personalidentityandtheirrelevanceofself-interest.docVIP

Personal Identity and the Irrelevance of Self-Interest Self-interest is widely regarded as an important, if not as the only, source of reasons for action, and hence it is widely held that one can rationally give special weight to one’s self-interest in deciding how to act. In what follows, I will argue against this view. I will do so by following the lead of Derek Parfit, and considering cases in which personal identity appears to break down. My argument will differ from Parfit’s, however, in that it will have a stronger conclusion, it will involve fewer assumptions, and it will be compatible with a wider range of theories of personal identity. The family of views I will be arguing against are self-interest theories of practical rationality. These theories come in varying strengths. According to the strongest version of this view, which we may call the Strong Obligation Theory, an agent is always rationally required to give overriding weight to her self-interest. On this view, if ? is the option that an agent expects would result in her having the best life overall, then she is rationally required to choose option ?. According to what we may call the Weak Obligation Theory, an agent is only rationally required give some significant degree of special weight to her self-interest in deciding how to act. On this view, if there is some option, ?, such that an agent expects her life would go much better, as a whole, if she were to choose ? than if she were to choose any alternative to ?, and if there is no relevant respect in which she expects that some alternative to ? would be significantly better than ?, then she is rationally required to choose ?. While the Strong and Weak Obligation theories each state that an agent is rationally required to give a certain degree of weight to her self-interest, a self-interest theory might instead state only that it is always rationally permissible to give a certain weight to one’s self-interest. According to the Strong Per