You have a non-zero chance of empathically expanding to care a lot more about animal suffering than you currently do. (We all do, I mean.) The self is flexible, because empathy is. And so you could someday have more self-interest in how cows are treated. Their mistreatment will hurt you, too.
You have a non-zero chance of empathically expanding to care a lot more about animal suffering than you currently do. (We all do, I mean.) The self is flexible, because empathy is. And so you could someday have more self-interest in how cows are treated. Their mistreatment will hurt you, too.
I agree, but I still have zero chance of becoming a cow in my lifetime. While I may one day care far more about the welfare of cows than I currently do, to the point that the existence of abattoirs will deeply upset me, my concern for the welfare of cows will never be based in the self-preservation instinct.
Yet political heroes, and mothers, are often willing to die for those in their circle of care. The object of our instinct for self-preservation can enlargen as the self does.
Of course, I'm not denying that people are capable of putting other entities' interests before their own. I'm simply making the distinction between "caring about bad things happening to people you care about" and "caring about bad things happening to you". I think it's fair to say the latter is far more fundamental to living creatures than the former, even instinctual. It's a useful lens though which to examine moral problems: the category of "bad things which could happen to me, (however unlikely)" will always be smaller than the category of "bad things which could happen to someone whose welfare I care about, or which COULD HAVE happened to me were it not for my good fortune", and I imagine this category distinction has some predictive power regarding people's intuitions about policy proposals.
I think it's a bit of a reach to say the self can enlargen. A mother does not throw herself in front of a car to prevent her son from being killed because she thinks of her son as part of herself - she does so because she loves her son and is willing to sacrifice her life to save his.
I don't think it a semantic stretch, but I concede that it's a practical stretch. The small Paul has a lot of gravitational pull. And my empathy for X is based, in part, on a chain of my perceptions & inferences re X, a chain looser than my own off-the-shelf nervestrings!
You have a non-zero chance of empathically expanding to care a lot more about animal suffering than you currently do. (We all do, I mean.) The self is flexible, because empathy is. And so you could someday have more self-interest in how cows are treated. Their mistreatment will hurt you, too.
I agree, but I still have zero chance of becoming a cow in my lifetime. While I may one day care far more about the welfare of cows than I currently do, to the point that the existence of abattoirs will deeply upset me, my concern for the welfare of cows will never be based in the self-preservation instinct.
Yet political heroes, and mothers, are often willing to die for those in their circle of care. The object of our instinct for self-preservation can enlargen as the self does.
Of course, I'm not denying that people are capable of putting other entities' interests before their own. I'm simply making the distinction between "caring about bad things happening to people you care about" and "caring about bad things happening to you". I think it's fair to say the latter is far more fundamental to living creatures than the former, even instinctual. It's a useful lens though which to examine moral problems: the category of "bad things which could happen to me, (however unlikely)" will always be smaller than the category of "bad things which could happen to someone whose welfare I care about, or which COULD HAVE happened to me were it not for my good fortune", and I imagine this category distinction has some predictive power regarding people's intuitions about policy proposals.
I think it's a bit of a reach to say the self can enlargen. A mother does not throw herself in front of a car to prevent her son from being killed because she thinks of her son as part of herself - she does so because she loves her son and is willing to sacrifice her life to save his.
I don't think it a semantic stretch, but I concede that it's a practical stretch. The small Paul has a lot of gravitational pull. And my empathy for X is based, in part, on a chain of my perceptions & inferences re X, a chain looser than my own off-the-shelf nervestrings!