The perfect murder: A philosophical whodunit

In his Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues from the possibility of cases of fission and/or fusion of persons that one must reject identity as what matters for personal survival. Instead Parfit concludes that what matters is “psychological connectedness and/or continuity with the right kind of cause,” or what he calls an R-relation. In this paper, I argue that, if one accepts Parfit’s conclusion, one must accept that R-relations are what matter for moral responsibility as well. Unfortunately, it seems that accepting that the R-relation is what matters for both survival and moral responsibility leads to a contradiction. My goal, however, is not merely to point out a problem in Parfit’s account. Instead, I believe that once we understand the basic intuitions which lead to this contradiction, it is clear that there is no fully satisfactory way to account for what matters with respect to survival and moral responsibility.     

Trivial Personal Differences

Abstract

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues that personal identity is indeterminate and that identity is not what matters in personal survival. Parfit argues that traditional views of personal identity have counterintuitive consequences and that they violate a plausible requirement, suggested by Bernard Williams, that must be met by any acceptable criterion of identity. Parfit argues that, unlike traditional determinate views of personal identity, his view succeeds in accommodating intuitions and in meeting (an analogue to) Williams' requirement. I argue that Parfit's view has more counterintuitive consequences than do the traditional views of identity. Though the traditional views do seem to violate Williams' requirement, Parfit's view fares no better. In fact, it seems that any theory of personal survival that appeals to connections that may hold to a greater or lesser extent will fail to meet the relevant requirement. This is an important general point, since the requirement is a plausible one.     

Trivalent Semantics and the Vaguely Vague

Michael Tye responds to the problem of higher-order vagueness for his trivalent semantics by maintaining that truth-value predicates are “vaguely vague”: it’s indeterminate, on his view, whether they have borderline cases and therefore indeterminate whether every sentence is true, false, or indefinite. Rosanna Keefe objects (1) that Tye’s argument for this claim tacitly assumes that every sentence is true, false, or indefinite, and (2) that the conclusion is any case not viable. I argue – contra (1) – that Tye’s argument needn’t make that assumption. A version of her objection is in fact better directed against other arguments Tye advances, though Tye can absorb this criticism without abandoning his position’s core. On the other hand, Keefe’s second objection does hit the mark: embracing ‘vaguely vague’ truth-value predicates undermines Tye’s ability to support validity claims needed to defend his position. To see this, however, we must develop Keefe’s remarks further than she does.     

Against the Additive View of Imagination

According to the additive view of sensory imagination, mental imagery often involves two elements. There is an image-like element, which gives the experiences qualitative phenomenal character akin to that of perception. There is also a non-image element, consisting of something like suppositions about the image's object. This accounts for extra-sensory features of imagined objects and situations: for example, it determines whether an image of a grey horse is an image of Desert Orchid, or of some other grey horse. The view promises to give a simple and intuitive explanation of some puzzling features of imagination, and, further, to illuminate imagination's relation to modal knowledge. I contend that the additive view does not fulfil these two promises. The explanation of how images come to be determinate is redundant: the content constituting the indeterminate mental images on which the view relies is sufficient to deliver determinate images too, so the extra resources offered by the view are not required. When applied to modal epistemology, the view either delivers implausible results or offers no distinctive insight. Since the view is sold on its explanatory merits, and since these are dubious, the additive view should be rejected.     

Autonomy,life as an intrinsic value,and the right to die in dignity

This paper examines two models of thinking relating to the issue of the right to die in dignity: one takes into consideration the rights and interests of the individual; the other supposes that human life is inherently valuable. I contend that preference should be given to the first model, and further assert that the second model may be justified in moral terms only as long as it does not resort to paternalism. The view that holds that certain patients are not able to comprehend their own interests in a fully rational manner, and therefore ‘we’ know what is good for these patients better than ‘they’ do, is morally unjustifiable. I proceed by refuting the ‘quality of life’ argument, asserting that each person is entitled to decide for herself when it is worth living and when it is not. In this connection, a caveat will be made regarding the role of the family. The author’s research interests include bioethics, free speech, tolerance and ethics in the media.     

Past Desires and the Dead

I examine an argument that appears to take us from Parfit’s [Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1984)] thesis that we have no reason to fulfil desires we no longer care about to the conclusion that the effect of posthumous events on our desires is a matter of indifference (the post-mortem thesis). I suspect that many of Parfit’s readers, including Vorobej [Philosophical Studies 90 (1998) 305], think that he is committed to (something like) this reasoning, and that Parfit must therefore give up the post-mortem thesis. However, as it turns out, the argument is subtly equivocal and does not commit Parfit to the post-mortem thesis. I close with some doubts about Parfit’s case for his indifference thesis.     

