Prichard’s “Duty and Interest”
Prichard proposes “to justify our feeling of dissatisfaction by considering what these attempts [at connecting duty and interest] really amount to, and more especially what they amount to in view of the ideas which have prompted them.”(XR, p.469)
What does he think we are dissatisfied with?
The assumed connection between the two (duty and interest).
The “connexions” that he is discussing are either
i) a necessary connexion between duty and interest, or
ii) a self-evident connexion
The “interest” can be either
i) only ones own (egoism), or
ii) that of all who are concerned (universalism)
He claims that he will use Plato’s, Butler’s, and Green’s attempts as examples of such projects. (Green’s discussion does not appear in our excerpt.)
He states, “I shall try to show that the attempts so described really consist of endeavours, based on mutually inconsistent presuppositions, to do one or another of three things.” (XR, p.470)
Plato-
In Plato’s discussion of justice he seems to presuppose that a decision about what is just must include an appeal to what is advantageous to the agent or those involved.
Prichard states, “The Sophists in reaching their conclusion were presupposing that for an action to be really just, it must be advantageous; for it was solely on this ground that they concluded that what we ordinarily think just is not really just. And what in the end most strikes us is that at no stage in the Republic does Plato take the line, or even suggest as a possibility, that the very presupposition of the Sophists’ arguments is false, and that therefore the question whether some action which men think just will be profitable to the agent has really nothing to do with the question whether it is right, so that Thrasymachus may enlarge as much as he pleases on the losses incurred by doing the actions we think just without getting any nearer to showing that it is a mere mistake to think them just.” (XR, p.473)
Butler-
In his eleventh sermon, he states, “Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good, as such; yet that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it.” (XR, p.474)
This is based on Butler’s concept of self-love and how it is distinguished from selfishness.
The point, however, is that Butler also assumes that some appeal to advantage (in his case happiness) is necessary to justify an act as a duty.
Prichard gives a short argument against holding a middle ground that advantageous is not what makes an action right but it cannot be right without being advantageous. This appears on p.475-6. Hence he concludes that although Plato and Butler try to take weaker positions on the relationship between duty and interest, they are committed to the idea that the two are somehow one in the same or that duty necessitates interest.
Prichard contends that not even our ordinary moral convictions allow us to be satisfied with such accounts. “For whenever in ordinary life we think of some particular action as a duty, we are not simply thinking of it as right, but also thinking of its rightness as constituted by the possession of some definite characteristic other than that of being advantageous to the agent.” (XR, 477)
Hence we must “abandon [the idea] that conduciveness to personal advantage is what renders an action a duty.” (XR, p.477)
In addition, Prichard contends that Plato and Butler hold a concomitant position that is not necessary to the first but Plato and Butler seem to think is a part of it, which states that “even though we know certain actions to be right, we must have it proved to us that they will be for our own good or happiness, since otherwise, as we act only from desire of our own happiness, we shall not do them.” (XR, p.482)
Prichard provides arguments against this second position on pages 478-482.
He asserts that he has established the following:
1) Both Plato and Butler are trying to prove that right actions will be in the agent’s interest.
2) The reason for claiming so lies in their conviction that even if we know an action is right we will not do it unless we think it is in our interest (benefit/advantage).
3) Behind this conviction is the conviction of which it is really a corollary, namely, the conviction that desire for some good to oneself is the only motive of deliberate action.
Prichard challenges these three assumptions. He proposes that the desire to advantage ones self is not the only desire. We can have a desire to do what is right that is not based on some more basic desire to our own interest. It is a desire that arises on its own in the same way that a desire for ones own happiness arises.
He states, “For we shall be able to maintain that his desire to do what is right, if strong enough, will lead him to do the action in spite of any aversion from doing it which he may feel on account of disadvantages.” (XR, p.486)