Conflicting reasons

Abstract

Sidgwick believed that, when impartial reasons conflict with self-interested reasons, there are no truths about their relative strength. There are such truths, I claim, but these truths are imprecise. Many self-interested reasons are decisively outweighed by conflicting impartial moral reasons. But we often have sufficient self-interested reasons to do what would make things go worse, and we sometimes have sufficient self-interested reasons to act wrongly. If we reject Act Consequentialism, we may have to admit that we sometimes have sufficient or even decisive impartial reasons to act wrongly. But these are early days. We may be able to resolve some of these disagreements.