HOW SHOULD WE BEHAVE? A REVIEW OF REASONS AND PERSONS BY DEREK PARFIT

In this book Parfit attempts to develop a rational, non-religious ethics. Instead of asking, “What does God tell us to do?” he asks, “What does reason tell us to do?” Given a set of simple assumptions, he considers whether it is possible to be consistently selfish or consistently good. Analyses of personal dilemmas (problems of self-control) and moral dilemmas (problems of social cooperation) show that neither consistent selfishness nor consistent goodness is logically possible. Instead, a fine balance must be maintained between, on the one hand, our immediate versus long-term good and, on the other, our own good versus that of other people. Ultimately Parfit fails to develop a formula by which such a balance may be struck. Parfit''s analysis is consistent with behavioral analysis in its reductionistic view of the self and the parallel it draws between relations with other people and relations with oneself at other times. Parfit''s analysis is inconsistent with behaviorism in its view of the mind as internal, available to introspection, and able to cause behavior. His nonfunctional mentalism leads Parfit to inconsistencies and blocks the path to a consistent ethics. Teleological behaviorism''s view of the mind in terms of patterns of overt behavior is not hampered by these inconsistencies and may lead to a functional rather than purely rational ethics.     

A Right of Rebellion in the Mengzi?

Mengzi believed that tyrannical rulers can be justifiably deposed, and many contemporary scholars see this as grounding a right of popular rebellion. I argue that the text of the Mengzi reveals a more mixed view, and does so in two respects. First, it suggests that the people are sometimes permitted to participate in a rebellion but not permitted to decide for themselves when rebellion is warranted. Second, it gives appropriate moral weight not to the people’s judgments about the justifiability of rebelling, but rather to certain affections and behaviors that closely track their life satisfaction. I contend that in both respects the permissions Mengzi grants the people fall short of a proper right of rebellion. I conclude that the more historical account of Mengzi’s “just revolt theory” suggests an intriguing division of deliberative labor, and note some of the advantages of this account.     

Room for a view: on the metaphysical subject of personal identity

Sydney Shoemaker leads today’s “neo-Lockean” liberation of persons from the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson, according to whom persons are biological entities and who challenge all neo-Lockean views on grounds that abstracting from strictly physical, or bodily, criteria plays fast and loose with our identities. There is a fundamental mistake on both sides: a false dichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychological continuity theories of personal identity. Neo-Lockeans, like everyone else today who relies on Locke’s analysis of personal identity, including Derek Parfit, have either completely distorted or not understood Locke’s actual view. Shoemaker’s defense, which uses a “package deal” definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity and employs the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity, leaves far less room for psychological continuity views than for my own view, which, independently of its radical implications, is that (a) consciousness makes personal identity, and (b) in consciousness alone personal identity consists—which happens to be also Locke’s actual view. Moreover, the ubiquitous Fregean conception of borders and the so-called “ambiguity of is” collapse in the light of what Hintikka has called the “Frege trichotomy.” The Ramsey–Lewis account, due to the problematic way Shoemaker tries to bind the variables, makes it impossible for the neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfill the uniqueness clause required by all such Lewis style definitions; such attempts avoid circularity only at the expense of mistaking isomorphism with identity. Contrary to what virtually all philosophers writing on the topic assume, fission does not destroy personal identity. A proper analysis of public versus perspectival identification, derived using actual case studies from neuropsychiatry, provides the scientific, mathematical and logical frameworks for a new theory of self-reference, wherein “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” and the “I,” can be precisely defined in terms of the subject and the subject-in-itself.     

Attesting the Aristotelian Future

Aristotelian relativism about the future (as recently defended by MacFarlane (2003)) claims that a prediction made on Monday, such as ‘It will rain’, can be indeterminate on Monday but determinate on Tuesday. A serious objection to this intuitively appealing view is that it cannot coherently be attested: for if it is attested on Monday, then our blindness to what the future holds precludes attesting that the prediction is determinate on Tuesday, and if it is attested on Tuesday (when, suppose, it rains), then the fact that it rains precludes attesting that the prediction is indeterminate on Monday. In this paper, I focus on Moruzzi and Wright (2009)’s recent development of this objection and argue that it fails. This result removes a major obstacle to defending the Aristotelian view.     

How useful is the concept of the ‘harm threshold’ in reproductive ethics and law?

In his book Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit suggests that people are not harmed by being conceived with a disease or disability if they could not have existed without suffering that particular condition. He nevertheless contends that entities can be harmed if the suffering they experience is sufficiently severe. By implication, there is a threshold which divides harmful from non-harmful conceptions. The assumption that such a threshold exists has come to play a part in UK policy making. I argue that Parfit’s distinction between harmful and non-harmful conceptions is untenable. Drawing on Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument for God’s existence, I suggest that the act of creation cannot be identical with the act of harming—nor indeed of benefiting—however great the offspring’s suffering may be. I suggest that Parfit is right that bringing children into existence does not usually harm them, but I argue that this must be applied to all conceptions, since Parfit cannot show how the harm threshold can be operationalised. If we think certain conceptions are unethical or should be illegal, this must be on other grounds than that the child is harmed by them. I show that a Millian approach in this context fails to exemplify the empirical and epistemological advantages which are commonly associated with it, and that harm-based legislation would need to be based on broader harm considerations than those relating to the child who is conceived.     

