Abstract
Peter French contrasts the world view of the westerners, which is committed to the claim that death is necessary for a certain sort of meaningfulness in our lives, with the world view of the easterners, with its Christian commitment to an afterlife. We argue that it is worth taking seriously a “third world view,” which posits the potential desirability of secular immortality. We consider a dilemma offered by Bernard Williams against this third world view. The first horn has it that if an individual’s character remains the same in a radically extended (or immortal) life, she would necessarily become bored. The second horn claims that if one’s character changes significantly, then one will either not be the same person any more or, even if one is the same person, it will not be rational for the antecedent individual to care about the resultant individual. We reply to the first horn by pointing out that there is no reason to individuate the relevant character traits (and events) as narrowly as Williams seems to, and once a more appropriate and relatively broad individuation of such traits (and events) is employed, his claim becomes implausible. Our reply to the second horn defends the symmetry of our situations in our limited, finite lives and the envisaged situation of individuals in an extended (or immortal) life. In both contexts, we may have good reason to care about future selves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht argue that Wagner’s Ring also contends that death is essential for meaningfulness in life (Kitcher and Schacht 2004). As in French’s interpretation of westerns, they argue that Wagner holds that “living means dying” (Kitcher and Schacht 2004, 162) and that one’s confrontation with death helps to give meaningfulness to life. But whereas the inevitability of death issues in an emphasis on values such as courage in westerns, Wagner’s Ring emphasizes (through Brunnhilde) the transforming value of love.
- 2.
- 3.
The response to Williams that we go on to suggest in the text is distinct from, but compatible with other responses that have been offered and which also focus on contestable assumptions that seem to underlie his argument. See, for example, Bostrom and Roache (2008), where they point out the role of expected life span in shaping the projects one finds it reasonable to adopt. The fact that we can expect to live roughly 80 years makes it unrealistic to pursue the project of writing a different great novel in every major language. But if we could expect to live radically longer (perhaps indefinitely long) lives, this project may be realistic. And it is far from clear that it would be exhausted or lose its interest if one were to live for centuries. Thus, it is far from clear that radical life-extension (or immortality) entails boredom.
- 4.
“Nothing less will do for eternity than something that makes boredom unthinkable. What could that be? Something that could be guaranteed to be at every moment utterly absorbing? But if a man has and retains a character, there is no reason to suppose that there is anything that could be that” (Williams 1973/1993, 87).
- 5.
As French’s work reminds us, sometimes these transformations can be, at once, physical, mental and due to events outside one’s control. They may also extend to other worlds. See his 2011 discussion of a white, male Marine who is wounded by a roadside bomb, suffering loss of movement in three limbs, a disfigured face, depression and PTSD. This man, whom French calls “Bob,” comes to care deeply about an African-American, female avatar he creates in the virtual world of Second Life. French is concerned with the question whether Bob can live a meaningful, albeit “illusionary,” life by means of his avatar in this virtual world. French’s concerns intersect with ours in the text, though the context of a virtual environment brings with it special complications. Bob’s case requires a more thorough treatment than we can provide here.
- 6.
The focus on the first person case may be significant here. Strohminger and Nichols (2014) have documented the centrality of moral character traits to people’s judgments about personal identity over time. If your college roommate undergoes a radical change in values, you are more likely to judge that he is no longer the same person than if he were to lose all of his memories of your time on campus together. However, they note that the first personal impact of memory loss may explain why the psychological criterion of memory has been so central to philosophical discussion of personal identity. You feel less like yourself if you lose you memories than if you lose your values. Your friend, by contrast, seems less like himself if he loses his values than if he loses his memories. They note the need for future work on the apparent asymmetry between judgments of identity from the first and third person perspectives. We would like to note the relevance of this asymmetry to our argument in the text. Even if third personal judgments about personal identity over time track persistence of moral character traits, suggesting that certain radical transformations would be incompatible with persistent identity, this need not be taken to entail that these radical transformations are incompatible with first personal judgments that one is the same person. The issue that concerns Williams, and us, is whether one could see oneself as the same person given changes in character.
- 7.
And for good reason. We could not function well if we retained a memory of everything we experienced. For a fantastic treatment of the issue, see Borges (1962). For a clinical discussion of a woman, Jill Price, referred to as AJ, who has near perfect autobiographical memory, see Parker et al. (2006). Nietzsche’s remarks about our active forgetfulness in the first aphorism of the Second Treatise of his Genealogy of Morality may also be relevant here; see Nietzsche (1998, 35–36).
- 8.
On the difference between continuity and connectedness, see Bratman (2007, esp. 29–30).
