Ethics and Temporality: When are Moral Propositions True?

Abstract

The association of time and ethics (particularly in the context of a meeting at Otago) inevitably brings to mind the memory of Arthur Prior, who worked on logic and ethics and on logic and time, though I am not sure whether he ever put the time and the ethics together. This paper is prompted in part by personal recollections of Prior and a desire to honour him on his old territory, if it is possible to honour someone who is no longer living—itself a question for the philosophy of time. Over the last decades the issues in this area of philosophy have been re-labelled: what used to be an argument between open-future theories and block-universe theories, in which no one mentioned McTaggart, now surfaces, with refinements, as an argument between A-theory and B-theory in which McTaggart is the great precursor. The stronger arguments seem to favour B-theory: B-relations make better sense (to me) than A-properties, and while serious questions remain about the possible truth-values of propositions referring to times later than now it seems clear that, once they are true, they are and remain so timelessly.