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    You Are Them
    You Are Them
    You Are Them
    Ebook78 pages50 minutes

    You Are Them

    By Magnus Vinding

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    About this ebook

    What follows if we reject belief in any kind of non-physical soul and instead embrace a physicalist picture of the world? A key implication, this book argues, is a naturalization of personal identity and ethics — a radically different way of thinking about ourself.

    "A precondition of rational behaviour is a basic understanding of the nature of oneself and the world. Any fusion of ethical and decision-theoretic rationality into a seamless package runs counter to some of our deepest intuitions. But You Are Them makes a powerful case. Magnus Vinding's best book to date. Highly recommended."
    — David Pearce, author of The Hedonistic Imperative and Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMagnus Vinding
    Release dateApr 21, 2017
    ISBN9781386452546
    Author

    Magnus Vinding

    Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), and Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022).He is blogging at magnusvinding.com

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      Book preview

      You Are Them - Magnus Vinding

      1. Four Reasons for Being Ethical

      ––––––––

      Reason shows me that if my happiness is desirable and a good, the equal happiness of any other person must be equally desirable.

      — Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

      As a prelude to the following examination of personal identity, I find it worth conveying what motivates my writing this book. A helpful starting point in this regard is to look at our reasons for behaving in ethical and altruistic ways. I think we can broadly identify four such reasons.

      1.1 Empathy

      The first is the emotion of empathy that millions of years of evolution have hammered into us. We see someone hurting, we feel a strong empathetic impulse, and we instinctively try to help. This mechanism has enabled us to care for each other and to function together in groups, and it still seems crucial for most of what we would characterize as moral behavior today.

      Yet empathy also has significant drawbacks. Being an emotion, it is subject to the biases and limits we should expect emotions to suffer from. For example, we cannot just multiply our emotions of empathy by ten when we see ten beings who are suffering. Indeed, as psychologist Paul Slovic has documented, our empathy appears to decrease as the magnitude of a disaster grows — we are generally more willing to help one victim than two victims who suffer the same ill.[2] This makes little sense from an ethical perspective.

      Indeed, it is not only when it comes to numbers that our empathy betrays reason, but also when it comes to different kinds of beings. For example, most of us have significant empathy for dogs and cats, and are outraged when they are mistreated, yet when it comes to the mistreatment of equally sentient rats and pigs, tragically few of us will make any effort to object.

      1.2 Signaling

      The power of signaling is difficult to overstate. Again, viewing ourselves in the context of our origin is instructive: we evolved in social groups, and how we were perceived in that group was critical for our survival and reproductive success. So we should expect humans to care a lot about what other people think about them, and to act accordingly.

      This is arguably what we see when we observe human actions, especially when it comes to human moral behavior. Much of our do-gooding is done largely for the purpose of looking good to our peers — examples may include conspicuous donations by individuals and companies. Of course, few of us will have the self-awareness and honesty to realize and admit the prevalence of this signaling motive, yet the less than flattering truth about our motives often shines through from our actions regardless.[3]

      To be sure, that we try to do good in order to look good need not be a bad thing. Indeed, it can be a great thing if we manage to exploit it efficiently. Making alleviating the most suffering the new most championships won or most records sold would no doubt constitute an enormous step of moral progress.

      1.3 Consistent Reasoning

      Consistent reasoning has arguably exerted a growing influence on our moral behavior in recent times. As psychologist James Flynn has documented, our ability to think in terms of consistency and other abstract concepts appears to have increased steadily since about 1930, and likely since before that. And this general pattern in cognitive development also seems to have had a significant effect on our thinking about ethics in particular.[4] Just compare how much more inconsistent we were a couple of hundred years ago compared to today in terms of allowing some arbitrarily privileged humans to own other, arbitrarily underprivileged humans. Consistent reasoning and consistency-based arguments seem to have played an important role in motivating significant changes in this regard (for example, some abolitionists appealed to notions of equal rights in their arguments against

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