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 th…
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!
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!