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Perfectionism

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-L070-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-L070-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/perfectionism/v-1

3. Perfectionism and other-regarding duties

Perfectionism gives a central place to self-regarding duties. Whereas some philosophers confine moral evaluation to acts that affect other people, perfectionists affirm moral duties to seek goods such as knowledge and achievement in one’s own life. To be a complete morality, however, perfectionism must also capture other-regarding duties such as the duties not to kill, to relieve starvation, and so on.

Some perfectionists attempt this within a formal structure that is egoistic, so each human’s ultimate duty is only to seek their own perfection. They do so by claiming that virtuous action, including the exercise of other-regarding virtues such as justice and beneficence, is part of the agent’s good (see Egoism and altruism §4; Virtue ethics; Virtues and vices §3). But this egoistic account of other-regarding duties is problematic. In a merely broad perfectionism, one can simply add virtue to a list of objective goods. But especially if virtue is given special weight against other goods, it is hard to see how the resulting morality differs significantly from a non-perfectionist one that simply tells agents to act justly and beneficently without tying this to claims about their good. Some egoistic perfectionists try to derive the goodness of virtue within narrow perfectionism. Thus, some argue that human nature consists in rationality, and that exercising rationality requires acting virtuously. But if there is a sense of rationality in which rationality is plausibly part of human nature, for example, is plausibly essential to humans, this rationality does not seem specially tied to virtuous action. It can be exercised not only in just and beneficent acts but equally in ones that ignore others’ needs (such as philosophizing while others starve) or positively hurt them.

A more promising approach is to give perfectionism a universalistic structure, so each human’s ultimate duty is to promote the greatest perfection of all, with others’ good counting as much as one’s own (see Universalism in ethics). This yields other-regarding duties, though on a distinctive basis: the reason we ought to relieve starvation and not kill is to promote others’ excellence. And, given a universalistic structure, perfectionism can go on to treat virtue as good. It can hold, as Brentano, Moore and Ross have done, that whenever something is good, loving it for itself, that is, desiring, pursuing, or taking pleasure in it for itself, is also good. Then desiring and pursuing the objective good of others, which for perfectionists constitutes virtue, is itself an objective good. This account of virtue is an attractive addition to broad perfectionism, but it presupposes that each agent should already care about the perfection of all. Given a structure that already grounds other-regarding duties, perfectionism can add that fulfilling these duties virtuously promotes one aspect of the agent’s good. It is harder for it, while remaining distinctively perfectionist, to derive other-regarding duties from a concern only with the agent’s perfection.

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Citing this article:
Hurka, Thomas. Perfectionism and other-regarding duties. Perfectionism, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-L070-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/perfectionism/v-1/sections/perfectionism-and-other-regarding-duties.
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