Abstract
Here I respond to Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s “The Evil of Death: A Reply to Yi.” They developed an influential strategy in defense of the deprivation account of death’s badness against the Lucretian symmetry problem. The core of their argument consists in the claim that it is rational for us to welcome future intrinsic goods while being indifferent to past intrinsic goods. Previously, I argued that their approach is compatible with the evil of late birth insofar as an earlier birth would have generated more goods in the future. In reply, Brueckner and Fischer argue that my critique fails to appreciate an important aspect of their thought experiment, which aims only to show that the deprivation of past goods per se is not bad for us. Thus, purportedly, my critique poses no threat to their view. Here I argue that since the deprivation account explains the evil of death with recourse to how one’s life would have fared had one lived longer, it ought to respond to the symmetry problem with reference to how one’s life would have fared had one been born earlier. However, it is not generally true that the life one would have had with an earlier birth is not preferable to one’s actual life, because in many cases such a life would contain more future goods.
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Notes
It may seem that Brueckner and Fischer are not straightforwardly arguing for the non-badness of late birth, because they sometimes qualify their conclusion by saying that late birth is not bad in the way that early death is bad (Brueckner and Fischer 1986: 219; 1993b: 327). However, if I am right in suggesting that late birth can deprive us of future intrinsic goods, then late birth should be bad precisely in the way that early death is bad—that is, they both deprive us of what is rational for us to care about. Furthermore, Brueckner and Fischer, at least on one occasion, explicitly endorsed a thesis that ascribes the non-badness of late birth to the fact that it is not rational for us to care about our being deprived of pleasant experiences as a result of late birth (Brueckner and Fischer 2013: 787).
I suppose that the net amount of goods obtained during the extended period of time in PL2 need not be β. I only stipulate that it is β to highlight the structural symmetry of PL1 and PL2.
Strictly speaking, they characterize it in terms of what would have been the case had one died later holding fixed the time of one’s birth. In what follows, I will drop this constraint to avoid unnecessary complexity.
Here, too, I should say that the evil of late birth should be explained with reference to what would have been the case had one been born earlier holding fixed the time of one’s death. To simplify the exposition, I will drop this constraint in what follows.
McMahan writes, “I still may not regret having my actual life instead [even if, with an earlier origin, my life would have been better even by reference to the general values that inform my actual life]. … In that life, for example, my actual wife would have been too young for me to marry, and we would never have met in any case. So I would never have had my actual children.” (2006: 221) Here, in addressing the non-badness of a later birth, McMahan clearly alludes to what would have been the case in a life with an earlier birth.
It may be argued that the nearest possible world in which an actual event occurring at time t does not occur need not be a world that is exactly like the actual world up to t. For example, the nearest possible world where I do not die at t, where in the actual world I never quit smoking and die from lung cancer at t, may be a possible world where I quit smoking sometime before t. Feldman, and perhaps some other proponents of the deprivation account as well, do not seem to distinguish between these two kinds of possible worlds. However, I disregard this point and ignore the difference between these two kinds of worlds for the sake of simplicity.
Again, I don’t mean to argue that the example of Learning Japanese represents a typical case of how life’s goods would be allocated if one were to be born earlier. I aim merely to argue that there are sufficiently many cases like this, and, therefore, that it is not generally true that the life one would have had with an earlier birth is not preferable.
There is another way in which to make this point. Suppose it is possible that the life of an arbitrary person with an earlier birth contains no more future goods, in the sense that there exists a possible world where she had never engaged in any future-goods-generating projects during the additional time secured by an earlier birth, and all the past pleasant experiences she had enjoyed during that additional time are screened off from present recollection by amnesia. Her life in such a possible world might look like PL2. However, there is no reason to think that this possible life is what she would have had if she had been born earlier. It is far more natural to think that if she had been born earlier, she would probably have engaged in at least some activities during the additional past time that would be causally accountable for obtaining at least some future pleasures, and that at least some of the pleasant experiences she would have had during the additional time would not have been followed by amnesia. Given that her life with an earlier birth would be similar to the life typical to most of us, such a possible life may look like PL3. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that in many cases, were one to be born earlier, one would have more future goods than one’s actual life does, as illustrated by PL3.
Brueckner and Fischer, for the sake of the argument, seek to accommodate the possibility that “our late births typically deprive us of future pleasures, and thus a total indifference to late birth would not be rationally justified.” According to them, “[even if it is true that late birth typically deprive us of future goods,] it would still be rational to have asymmetric attitudes toward early death and late birth; it would still be the case that our early deaths are significantly worse than our late births (and thus that our attitudes should reflect this fact). … [A] proponent of the Brueckner/Fischer approach can accept that it would be rational to regret late birth somewhat, if it really were true that Learning Japanese represents the typical case” (2014b: 746). I am sympathetic to the view that early deaths are significantly worse than late births, because I believe that late birth tends to deprive us of fewer future goods than does early death (Yi 2012: 301–3). Nevertheless, I want to note that appealing to the worse-ness of early death in defending the Commonsense Asymmetry might be at odds with the basic tenet of the Brueckner/Fischer approach. Brueckner and Fischer have attempted to explain the asymmetry in our attitudes toward late birth and early death in terms of the contrasting nature of the goods deprived by the former and the goods deprived by the latter. They have emphasized that these two are different in kind from each other: the goods deprived by early death are things one can rationally prefer, whereas the goods deprived by late birth are things to which one can rationally be indifferent (Brueckner and Fischer 1986: 219; 1993a: 43; and 2013: 784–85). Such a disparity constitutes the core of the Brueckner/Fischer approach in its justification of the Commonsense Asymmetry. However, if we try to defend the Commonsense Asymmetry on the grounds that the amount of future goods deprived by late birth tends to be less than the amount of future goods deprived by early death, we now appear to justify the asymmetry in terms of the difference in magnitude of the deprived goods: both early death and late birth deprive us of those elements about which it’s rational for us to care (namely, future intrinsic goods), but the former tends to deprive us of more of such elements and that’s why it’s worse. Here, the justificatory basis of the Commonsense Asymmetry is sought in the difference in magnitude, rather than kind, of the deprived goods. One might argue that this is a fundamental departure from their original view.
I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this objection.
The relevant passage from De Rerum Natura goes as follows: “Look back now and consider how 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? Does it not appear more peaceful than the deepest sleep?” (Lucretius 2001: 94)
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Sungil Han, Fumitake Yoshizawa, and the anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for helpful comments and discussions.
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Yi, H. The Symmetry Argument Against the Deprivation Account. Philosophia 44, 947–959 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9692-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9692-0