Abstract
According to John Martin Fischer and Anthony Brueckner’s unique version of the deprivation approach to accounting for death’s badness, it is rational for us to have asymmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. In previous work, I have defended this approach against a criticism raised by Jens Johansson by attempting to show that Johansson’s criticism relies on an example that is incoherent. Recently, Duncan Purves has argued that my defense reveals an incoherence not only in Johansson’s example but also in Fischer and Brueckner’s approach itself. Here I argue that by paying special attention to a certain feature of Fischer and Brueckner’s approach, we can dispense of not only Johansson’s criticism but also of Purves’s objection to Fischer and Brueckner’s approach.
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Notes
Fischer and Brueckner use the following Parfit-inspired (see Parfit 1984) thought experiment to show that we do in fact have asymmetric attitudes toward past and future goods (in this case, pleasures):
Imagine that you are in some hospital to test a drug. The drug induces intense pleasure for an hour followed by amnesia. You awaken and ask the nurse about your situation. She says that either you tried the drug yesterday (and had an hour of pleasure) or you will try the drug tomorrow (and will have an hour of pleasure). While she checks on your status, it is clear that you prefer to have the pleasure tomorrow (Brueckner and Fischer 1986: 218–219).
This name ‘BF*(dd)*’ requires a key: ‘BF’ refers to Brueckner and Fischer, ‘dd’ to the fact that it is a de dicto construal of Fischer and Bruckner’s position, and the asterisks to independent modifications of the de dicto construal of Fischer and Brueckner’s position.
As Fischer and Brueckner (Fischer and Brueckner 2014: 4) see it, Johansson raises three criticisms of their view, the first of which is avoided in the most recent formulation of the view, BF*(dd)*, which leaves two remaining criticisms. Johansson (Johansson 2013: 62) sees the first of these two remaining criticisms as an objection to Fischer and Brueckner’s claim that they are rescuing the standard deprivation approach, and he sees the second criticism as an objection to taking an alternative approach. As I noted in my reply to Johansson (Cyr 2014: 335), Fischer and Brueckner take both criticisms as criticisms of their actual view, and so, I take it, we should understand BF*(dd)* to be an alternative to the standard deprivation approach (one that Fischer and Brueckner take to be particularly well-suited for a response to the Lucretian symmetry argument).
I do not mean to suggest that Purves is committed to the truth of NTR; I only discuss problems with the principle because doing so will be helpful in creating an alternative principle to show the incoherence of Johansson’s example.
For simplicity’s sake, I have dropped references to the possible worlds at issue. Presumably the two worlds can be the same world, or at least identical in all respects relevant to this case. One complication with NTR (and, as I see it, an additional reason to set aside references to the possible worlds to which it refers) is that it is not clear what connections there must be between the possible worlds to which it refers, other than that S must be in both worlds.
One way to bolster NTR in order to avoid this problem would be to build into the principle the requirement that we hold fixed certain features of the agent, including her preferences, when we consider the other possible world:
Non-time-relativity* (NTR*): If it is rational for a subject S to care about an event e in a possible world w at a time t, then it is rational for S to care about e in a possible world w* at a time t* [where t* is a time before or after t] provided that S’s preferences in w* at t* are the same as her preferences in w at t.
In addition to being better suited to show the incoherence of Johansson’s example and also to avoid the problem raised by the case of Fernando, NTR* would be just as problematic for Fischer and Brueckner’s approach as is NTR. But, since there is a different principle to which Fischer and Brueckner can appeal to show the incoherence of Johansson’s example (one that does not show their own approach to be incoherent too), we can set aside NTR*. Thanks to Duncan Purves and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin for discussion on this point.
Thanks to Philip Swenson for discussion on the formulation of this principle.
In other words, when we shift to another possible world, we hold fixed two sets of things: first, all of the facts about Susan that ground whether or not it is rational for her to care about torture, and second, the temporal relation between Susan and the painful torture (in this case, Susan is temporally located prior to the potential painful torture).
References
Brueckner, A.L., and J.M. Fischer. 1986. Why is death bad? Philosophical Studies 50: 213–221. Reprinted in The metaphysics of death, ed. J.M. Fischer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993: 221–229.
Cyr, T. 2014. Rationally not caring about torture: a reply to Johansson. The Journal of Ethics 18: 331–339.
Feldman, F. 2011. Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death. Philosophical Studies 162: 309–312.
Fischer, J.M., and A.L. Brueckner. 2012. The evil of death and the Lucretian symmetry: a reply to Feldman. Philosophical Studies 163: 783–789.
Fischer, J.M., and A.L. Brueckner. 2014. Prenatal and posthumous non-existence: a reply to Johansson. The Journal of Ethics 18: 1–9.
Johansson, J. 2013. Past and future non-existence. The Journal of Ethics 17: 51–64.
Johansson, J. 2014. Actual and counterfactual attitudes: reply to Brueckner and Fischer. The Journal of Ethics 18: 11–18.
Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Purves, D. 2015. Torture and incoherence: a reply to Cyr. The Journal of Ethics 19: 213–218.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the participants in the Immortality Project’s Younger Scholars Workshop, especially to Ben Mitchell-Yellin, Duncan Purves, and Philip Swenson, for helpful discussion of an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks to John Fischer, too, for insightful comments on the paper.
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Cyr, T.W. Death’s Badness and Time-Relativity: A Reply to Purves. J Ethics 20, 435–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9200-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9200-y