The Moral Self-Cliff

This post is presented in the LLM-Lensed Iterative Blogging format: a hand-written summary by me first, then a full version generated by an LLM from that summary.

Summary

Written by hand.

Say that you have the opportunity to do something nice for someone, from giving someone your game show winnings to saving someone from dying, but you must choose one of two people. Given time to deliberate, there are many factors that should be considered in your choice, including need. But one factor that looms very large culturally is each person's social distance from you.

Culturally, you'd be wrong to save a friend and not your spouse. You'd be a monster to save an acquaintance and not a close relative. The closer socially an individual is, the more we owe them morally. The opposing choices here are not noble, they are confusing, perverse, and culturally incorrect. This is a consistent pattern, until you get to the closest individual of all: yourself.

It is noble to sacrifice yourself for your spouse. It is noble to sacrifice yourself for a distant friend. It is even noble to sacrifice yourself for a stranger. By this blunt measuring device, i.e. the cultural approval attached to prioritizing someone, people closer to you have a rising moral priority up until yourself specifically, where it falls precipitously to the lowest of all. I call this the Moral Self-Cliff.

There could be many reasons for this; the most readily apparent are the clear ills of selfishness. However, it's not as obvious as it first seems that the ills of selfishness should be scale-dependent. Would selfless couples or selfless friend groups lead to a more cooperative world than the culture we are in where members of these kinds of relationships prefer members of their own group? To over-personify, this cliff evidences a culture's preference for the smallest non-individual units of organization.

Another perspective is that “yourself” as the closest individual to you is simply an invalid or hasty assumption coming from a shallower part of the culture. A redrawing of the ‘x-axis’ of the cliff (especially a cropping) could leave a perfectly explicable, even monotonic, relationship.

There are many other ways of reconciling the ‘jump discontinuity’ in this relationship of social proximity and moral priority, but mainly it's an interesting phenomenon to notice.

Generated by claude-opus-4-8

The text below is AI-generated from the summary above.

The strange thing about the picture above is not the slope; it is the last point. Almost every moral culture agrees that closeness buys priority — that you owe your spouse more than your neighbor, and your neighbor more than a stranger. Plot that and you get a tidy, rising curve. The curve invites you to extrapolate: if the person one step closer than your spouse gets even more priority, then the closest person of all should sit at the very top. Instead the graph does the opposite. At “yourself” it plunges. Sacrificing your interests for almost anyone is called noble; insisting on them is called selfish. The dotted line is what the trend predicts; the solid drop is what the culture actually does.

Two questions follow, and the rest of this post takes them in turn. First, descriptively: where does a shape like this come from? Second, and more interestingly: when we hand the question to a formal moral theory — one with explicit axioms rather than inherited intuitions — does the cliff survive?

Where the slope comes from, and where the cliff doesn't

The rising part of the curve has an unusually clean explanation from biology. Hamilton's rule — that altruism is favored when relatedness times benefit exceeds cost, rB > C — predicts exactly a gradient of concern that falls off with genealogical distance. Reciprocal-altruism models (Trivers) extend the same logic to friends and allies, who are “close” in a social rather than genetic sense. So far, biology and culture agree.

But notice what these models say about the endpoint. Your genetic relatedness to yourself is 1 — the maximum. Inclusive-fitness reasoning therefore predicts that the self should sit at the peak of the curve, not the bottom. Biology draws the dotted line, not the cliff. The discontinuity is precisely the place where culture overrides the gradient it otherwise tracks so faithfully, and that mismatch is the phenomenon worth explaining.

Psychology names the pieces without quite dissolving the puzzle. There is a long literature on the moral circle and its expansion (Singer), and on moral expansiveness as a measurable trait; there is construal-level theory on how psychological distance reshapes judgment; and there is the empathy-altruism debate (Batson) over whether we can be moved by anything but self-interest. What none of these quite predict is a sign flip at zero distance. The cultural machinery that praises self-sacrifice looks less like a continuation of kin altruism and more like a group-level adaptation: a norm that benefits the pair, the family, the tribe — the summary's “smallest non-individual units” — by taxing the individual who would otherwise defect toward self-interest. On that reading the cliff is not a fact about how much you matter; it is an incentive the group installs because you matter to yourself already and need no encouragement.

Which is the first hint that the cliff might be an artifact of what we are measuring. Hold that thought; it is what the formal theories make precise.

