ABSTRACT
Reductionists claim that their view has two important ethical consequences: first, that coming to be a Reductionist leads to the cessation of existential suffering; and second, that it follows from Reductionism that people are obligated to act so as to promote the welfare of others. According to the Reductionist, the personhood convention prevails because it is more conducive to overall welfare than the readily available alternatives, such as Punctualism and the Weltgeist convention. Just as coming to be a Reductionist is said to alleviate suffering, so it is also said to dissolve the tension people commonly feel between the demands of others and the promotion of their own interests. It is widely held that temporally neutral self-interested conduct is supremely rational: it is always rational for me to choose to promote my interests, timelessly construed. A consequentialist might try to answer the alienation objection to maximization strategy by denying that being strongly self-effacing is necessarily defect in a moral theory.
