Two Kinds of Moral Reasoning: Ethical Egoism as A Moral Theory

Abstract

Ethical egoism, when summarized into a single ethical principle, is the position that a person ought, all things considered, to do an action if and only if that action is in his overall self-interest. The criticisms standardly advanced against this view try to show either that it is subject to some fatal logical flaw or else that, even if logically coherent, it can give no account of the basic parts of morality. Both these objections are mistaken, however, and it is the point of this paper to make this clear. Central to my argument is the distinction drawn in Section 1 between two kinds of moral reasoning and hence two kinds of moral reasons. I call these ‘traditional’ and ‘nontraditional’ (the latter could be termed ‘conventional’ or ‘institutional’ without much change of meaning). Both are present in the writings of contemporary moral philosophers but have not been emphasized or seen as crucial.