(November 7, 2018 at 11:49 am)bennyboy Wrote: What represents self-interest? It is the sense of agency. It think, therefore I am, isn't just a general sense of qualia, IMO, it's also a mythological archetype-- that of the individual agency of self. Benjamin isn't so much a thing, as a complex of ideas and feelings attached to a name.
Actions which lead to the dissolution of the agent cannot be in the self interest of the agent because you have to have an agent to be a self. Thus those acts which encourage the dissolution of the agent, rather than discourage it, are against that agent's self interest. The rest can be derived from that. It's a lot like asking the question of what is health. The answer may be subjectively based, but the difference between health and it's lack is based upon objective considerations based upon the undesirability of pathology and dysfunction. Likewise, the interest of the agent may be subjectively defined, but it is based on objective facts.