Lecture 18, 2025
“Self-love, Egoism, and the Distinctness of Persons”
Richard Moran
Harvard University
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Abstract
The dominance of "self-love" is often taken to be the main obstacle to moral motivation. In this
lecture I examine a famous argument from Bishop Butler against the "self-love hypothesis." I
aim to show that his argument depends on clarity about the difference between the object of a
desire (what it aims at) and the subject of desire (the person whose desire is in question). This
allows us to see a common theme in related arguments from Rawls on benevolence, Scanlon
on well-being, and Sartre on the structure of consciousness. In their different ways, they are
diagnosing a similar error of perspective, that in thinking about human action and its sources,
philosophers tend to adopt a second-order perspective on the agent and then project that external
point of view back into the description of the perspective of the agent themselves. A further
problem is that the very idea of self-love would seem to entail that here loving and being loved
are simply one and the same, which would exclude the various ways that love of another seeks
recognition or reciprocity. This helps explain the observation of the poet James Richardson that
'self-love' is a "strange name, since it feels neither like loving someone, nor like being loved."
Preferred citation
Moran, Richard. "Self-Love, Egoism, and the Distinctness of Persons." The Amherst Lecture
in Philosophy 18 (2025): 1-32. <http://www.amherstlecture.org/moran2025/>.
