Abstract
We worry about becoming non-existent, but not about coming into being. But both events are similarly bad according to Deprivationism; hence, it seems that we should display symmetric attitudes towards both. This entails the implausible conclusion that we should display negative attitudes towards the time of our birth. In a series of articles Brueckner and Fischer offered one of the most prominent attempts to block this conclusion by appealing to a temporal bias towards future pleasures. Inspired by Yi’s criticism of their view, we argue that there is an appropriate sense of deprivation in which late birth can deprive of future pleasures. Hence, Brueckner and Fischer’s Temporal Bias does not explain the attitudinal asymmetry. In addition, to make sure that one picks out the appropriate sense of deprivation, we offer a restriction, the Historical Condition, that prevents us from considering that every value one would otherwise have is value that one was deprived of due to one’s actual birth/death. Finally, we present a novel account for the attitudinal asymmetry that relies on what we call ‘Interests Proximity Bias’.
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Notes
“Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it? Do you perceive anything grim?” (Lucretius 2001, p. 94)
Most likely Lucretius is talking about non-existence itself and not about the time when persons begin to exist or the time when they cease to. Notwithstanding, our point is not exegetical, it is enough that the passage above inspires the argument.
For simplicity’s sake we will sometimes use ‘birth’, ‘death’, ‘time of birth’, ‘time of death’ and other similar phrases indifferently to denote the time of coming into being and the time of ceasing to exist. We are avoiding the talk about non-existence because it is somewhat equivocal. The contemporary debate is not about the badness of non-existence itself or about the badness of becoming non-existent without qualification or even about the badness of being mortal. Rather, it is about the badness of ceasing to exist at a particular time. See e.g. Meier (2018: 2) and Rosenbaum (1989: 359-360) for other formulations of the argument.
Having symmetric attitudes is having attitudes of the same quality, positive, negative or neutral (otherwise, they are asymmetric). For example, if it is reasonable to fear death, attitudinal symmetry requires concern or some other negative attitude towards birth.
This is what Rosenbaum (1989: 368) called “the backfire problem”, which implies that the Lucretian argument does not force us to endorse the epicurean conclusion that we should be indifferent towards the time of our death. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to our attention.
Adapted from Nagel (1970) and Brueckner and Fischer (1986). For other early references on Deprivationism, see Feldman (1991, p. 206, fn. 3). Although the debate with Epicureans usually occurs in a hedonist background, we are using hedonic terms merely to simplify matters. For our purposes, nothing crucial hangs on hedonism being true. Instead of “pleasure” the reader is free to plug-in the phrase that denotes what he/she considers to have value.
Examples of DS typically argue that it is impossible to have been born earlier. If this is so, then birth does not deprive. See Nagel (1970) and Kaufman (1996) for two different ways of defending such impossibility. For criticisms, see e.g. McMahan (2006) and Timmerman (2018). Another way of favouring DS relies on a satisfactionist theory of value. If only the satisfaction of present desires is valuable for a person, then, via Deprivationism, although death can deprive, because it can prevent us from satisfying present desires, it seems that birth cannot have the same effect. Even granting that this controversial view on value is true, it seems that birth can also prevent us from satisfying present desires. For example, four year-old Alice desires to watch The Shining, but her parents disallow it on account of her being too young to watch the movie; had she been born earlier she would have been able to satisfy her present desire.
The asymmetry concerning pains was presented by Parfit (1984, pp. 165–166): we tend to be indifferent to past painful experiences but are concerned with future pains.
It is unclear to us whether the example shows that we display the stronger bias – i.e. that we display indifference towards past pleasures –, since a weaker temporal bias, namely that we prefer future pleasures to past pleasures, plausibly accommodates the case. The problem is that the weaker bias only explains what we have called the second interpretation of the attitudinal asymmetry (see section 1). Although Brueckner and Fischer (1986) started by claiming that the example shows that we display the stronger bias, given their responses to Belshaw (1993) and Feldman (2013), their stance became unclear for they sometimes describe the bias in its weaker form and sometimes in its stronger form (see Brueckner and Fischer 1993; Fischer and Brueckner 2013). Nonetheless, we will be assuming that they are interpreting the example in the stronger sense.
The amnesia is also designed to mimic how we relate to the non-experiential goods that birth and death may deprive one of.
With this said, the primarily axiological interpretation of the amnesia restriction leads us to a different conundrum. The outcome we get from applying it is counterintuitive: in both cases, Alice was indeed deprived of the additional value due to her untimely death and not due to the mistreatment she was subjected to. Hence, this sort of cases may be used to build a robust argument against the amnesia restriction itself – regardless of its interpretation. Nevertheless, the primarily axiological interpretation of the restriction has the advantage of providing a coherent response, even if, arguably, it conflicts with our intuitions regarding these cases.
We have in mind the famous January 30th, 1969 Rooftop Concert in London.
An anonymous reviewer objected that in these sort of cases late birth also implies future additional pleasure. For example, Alice being born in 1969 implies that she will enjoy seeing other bands live that otherwise she would not. All other things being equal, the gains and losses of a late birth seem to balance each other out. We think this is false. Here is a counterexample: as a child, Alice was the victim of a violent and abusive father and thus had a short and miserable life, but this would not have been the case had she been born earlier. Why? Because, let us suppose, her father’s abuse and violent behaviour was caused by his experience in the war a few years after she was born. Had she been born earlier, she would not have been a helpless victim of her father’s abuse (because, say, by the time he went to war she would have been an adult and thereby she would not be powerless against her father’s abuse). Consequently, she would have had a longer, better life. Her late birth deprived her of the value in such life. And this value is in the future.
Although their legal dissolution only occurred in 1975, they stopped playing live in 1969.
This is quite similar to, but importantly more general than, McMahan’s view on the attitudinal asymmetry. He says that “About the only thing one can be confident about is that a life with an earlier origin would have been radically different and would not have contained the particulars about which one cares. So in most cases there is no reason for a person to prefer to have had an earlier origin and good reason to prefer not to have had it. In general, therefore, it is rational for people not to regret that they did not have an earlier origin. But normally it is rational to want a later death. Hence there is an important asymmetry between an earlier origin and a later death.” (McMahan 2006, p. 224) It should be clear that having a life with such and such particulars is but one interest among others.
We are not assuming an interest-focused view about value. We are merely claiming that, when we assess what matters to us, we typically take into consideration the satisfaction of our present interests, not interests that are alien to us. It might be the case that satisfying interests is of no value at all and yet having some interests instead of others is the basis for persons’ preferences. In particular, for their preference to die later instead of being born earlier.
We have not argued in favour of the rationality of the Interests Proximity Bias. Nevertheless, a strategy similar to the one used by Fischer (2009, ch. 5) in favour of the rationality of the Temporal Bias solution can be adapted to our purposes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank audiences for discussing an early version of this article at the 3rd International Congress of the Portuguese Philosophical Society and Vth Conference of the Brazilian Society for Analytical Philosophy. We also thank our colleagues from LanCog for many helpful comments and suggestions, especially André Ferreira, Bogdan Dicher, Bruno Jacinto, David Yates, Domingos Faria, Elia Zardini, Elton Marques, Hugo Luzio, José Mestre, Pedro Dinis, Pedro Galvão, Ricardo Santos. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for many valuable comments and suggestions.
Funding
Ricardo Miguel’s work on this paper was supported by the doctoral fellowship SFRH/BD/107907/2015.
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Miguel, R., Santos, D. New Reflections on the Mirror: the Interests Proximity Bias Solution. Philosophia 48, 1527–1542 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00165-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00165-x