Self-Love, Egoism, and the Distinctness of Persons." The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 18 (2025): 1-32. http://www.amherstlecture.org/moran2025/

1) One version of egoism is to claim that it’s incoherent to deny egoism. Moran lays out a weak version of this claim. He then is able to attack it. In other words, Moran uses a straw man.

Here’s a better version of the claim:

Suppose that Mary helps Fritz cross the street. That means she has implicitly compared two worlds: one in which she helps and one in which she doesn’t. Egoism is the claim that she always chooses the world she likes best. It’s incoherent to deny this. It’s incoherent to say she chooses to go against her own preferences.

2) It is the same with normative egoism. Moran presents a version of normative egoism and then attacks it. But he does not use the strongest version of normative egoism.

The best version of normative egoism is this: Claim: everyone is better off when everyone acts in their own self-interest. This is derived from Smith’s insight that, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

A corollary is that if you try to help others, you will end up hurting others. Thoreau’s insight was “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

3) Do you help someone by furthering the things they care about? Moran’s discussion here feels superficial.

(a) Moran fails to consider jouissance. Consider fans of a team that never wins. There comes to be a pleasure in pain for these fans. But Moran just takes things at face value. He assumes that if you arranged for the Cubs to win the World Series, that would be a benefit for Cubs fans.

(b) Consider a woman who spends years yearning for a man who keeps himself just out of reach. She comes to like the yearning. It has a depth and resonance to it. If you were able to get this man to return her love, she will likely be disappointed.

(c) Some people don’t want to get what they desire. What they want is to feel alive. To feel that they aren’t inert. Intense relationships (for example sado-masochistic relationships) provide this. Desiring something provides this. For these people, they don’t want to get what they desire, because that would take away the vitality of desiring.

(d) “The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own." Bill Bradley.

(e) The young men whose great desire was to be able to join the armed forces and fight in WW1.

4) Moran seems to be distracted by the meanings of words.

Fritz desires X. To desire X means to want to get X. Therefore, Fritz will be better off if he gets X.

Bob is in a painful romantic relationship with Chris. If Bob were with Jesse instead, Bob would not be in such pain. Pain is bad, and therefore Bob would be better of with Jesse.