- 9.
Here we draw on the work of several philosophers. For discussion of narrative explanation and its connection to human agency, see Velleman (2003, 2009). For discussion of narrativity and the value of lives and acting freely, see Fischer (2009: chapters 9 and 10). For illuminating discussion of the role of responsiveness to reasons and identification with a future self, see Korsgaard (2009: chapter 9). For discussion of the role of responsiveness to reasons and our attitudes about the future, with special attention to our attitudes about the future loss of things we currently value, see Shiffrin (2013).
- 10.
And it holds whether or not the reasons in terms of which one understands the change are mere confabulations. The explanation would fail if one came to realize that one was confabulating. But so long as the confabulation remains hidden to one’s own understanding, it is compatible with the cited (yet false) reasons providing grounds for caring about a future self.
- 11.
It may be that maximal identification is secured by a future self who does not exhibit any differences in character with my present self. Perhaps we can read Williams’ argument in light of this suggestion. I cannot maximally care about a future self unless he has an identical character to me, as I am now. But it is not so clear that it is the right way to conceive of identification with future selves. Circumstances change over time. Why not think that one’s character should change with them? That is, in light of the fact of changes in one’s circumstances, it can come to seem strange (alien, even) to think that one’s character would remain static.
- 12.
Bortolotti (2010) discusses the role that confabulation can play in allowing those with Alzheimer’s to form a coherent life-story from the first person perspective. Even so, there is room to doubt that a confabulated narrative provides self-understanding, or the same kind of self-understanding as a narrative based on actual events.
- 13.
This is not to say that there are no grounds for identification with a future self with (advanced) Alzheimer’s Disease. As we have pointed out, there may be an attenuated narrative connection. And we hasten to add that our account of identification in terms of reasons-responsiveness and narrativity is not intended to be exhaustive. There may be other grounds for identification with future selves. And these further grounds may be present in the Alzheimer’s case. Even so, our point in the text stands. There are grounds for identification with a future self in the Methuselah case that are absent in the Alzheimer’s case.
References
Borges, Jorge L. 1962. Funes the memorious. In Labyrinths, ed. D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby, 59–66. New York: New Directions.
Bortolotti, Lisa. 2010. Agency, life extension, and the meaning of life. The Monist 93: 38–56.
Bostrom, Nick, and Rebecca Roache. 2008. Ethical issues in human enhancement. In New waves in applied ethics, ed. J. Ryberg, T. Peterson, and C. Wolf, 120–152. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bratman, Michael. 2007. Structures of agency. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, John M (ed.). 1993. The metaphysics of death. Stanford: Stanford University Press
———. 1994. Why immortality is not so bad. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2: 257–270.
———. 2009. Our stories: Essays on life, death, and free will. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. Immortality. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of death, ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johannson, 336–354. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, John M., and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin. 2014. Immortality and boredom. The Journal of Ethics 18: 353–372.
French, Peter A. 1997. Cowboy metaphysics: Ethics and death in Westerns. Lanham: Rowman Littlefield.
———. 2011. War and moral dissonance. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kagan, Shelly. 2012. Death. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kitcher, Philip, and Richard Schacht. 2004. Finding an ending: Reflections on Wagner’s ring. New York: Oxford University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. Self-constitution: Agency, identity, and integrity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. D. N. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nietzsche, Freidrich. 1998. The Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Parker, Elizabeth S., Larry Cahill, and James L. McGaugh. 2006. A case of unusual autobiographical remembering. Neurocase 12: 35–49.
Rosati, Connie S. 2013. The makropulos case revisited: Reflections on immortality and agency. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of death, ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johannson, 355–390. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scheffler, Samuel. 2013. In Death and the afterlife, ed. N. Kolodny. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shiffrin, Seana V. 2013. Preserving the valued or preserving valuing? In Death and the afterlife, ed. N. Kolodny, 143–158. New York: Oxford University Press.
Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols. 2014. The essential moral self. Cognition 131: 159–171.
Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of everything: The inner life of westerns. New York: Oxford University Press.
Velleman, J. David. 2003. Narrative explanation. The Philosophical Review 112:1–25.
———. 2009. How we get along. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1973. The makropulos case: Reflections on the tedium of immortality. In Problems of the self, ed. B. Williams, 82–100. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Reprinted: Fischer, John M. (ed) 1993, 73–92.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fischer, J.M., Mitchell-Yellin, B. (2017). (Not) Riding into the Sunset: The Significance of Endings. In: Goldberg, Z. (eds) Reflections on Ethics and Responsibility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50359-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50359-2_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50357-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50359-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)