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Philosophical work

Beginning with his first and best known book, The Moral Point of View (1958), Baier has been attempting to construct a justification of morality that is grounded in rationality. His original strategy was to find certain nonquestion-begging requirements of practical reason that then could be shown to favor morality over egoism. According to Baier, the very raison d'être of a morality is to yield reasons that overrule the reasons of self-interest in those cases when everyone following their own self-interest would be harmful to everyone.If we appeal to self-interested reasons to be moral, it would seem that such reasons cannot support morality over self-interest in cases of conflict. On the other hand, if we appeal to non-self-interested reasons to justify morality, those reasons seem to be implicitly moral, and so this would just be begging the question against egoistic opponents of morality. While making many contributions to the conceptual analysis of basic concepts in moral, political and legal philosophy such as those of obligation, responsibility, reason for action, egoism and the meaning of life, and also to applied ethics, Baier struggled with the fundamental question of how to justify morality throughout his career. He inspired many other philosophers to do so as well.