Life and Death Midterm 2

Doomsday (Scheffler)

Thought experiment where all of humanity will be destroyed thirty days after your death.

Some of are current engagements would be vulnerable.

Scheffler’s claim: We value the survival of future generations

The afterlife conjecture (Scheffler)

The discovery of imminent doomsday or universal infertility would be met with the loss of confidence in the value of many of our projects and activities.

Scheffler argues projects are most vulnerable if the success of them is seen as achieved in a far-away future or values derives from the benefits over a long period of time (curing cancer, activism, building social institutions, physical infrastructure). Projects are least affected if they are focused on personal comfort and pleasure.

Experientialism (Scheffler)

We only intrinsically value experiences

Scheffler argues against this and for non-experientalism:

P1) We don’t react to doomsday with indifference.

P2) If 1 is true then events that happen after our deaths matter to us.

P3) We don’t experience events after death

C) What matters to us isn’t limited to what we experience (experientalism)

Egoism (Scheffler)

Doomsday shows there is a limit to this.

1) In Children of Men (infertile) scenario some projects and activities would become less important to us

2) The fact that we and everyone we love will die does not make these activities less important.

C) The nonexistence of future people matter more to us than the people we love ceasing to exist.

→ In some respects vs. all things considered

→ Isn’t this asymmetry due to expectations

→ → No because this would still be true even if one were to grow up in the scenario.

Parody argument:

P1) If we lacked mineral X, all our projects and activities would become less important to us.

P2) The fact that we and everyone we love will die does not make these projects and activities less important to us.

C) Mineral X is more important to us than our own survival and the survival of everyone we love

→ Mineral X is just a condition for things mattering to us.

Revised C) The importance of some of our projects and activities depends on the survival of future generations we will never know.

Attitudinal dependence (Scheffler)

Some of our attitudes (e.g. valuing cancer research) depend on the existence on our belief in the afterlife.

Evaluative dependence (Scheffler)

Some things in fact have value only if there will be an afterlife (e.g. doomsday is coming but we don’t know, so cancer research would be a waste of time, though their is a common belief it is valuable)

Humanity’s survival vs. personal survival

Humanity’s survival is more important to us than our own personal survival. This is because the personal afterlife (life after individual death) is important but the collective afterlife (others continuing to live on after we die) gives the sense that life has a greater purpose. People who reject the personal afterlife still think their life has value but doomsday shows that those who reject a collective afterlife find less value in their lives.

Option A: Die 10 years earlier in exchange for 1,000 extra years of human civilization

Option B: Live 10 years longer in exchange for guaranteed mass infertility beginning immediately after one’s death.

Many of us would pick A so we care more about collective survival than personal survival.

Life vs. personhood (morally relevant life)

Can the permissibility of abortion be based on the question “When does life begin?”

→ No, it’s too vague (slippery slope)

The vagueness of personhood (morally relevant life)

Explained by the “sorites paradox”

P1) 100,000 grains of sand makes a heap

P2) 1 grain of sand never makes the different between a heap and a non-heap

C) Therefore, 0 grains of sand makes a heap

Doesn’t make sense, analogous with when a zygote/fetus becomes a person.

Thomson uses the analogy of an acorn and an oak tree.

Right to bodily autonomy (Thomson)

The right to bodily autonomy can override a fetuses right to life/right to not be killed unjustly.

Right to live vs. right to be saved (Thomson)

The right to life prevents others from killing you but does not give proactive obligations to keep you alive.

Scenario: The only thing that can save you is for Henry Fonda to travel across the country and touch your forehead. Is it right to force him to do this?

→ No, so there is no presumption that your body must be used to save another’s life.

Violin player case (Thomson)

Scenario to explain the moral permissibility of abortion in which you are kidnapped and plugged into a violinist to keep him alive and you must do it for nine months or he will die. Do you have an obligation to stay plugged in?

→ No. This is analogous to standard cases of abortion, therefore the women has no obligation to bring the fetus to term.

