Guillot, Marie;
O'Brien, Lucy;
(2023)
Self Matters.
Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy
, 9
, Article 28. 10.3998/ergo.2617.
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Abstract
We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya (2015). We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And three is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Self Matters |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3998/ergo.2617 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.2617 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Authors 2023. Original content in this paper is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | self-concern, the first person, agency, non-instrumental reasons for concern, pre-suppositional reasons, self-love, selfishness, egoism |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168845 |
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