Solidarity, Self-Deprivation, and Selflessness

Rowan Mellor (Northwestern University)

The Collective Ethics Seminar: Online Presentation – 20 October 2025 – 15.15 – 16.45 CEST / 09.15 – 10.45 EST

Rowan Mellor - Solidarity, Self-Deprivation, and Selflessness

On Monday 20 October 2025, Rowan Mellor (Northwestern University) will give a presentation in the Collective Ethics Seminar entitled ‘Solidarity, Self-Deprivation, and Selflessness’.

Abstract: People sometimes act in solidarity with others by depriving themselves of a good which others lack. For example, while leading his army through the desert, Alexander the Great is fabled to have refused a helmet filled with water, preferring to undergo the soldiers’ suffering with them than to accept something which they couldn’t have. Such self-depriving acts of solidarity pose a puzzle. On the one hand, they strike us as morally virtuous; in depriving himself of what others lacked, Alexander is portrayed as morally admirable. Yet, on the other, it is difficult to see what the point of acting in this way could be. Depriving yourself of a good which others cannot have simply makes you worse off without making them any better off. From this angle, self-depriving acts of solidarity look like a masochistic form of levelling down.

My aim in this talk is to make progress towards understanding could be morally admirable about self-depriving solidarity. The proposal I put forward is that agents who self-deprive in solidarity with others abnegate their own private perspectives in deliberation, and instead take up a collective perspective. That is, their sole aim is that we attain some good, and so they are unmotivated pursue states of affairs in which only they themselves get that good. I suggest that this abnegation of the private deliberative perspective amounts to a form a selflessness which Iris Murdoch identified in The Sovereignty of Good.

The online seminar is open for all to attend. The session starts at 15.15 CEST / 09.15 EST. You can join the session via the following link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/62736288881?pwd=SndEdTNoNlZtSzJqcmpabm5NaWIyUT09


The other speakers this semester are Marco Meyer, Frank Hindriks and Åsa Burman. For more information about the seminar, please see https://social.univie.ac.at/events/collective-ethics-seminar/.

We hope to see you at the seminar!

Kind regards,

Gunnar Björnsson (Stockholm University), Olle Blomberg (University of Gothenburg), and Niels de Haan (University of Vienna)