Abstract
In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. Their argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation.
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Notes
The relevant passage from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura goes as follows: “Look back again—how the endless ages of time come to pass before our birth are nothing to us. This is a looking glass Nature holds up for us in which we see the time to come after we finally die. What is it there that looks so fearsome? What’s so tragic? Isn’t it more peaceful than any sleep?” (2007: 101)
Philosophers who address the symmetry problem often use terms like ‘late birth’ or ‘later (rather than earlier) birth’ to indicate the state of affairs in which one fails to come into existence until after the actual time at which one came into existence. However, it is most natural to think that we come into being somewhat earlier than the time of our births, at some time during our fetal stages. Hence, it will be more accurate to use terms such as ‘late beginning’ or ‘coming into existence later (rather than earlier)’ to express this notion. For this reason, I will mostly use the terms that refer to our beginning of existence as opposed to our birth, unless it is more appropriate to do otherwise for contextual reasons.
Initially, Brueckner and Fischer did not offer a substantial argument for the claim that our differing attitudes toward past and future goods are in fact justified, while referring to Moller 2002 in support of the rationality of the asymmetric attitudes. Fischer later argues that the asymmetry is rational on evolutionary grounds in his 2006 and 2020: 80 − 81. Though the arguments in these works may be contentious, I will not press the point here.
Lucretius’s symmetry argument has two major components: our indifference to late beginning and the symmetry of prenatal and postmortem nonexistence. Now, granting the symmetry of the two nonexistences and the observation that prenatal nonexistence can sometimes deprive us of future intrinsic goods, one might suggest that my argument can be useful for establishing the evil of death, which is precisely the point Lucretius wished to deny and Brueckner and Fischer wish to defend. In response, I would like to note that arguing for the badness of prenatal nonexistence is completely compatible with arguing that death is even worse. In providing the preceding argument, I am not committed to the claim that prenatal nonexistence is as bad as death. My own view is that we can make a stronger case against Lucretius by arguing that death is even worse than prenatal nonexistence, as opposed to arguing that death is bad while prenatal nonexistence is not. See Yi 2012: 301 − 3 for my arguments that death is worse than prenatal nonexistence. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for urging me to clarify this point.
Insofar as I can see, most influential philosophers refer to what would have been the case in characterizing the deprivation account or the symmetry problem. Thomas Nagel, in his groundbreaking paper, claims that death deprives a person of possible goods in the sense that “if he had not died, he would have continued to live…and to possess whatever good there is in living” (1970: 78, emphasis mine). John Martin Fischer identifies the deprivation account as the view that “death is a bad thing for an individual insofar as it deprives her of what would have been on balance a desirable continuation of her life” (2020: 40, emphasis mine). Frederik Kaufman, in his recent contribution, characterizes this account by saying that “death can be bad…if it deprives someone of life that she would have enjoyed by not dying when she did” (2021: 112, emphasis mine). A similar result can be found regarding the discussion of the symmetry problem. For example, Lukas Meier describes the symmetry problem as follows: “Had one come into existence earlier than in fact one did, one would…have lived longer and would have experienced all of the goods that this additional time span would have provided, just as would be the case if one died later” (2019: 652, emphasis mine). In coping with the symmetry problem, many prominent scholars refer to what would have happened in a possible life with an earlier beginning to show that such a counterfactual life is not rationally preferable to the actual life. See, e.g., McMahan 2006: 221 and Feldman 1991: 221 − 23; 1992: 154 − 55.
I suspect that here Miguel and Santos have a rather peculiar notion of the closest counterfactuals in mind. In illustrating this point, they say that if Tom Simpson had been born one year earlier, he would have become a professional cyclist in 1958, as opposed to in 1959 (2020: 1531). I do not see why this should be so. In my view, nothing indicates that one’s life would go as it did in the actual life if it began earlier. If Tom Simpson had come into being one year earlier, his life would have been completely different—hence, we have no reason to suppose that he would have started his professional career as a cyclist exactly one year earlier (if he had become a cyclist at all).