Attitudes to suffering: Parfit and Nietzsche

Abstract

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that Nietzsche does not disagree with central normative beliefs that ‘we’ hold. Such disagreement would threaten Parfit’s claim that normative beliefs are known by intuition. However, Nietzsche defends a conception of well-being that challenges Parfit’s normative claim that suffering is bad in itself for the sufferer. Nietzsche recognizes the phenomenon of ‘growth through suffering’ as essential to well-being. Hence, removal of all suffering would lead to diminished well-being. Parfit claims that if Nietzsche understood normative concepts in Parfit’s objectivist sense, he would not disagree with the claim that suffering is bad in itself – that intrinsic facts about suffering count in favour of our not wanting it. I argue that Nietzsche would disagree. Suffering for Nietzsche is not merely instrumentally necessary for psychological growth, nor is it easy to construe it as something bad in itself that contributes value as part of a good whole. Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But for Nietzsche, suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts.     

Fearful asymmetry: Kierkegaard’s search for the direction of time

The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative.     

Parfit on Free Will,Desert, and the Fairness of Punishment

In his recent monumental book On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues for a hard determinist view that rejects free will-based moral responsibility and desert. This rejection of desert is necessary for his main aim in the book, the overall reconciliation of normative ethics. In Appendix E of his book, however, Parfit claims that it is possible to mete out fair punishment. Parfit’s position on punishment here seems to be inconsistent with his hard determinism. I argue that Parfit is mistaken here, in a way that leads him to unjustified optimism about the possibility of fair penalization. Insofar as we take the free will problem seriously, we cannot reconcile a belief in the absence of desert with a belief in the fairness of penalization.     

Toward a Purely Axiological Scientific Realism

The axiological tenet of scientific realism, “science seeks true theories,” is generally taken to rest on a corollary epistemological tenet, “we can justifiably believe that our successful theories achieve (or approximate) that aim.” While important debates have centered on, and have led to the refinement of, the epistemological tenet, the axiological tenet has suffered from neglect. I offer what I consider to be needed refinements to the axiological postulate. After showing an intimate relation between the refined postulate and ten theoretical desiderata, I argue that the axiological postulate does not depend on its epistemological counterpart; epistemic humility can accompany us in the quest for truth. Upon contrasting my axiological postulate against the two dominant non-realist alternatives and the standard realist postulate, I contend that its explanatory and justificatory virtues render it, among the axiologies considered, the richest account of the scientific enterprise.     

Educating Beyond Cultural Diversity: Redrawing the Boundaries of a Democratic Plurality

In this paper I draw some distinctions between the terms “cultural diversity” and “plurality” and argue that a radical conception of plurality is needed in order both to re-imagine the boundaries of democratic education and to address more fully the political aspects of conflict that plurality gives rise to. This paper begins with a brief exploration of the usages of the term diversity in European documents that promote intercultural education as a democratic vehicle for overcoming social conflict between different cultural groups. In contradistinction to these usages, this paper calls for a more robust conception of plurality, one that does not simply denote membership in different cultural groupings but is rooted in the human condition and based on a conception of uniqueness. Following the work of Hannah Arendt and feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, I explore how the appearance of unique beings in specific contexts can be understood as an eminently political act and I contend that such a view leads to a better educational understanding of conflict and contestation. The paper sketches the contours of democratic plurality along this line of thought and discusses how these new boundaries have implications for education’s relation to democracy.     

DESIRES, VALUES, REASONS, AND THE DUALISM OF PRACTICAL REASON

In On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that facts about reasons for action are grounded in facts about values and against the view that they are grounded in facts about the desires that subjects would have after fully informed and rational deliberation. I describe and evaluate Parfit's arguments for this value-based conception of reasons for action and find them wanting. I also assess his response to Sidgwick's suggestion that there is a Dualism of Practical Reason. Parfit seems not to notice that his preferred value-based conception of reasons for action augurs strongly in favour of a view like Sidgwick's. ¹     

Sortal continuity of material things

Spatiotemporal and qualitative continuity are not sufficient to trace the career or path of one and the same object through its history. One needs sortal continuity, guaranteed by the form-token of the object. In this paper I concentrate on the question of sortal continuity linked to the problem of the cohabitation of objects. I intend to test whether it is possible to stick to the belief in continuants or endurers as well as the sortal dependence of identity and at the same time avoid an undesirable multiplication of spatially coinciding objects, i.e., avoid the thesis of cohabitation. I abandon the philosophical view – this is the price to be paid – that the set of the material constituents making up an object is an object proper. The basic units of reality are the objects falling under sortals and not the ultimate components thereof. That a determinate piece of copper is not identical with the statue made from it, therefore, does not imply that we have a cohabitation of two numerically different objects. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.