The cliff in formal moral theories

Here is the sharp version of the question. Our vertical axis is the approval attached to prioritizing a person — a quantity indexed to you, the agent choosing. For each formal theory we can ask: plotted against social distance, does that quantity have a cliff at the self? The answer, remarkably, is almost always no — but the theories disagree about what to put there instead, and the disagreement is illuminating.

Classical utilitarianism flattens it. On the impartial view, everyone's welfare counts the same; in Sidgwick's phrase, the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other — and that includes your own. There is no proximity slope and no self-cliff: a flat line. What looks like a demand for self-sacrifice is not the self being devalued but arithmetic — if giving up your hundred dollars produces two hundred dollars of good for others, the sums say give, exactly as they would if the beneficiary were you. The self is neither privileged nor punished. So the theory most famous for demanding sacrifice actually has no cliff at all; it has a flat horizon.

Ethical egoism inverts it. If the sole thing you are required to promote is your own good, the curve is turned upside down: the self is the summit and concern descends from there. This is the cleanest possible negation of the cliff, and its rarity as a serious position is itself evidence that the cultural cliff is doing real work — we recoil from the self-summit as readily as we honor the self-sacrifice.

Kantian ethics forbids it. This one surprises people who expect duty-based ethics to demand self-abnegation. Kant holds that there are genuine duties to oneself — self-respect, the development of one's talents, and famously a duty against suicide. Each person is an end in themselves, and you are a person; you may not treat your own humanity as mere means, even in the service of others. Far from bottoming out, the self is pinned at the same inviolable height as everyone else. Kant's curve is high and flat, and the self is emphatically on it. A pure self-cliff is, in Kantian terms, a kind of error about your own worth.

Care ethics and commonsense partiality reproduce the slope but refuse the floor. These are the theories that most resemble our folk picture: Ross's prima facie duties and the ethics of care (Noddings, Held) build in exactly the special obligations to the near-and-dear that give the curve its rise. Yet even here the self is not zeroed out. Noddings is explicit that the one-caring must be sustained — care that consumes the carer is a failure mode, not an ideal. Partialist theories give you the slope but warn against the drop; the culture, it seems, is more self-effacing than the theories that most flatter its intuitions.

Contractualism gives the self a veto. On Scanlon's view, a principle is wrong if someone could reasonably reject it — and you are among those someones. A principle that demanded your ruin for others' modest benefit is one you could reasonably reject. Your standpoint enters the calculation with full standing, which structurally prevents the self from falling below everyone else. Again: no cliff.

Across the serious theories, then, the self sits at the top (egoism, and the biological trend), at the same protected height as everyone (Kant, contractualism, and the flat utilitarian horizon), or on the raised near-end of a partial slope (care, commonsense) — but essentially never at the bottom. So where does the cliff live?

The answer is supererogation. The category of the supererogatory — the praiseworthy-but-not-required — is exactly the home of noble self-sacrifice. You are not obligated to die for a stranger; it is “beyond the call.” And this is the key to the whole picture, because it means our axis was quietly measuring two different things at once. The rising part of the curve is obligation data (it is wrong — blameworthy — to prefer the acquaintance to your child). The cliff is praise data (it is admirable — but optional — to prefer anyone to yourself). Plot obligation alone and there is no cliff: you are simply not required to prioritize yourself, which lands the self at low-but-permissible, not at forbidden. Plot praise alone and the “slope” barely exists: we do not hand out medals for feeding your own children. The dramatic discontinuity appears only when the two scales are overlaid and read as one.

So is the cliff real?

Real as a cultural artifact; largely illusory as a claim about moral priority. When you force the question through a formalized theory — the exercise the summary asked for — the jump discontinuity tends to dissolve, because each theory keeps the two scales, obligation and praise, apart. The cliff was an artifact of overlaying them, which vindicates the summary's own suspicion that “yourself” is a hasty point on the axis. The honest redrawing is not a new x-axis but an un-mixing of the y: obligation is roughly monotonic and merely bottoms out (not below zero) at the self, while praise for selflessness is a separate curve entirely.

That leaves the genuinely interesting residue — the one the theories don't settle. Even granting that no rigorous ethics devalues the self, cultures still reward selflessness and still find the self-summit distasteful. The self-cliff is what that reward looks like when you mistake it for a measurement. It is less a fact about how much you are worth than a price the group is willing to pay you in approval for not acting like it.