Looking Out for Number One

Abstract

More often than not, people try to achieve a state which they believe will be good for them. Our society is based on the belief that prudential, or egoistic, action is rational and almost self-justifying; an action should benefit its agent. For this belief to be justified, there must be a clear distinction between what is, and what is not, that very same agent. In a number of articles published over the last twenty years' I have argued, however, that no such distinction exists. The very conceptual framework necessary for formulating such claims is flawed what survives is (by the egoist's lights) valueless, and what is valuable cannot possibly survive. In the present article I recast some of those arguments in a new, uniform way, avoiding what I take to be Parfit's failure to distinguish between (i) a genuine (e.g., Schlick-like) no-ownership model of mental life, where there is no substance which is oneself; and (z) a framework which has an enduring subject of experiences, oneself, albeit to a higher or lower degree. It is one thing to reject the concept of self-regarding interest altogether, and quite another to say that it is open-textured, because in some far-out and recherche cases the identity conditions of persons are not clearly defined.'