Preferentism And Self Sacrifice

In moral philosophy, preferentism - or desire satisfactionism - is the idea that the fulfilment of preferences is the sole basic bearer of intrinsic goodness, and the frustration of preferences is the sole basic bearer of intrinsic badness. Simply, getting what you desire most is good, not getting that is bad. The source of value is not the pleasure gained by getting what you want; rather the fulfilment of the desire as an end in itself. This view came about as an alternative to traditional hedonism, especially after Nozick's Experience Machine showed that most people would not choose not to be most efficiently pleasured through the machine, and therefore we should look to things other than pleasure as sources of value.

Mark Overvold (1980) argues that preferentist theories of value have trouble accommodating the view that agents can deliberately choose to perform actions that can be described as self-sacrifice. This essay will examine Overvold's article, and explain the problems that preferentism has with the idea of self-sacrifice.

The idea of self-sacrifice seems relatively common-sense to most of us: we forgo some current potential good in order to maximise either the good of someone we care about, or our own later good. Richard Brandt (1972) includes altruistic desires in his definition of self-interest: "if I really desire the happiness of my daughter, or the discomfiture of my department chairman ... then getting that desire satisfied ... counts as being an enhancement of my utility or welfare ... to an extent corresponding to how strongly I want that outcome." The key point here is that by this definition of self-interest, an altruistic act must have a number of conditions in order to be classed as self-sacrifice. Ove...

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...act which is such that (a) if the consequences of the alternative had been as the agent expected them to be, then the alternative would have been more in the agent's self-interest than the act he actually did perform, and (b) if the agent had chosen to perform the alternative act, then his act would have been more in his self-interest, objectively, than the act which he actually did perform.

Having then established a definition of self-sacrifice, he returns to the discussion of self-interest. "Any act which satisfies the first two conditions of self-sacrifice (i.e., the loss is anticipated, and the act is voluntary) would thereby satisfy Brandt's definition of 'self-interest'" . The

The problem with combining the Overvold's well defined conception of self-sacrifice with Brandt's account of self-interest is that the two ideas are inherently contradictory.