Harming Yourself and Others: A Note on the Asymmetry of Agency in Action Evaluations

Principles are investigated that allow one to establish a preference ordering
between possible actions according to the question whether an acting agent
himself or other agents will benefit or be harmed by the consequences of an
action. It is shown that a combination of utility maximization, an altruist
principle, and weak negative utilitarianism yield an ordering that seems to be
intuitively appealing, although it is not necessarily satisfied by common everyday
evaluations of actions.