish classification. But that doesn’t resolve the problem that actual decisions and behaviors do not make this distinction very sharply. Both practical/self-regarding and other-regarding aspects are part of decision criteria, but even worse, MOST considerations blend them in confusing-to-introspect ways.
You end up with EITHER “separate moral reasoning domain is unhelpful” or “morals may be fairly straightforward, but they don’t fully apply to most situations”.