Over at Bentham’s Newsletter, Bentham’s Bulldog argues that selfishness is irrational. The specifics of the argument aren’t relevant to any points I want to make, so I’ll just focus on how BB argues for his position.
I think BB in general thinks of philosophy as a pursuit that makes his flights of fancy into consequential statements about the world, like a "one weird trick" he has learned.
It seems to me that if it is irrational to care about one's future self, it is also irrational to care about anyone else's future self (that is, there is no point of view from which it is "rational" to care about anyone's future self). And indeed it may be "irrational" to "care" about anything, but only in some trivial sense.
This is my understanding of your main criticism. When BB says “it just seems...” he is arguing is arguing based on his own psychological dispositions. But since you and others do not share his psychological dispositions, you disagree with him and are not convinced. I think you’re right about this, but my concern is that you have not suggested a better or fundamentally different way to argue. In other words, all arguments that I advance will be ultimately based on my psychological dispositions.
Let’s say that you have some other criterion for how we should evaluate arguments, such as empirical evidence. If you offer an argument by appealing to empirical evidence and I disagree with you, I can simply say something such as, “What you have presented is not actually empirical evidence, or empirical evidence is not as important as you think, etc.” For any method of evaluating arguments, I can reject or dispute that method, and I would do so based on my own psychological dispositions. For any method of evaluating arguments that I accept, I do so based on my own psychological dispositions.
What can we do in philosophy other than invite others to reflect and see things the way we do? That is, perhaps, what BB does when he says “it just seems.”
I think BB in general thinks of philosophy as a pursuit that makes his flights of fancy into consequential statements about the world, like a "one weird trick" he has learned.
It seems to me that if it is irrational to care about one's future self, it is also irrational to care about anyone else's future self (that is, there is no point of view from which it is "rational" to care about anyone's future self). And indeed it may be "irrational" to "care" about anything, but only in some trivial sense.
It's all so pointless.
This is my understanding of your main criticism. When BB says “it just seems...” he is arguing is arguing based on his own psychological dispositions. But since you and others do not share his psychological dispositions, you disagree with him and are not convinced. I think you’re right about this, but my concern is that you have not suggested a better or fundamentally different way to argue. In other words, all arguments that I advance will be ultimately based on my psychological dispositions.
Let’s say that you have some other criterion for how we should evaluate arguments, such as empirical evidence. If you offer an argument by appealing to empirical evidence and I disagree with you, I can simply say something such as, “What you have presented is not actually empirical evidence, or empirical evidence is not as important as you think, etc.” For any method of evaluating arguments, I can reject or dispute that method, and I would do so based on my own psychological dispositions. For any method of evaluating arguments that I accept, I do so based on my own psychological dispositions.
What can we do in philosophy other than invite others to reflect and see things the way we do? That is, perhaps, what BB does when he says “it just seems.”
It’s quite funny to me how many realists tend to rely almost entirely on “seemings”.