[SEQ RERUN] Circular Altruism

So, you've described a human preference for having the things we'd want to happen to us also happen to systems we recognize as sufficiently like ourselves. Call that preference P.

A preference utilitarian would say that the moral value of a choice is proportional to the degree to which P is satisfied by that choice. (All else being equal.)

I was starting from my own intuitions about my moral preferences. But if you stop at treating morality as a preference you run into problems when people don't share these preferences. A common variation might for example be that people believe it is good for the strong to prey on the weak. But with morality being an interpersonal thing, any morality must account for differences in preferences and therefore cannot be based in preferences. That's why I reject preference utilitarianism.

And agency is a concept you came up with to encapsulate whatever properties humans have that "justify" preferring P.

My agency based morality does justify my moral preferences, but it doesn't "just" justify my moral preferences. I only have my moral preferences as a starting point. From that I construct an abstract moral framework, check if that abstract framework satisfies conditions of consistency and plausibility, and after I've been convinced it does, use it to justify or adjust my moral preferences.

Other people might come to different conclusions using this process, but since now our moral framework is removed from mere preferences we can use properties of the frameworks in question to try and integrate them or decide between them. A preference utilitarian would have to resort to some unjustified selection method like majority vote.

So how do I come up with the properties of a moral framework that make it better than an other? I don't know yet. I would suggest that minimalism is a good property. With a non minimal framework people could always ask, "why should we adopt this policy?". With a minimal framework it's either adopt all of it or don't adopt it at all. I also justify agency as the primary motivation since our agency is what creates the problem in the first place. Without choice we have no use for morality. Without deliberation we couldn't follow it. Without metalevel reasoning we couldn't adopt it, etc. Short, agency is the very thing that creates a solvable problem of morality and thus is the best place to solve it. If we start to argue that point, then we are coming to a point where we run into gödelian incompleteness.

The test whether a choice causes something is to see whether if I did not exist or could not act (e.g. was unconscious), the thing would not occur.

In the given example, if I poison someone I cause his death, since if I could not act for whatever reason there would be no poison. But if someone is drowning without my doing and I just happen to come along and choose not to throw a life belt I would not be causing his death since he would drown anyway if I could not act.