ECON 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Consequentialism, False Dilemma, Coset
Document Summary
Egoism - acting out of one"s self interests. (1) psychological, we always do act selfishly (2) normative, we always ought to act selfishly. Altruism - acting for the sake of others interests (1) psychological, some of our acts are naturally altruistic, (2) we ought to act for the sake of others. 21,000 children die everyday mainly in developing countries. We are insulated from them by our own comfortable lives. The numbers are too staggering to fathom; they don"t elicit an empathetic or emotional response. Empirical support for this idea - we tend to give more charity when presented with the image or personal story of one individual or when presented with personal details than with large numbers or statistics. We get too overwhelmed and do not relate to it. (dickert and slovic 2009) We have natural" duties to others simply because they are people who could be helped or harmed by what we do.