If it is true that an earlier beginning deprives one of future intrinsic goods, it can also be used to impugn a certain strategy for defending the symmetry argument, since the symmetry would now imply that it could indeed be rational to fear death or regard it as a bad thing, given that it is similarly rational to regret a late beginning. This observation is of course compatible with the claim that it is not rational to remain indifferent to prenatal nonexistence contra the temporal bias approach, given that a past extended period of time would have ensured more future goods. Since the main focus of this paper is to provide a critique of Miguel and Santos’s view, I will not pursue to discuss how the deprivation of future pleasures caused by a late beginning disputes the symmetry argument any further. I am grateful to John Martin Fischer for urging me to clarify this point.
One may question the identity of the additional pleasures in the two counterfactuals on the grounds that the quantity of each pleasure is determined by experiences in visiting Lisbon but a value in visiting a particular place can be individuated differently depending on the time of the visit. It is one thing to be deprived of the pleasure which would have been generated had I died later, it is another to be deprived of the pleasure that would have been generated by a visit to Lisbon at an earlier age. According to this argument, given that these pleasures are of different quantity, only the former counts as deprivation due to an early death. In response, I want to note that one may wish to visit a place regardless of the time of visiting and, in such a case, the deprived pleasure does not seem to be individuated in terms of its quantity. Suppose that I wished to visit Lisbon for the celebration of my 60th birthday, but this wish was never realized because I died at 55. This wish would not have been realized even if I had decided earlier and visited the city before 55. This is not the kind of wish I had in mind in giving the preceding example. There, I stipulate that I always wanted to visit the city regardless of the time of my visit, but this wish was never realized because of my premature death. Unlike the wish to visit Lisbon for the celebration of my 60th birthday, this wish would have been successfully fulfilled if I had made an earlier decision to visit the city and acted on it (regardless of the quantity of the deprived pleasure). I thank an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for inducing me to address this point.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for guiding me to see this point.
Here we don’t need to imagine that in the actual world there was a series of events regarding the invention of the magic pill in human history. We can stipulate that in the actual world history is roughly the same as the one we know, but it includes an episode of an alien civilization secretly placing the magic pill in Alice’s residence (which, of course, is unknown to any earthling).
A similar line of thinking applies to the alien abduction scenario. In describing the story of Seeing The Beatles, we can stipulate that in the actual world, a UFO, occupied by aliens equipped with the special treatment skills, was lurking around Alice’s residence unbeknownst to anyone on earth, but did not kidnap her. So, the abduction never actually occurred, but it could have. In this version of the story, most, if not all, actual historical events can be held fixed in the counterfactual situation (up to the time of Alice’s abduction).
I am not assuming here that, in the counterfactual situation, Alice’s brain states prior to the sudden development must differ from those in the actual world. I am thinking of a possible world in which her brain states were exactly the same as those in the actual world before the sudden developmental change kicked in. Arguably this scenario is physically impossible, but it is certainly logically possible.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for this observation.
One might point out here that it is because of Alice’s immaturity that she is deprived of the pleasure. However, as discussed before, to say that Alice is deprived of a value due to her immaturity is perfectly compatible with saying that she is deprived of the same value due to her late birth. Hence, in this version of the story, the antecedent of the Historical Condition is instantiated as being true.
I am indebted to Hwan Sunwoo for the criticisms of the Historical Condition that follow in the remainder of this section.
I am not alone in making this claim. Some philosophers attempted to deal with the symmetry problem by observing that a life with an earlier beginning would be completely different from the actual life. For example, Jeff McMahan (2006: 221−22) argues that we have little reason to care about a life with an earlier beginning given that such a life would not have contained the particulars that we care about in our actual life. See also Harman 2011: 139.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to John Martin Fischer and Hwan Sunwoo for reading earlier drafts and providing me with valuable comments, which immensely improved the quality of this paper. I am also grateful to audiences at the 2022 Spring Meeting of Korean Society for Analytic Philosophy. Finally, I thank anonymous reviewers for Philosophia for urging me to clarify my arguments in several places.
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Yi, H. The Temporal Bias Approach to the Symmetry Problem and Historical Closeness. Philosophia 51, 1763–1781 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00603-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00603-y