Abstract
There has been a growing charge that perdurantism—with its bloated ontology of very person-like objects that coincide persons—implies the repugnant conclusion that we are morally obliged to be feckless. I argue that this charge critically overlooks the epistemic situation—what I call the ‘veil of ignorance’—that perdurantists find themselves in. Though the veil of ignorance still requires an alteration of our commonsense understanding of the demands on action, I argue for two conclusions. The first is that the alteration that is required isn’t a moral one, but rather an alteration of prudential reasoning. Second, and more importantly, this alteration isn’t necessarily a repugnant one. In fact, given that it prudentially pushes one towards greater impartiality, it may be seen as a point in favor of perdurantism.
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Notes
See Kaiserman (2019) for an argument that exdurantism, or stage-theory, doesn’t suffer the same problem.
One might point out that persons at least meet a safety condition for knowledge: since I am necessarily a person, in all the closest possible worlds in which I believe that I’m a person, I’m correct. But safety is normally only proposed as a necessary condition for knowledge [see for instance Sosa (1999)]. Perhaps one could find some further principles that would, along with the safety principle, imply that such a belief is also knowledge. But I take it as a datum of intuition—around which one’s epistemic theory should be constructed—that given the great similarity between both internal and external factors, the person can’t know that she is a person rather than a personite. I suspect many will share this intuition.
Unlike a coma patient who, though unconscious, at least has a robust sense in which she could possibly be conscious.
Noonan seems to suggest that a person’s coinciders couldn’t employ such terms. Noonan (2010, 98) writes “why can quite different kinds of thing with quite different kinds of persistence condition not be objects of first-person reference…? This is a very good question. The only answer, I think, is the transplant intuition, which has to be accommodated.” Thus Noonan seems to think that even introducing new terms wouldn’t even allow a person’s coinciders to refer to themselves. But even if the transplant intuition—which holds that in a brain transplant, a person goes where the cerebrum goes—is strong, I find it utterly baffling that a personite couldn’t use technical vocabulary to refer to itself. (In any case, it seems that the perdurantist who holds unrestricted composition can preserve the transplant intuition, since there is an object that goes where the cerebrum goes.)
If there are a finite number of personites that coincide persons, then we can straightforwardly see how this “balancing out” would work: there’s a comparable (or larger) number of the gappy personites that would benefit compared to the number of short-lived personites that don’t benefit. But if time is continuous, then at any moment, an infinite amount of personites comes into existence—likewise there’s an infinite number of the gappy and short-lived personites. How could we compare these sets of infinities? A first pass is to do it much like we compare measures of time: even though one second and two seconds of time both contain infinite amounts of moments (if time is continuous), the latter is larger than the former. Likewise we can define a measure over personites based on when those personites come into existence. So if we take the infinite set, S1, of person S’s personites that come into existence during one second and compare it to the infinite set, S2, that come into existence during a two second period, the latter set will be larger than the former. (This basic idea can be refined. We would supposedly want to consider when the personites go out of existence. For suppose set A contains all and only the personites that come into existence in the first second, t1, who also go out of existence within t1, and set B contains all and only the personites that come into existence at t1 who also go out of existence within t1or the next second, t2. Intuitively, B is larger than A since the former has a larger end range. We would also need further additions if we wanted to make comparisons that include other sorts of personites introduced below.) These considerations support the thought that, even in a temporally continuous world, the gappy personites would help balance out the odds against the shorter-lived personites.
I will also introduce other types of personites below. It seems to me that essentially the same points hold for them as well.”
Some may think that near-bias—a preference for pleasurable experiences to be in our near, rather than distant, future and for painful experiences to be in our distant, rather than near, future—is rational. But if the population continued to grow, one is more likely to exist in the distant rather than near future. Thus the current view would take near-bias as imprudent, and, for the same reason, take future-bias as prudent. Though many [see for instance Sidgwick (1884, 380–381), Rawls (1971, 293–294), Sullivan (2018)] already hold near-bias to be irrational, they don’t take the further step of recommending future-bias.
Another issue is this: suppose one had the ability to create gold atoms out of thin air and sell it for a large profit. Since creating such non-conscious atoms increases the probability (even if only slightly) that you suffer consciousness-deficiency, this gives you prudential reason not to create it. Nonetheless, this will only be a pro tanto reason that can be outweighed by other factors—such as possible benefits it brings to humanity, if there be such benefits.
Given that such a population explosion in our current environment would likely have devastating effects on peoples’ quality of life and humanity’s future in general.
This still might not imply that one has good reason to take the veiled-ship voyage. After all, we would normally take the trip to serve the best interests of the person (which we normally identify ourselves with), whereas the activist is more worried about the best interests of humanity as a whole. Nonetheless, the activist might still judge the voyage to be a good way to serve humanity.
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Longenecker, M.TS. Perdurantism, fecklessness and the veil of ignorance. Philos Stud 177, 2565–2576 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01326-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01326-9