→ → This is only analogous to cases of rape, not that abortion is generally permissible

→ → → No, its analogous to any case where a mother took precautions to avoid pregnancy, then gets pregnant.

Seed person case (Thomson)

Scenario to explain how the violin case doesn’t just apply to cases of rape in which people-seeds drift like pollen and can drift in. You set up your windows with screens to avoid one drifting in but one is defective and takes root. Do they have the right to use your house?

→ No, you may have voluntarily opened your windows and knew the screen could be defective but you didn’t want this and tried to prevent it within reasonable means. So, people don’t have the general right to the use of another person’s body for their own preservation.

Good samaritan vs. minimally decent samaritan (Thomson)

To carry a baby to term is to be a good samaritan. But no law requires anyone to even be a minimally decent samaritan (bystander effect). Additionally, no one is morally required to make sacrifices to keep another person alive. Hence, abortion is morally permissible in every case, but is fundamentally selfish.

→ No it’s not selfish, but this argues that a fetus is not a person (circular argument)

Infanticide (Thomson)

A point of contention and disagreement in Thomson’s argument. Setting aside fetuses, are mothers (and fathers) obligated to sustain the life of their newborns?

→ If the parents took reasonable precautions to avoid having a child then in Thomson’s view the parents wouldn’t be obligated at all.

Future like ours (Marquis)

An answer to “what makes death bad?” It is wrong to kill x just in case x has a FLO. Fetuses have FLOs.

Current values vs. future values (Marquis)

The value of our futures cannot be what we value now as those values change (an elderly person does not value the same things as a young person). What makes the future valuable is the aspects of the future we will value when we will experience them. What makes killing us wrong is that it deprives us of a future of value. Fetuses will have future values, similar to unconscious human beings, so it is wrong to kill them.

Early fetuses (Harman)

A fetus before it’s a person (before it has any intrinsic properties that confer moral status). Harman argues not all early fetuses are morally equal (permissible to abort some, but not others).

Actual future principle (Harman)

An early fetus that will become a person has moral status. An early fetus that will die while it is still an early fetus has no moral status.

OR

Whether or not an early fetus has a right not to be killed depends on whether or not it will in fact be killed.

→ Whether a thing has a certain moral status should be settled by its past and present properties. Future properties are irrelevant.

→ If AFP were true, then we wouldn’t be in a position to know an early fetus’s moral status.

→ If AFP were true, then we would get to “decide” whether the fetus has moral status

→ AFP tells us nothing about what to do in cases where it’s borderline

→ AFP tells us nothing of unreliable abortion procedures

Places the priority on bringing a person into existence then taking a non-person out of existence.

Anti-natalism

It is bad to bring people into existence.

Upshot: It is morally wrong to have children.

Starting life vs. continuing life (Benatar)

Coming into existence is bad, not staying in that existence. So, it is bad to start a life, but (generally) good to continue it once it’s started.

The asymmetry between absent pleasures and absent pains (Benatar)

The absence of pleasure is only bad if someone is deprived of it, and non-existent people can’t be deprived of things, so the absence of pleasure is not bad for non-existent people. However, the absence of pain is good even if there is no one for whom the pain is absent. So by not bringing someone into existence, you don’t deprive them of anything good, but you do avoid causing them harm, which is good.

The asymmetry between creating a bad life and failing to create a good life (Benatar)

There seems to be a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, but there doesn’t seem to be any duty to bring happy people into existence.

It’s strange to give benefiting a child as a reason for having them, but not strange to give not harming a child as a reason for not having them.

We can regret brining a person into existence but can’t regret not bringing them in for that person’s own sake.

The dominance principle (Benetar)

For any two prospects P1 and P2, if there are some respects in which P1 is better than P2, and no respects in which P1 is worse than P2, then P1 is better than P2.

If scenario A is where X exists and scenario B is where X never exists, then B is better than A with respect to pain, but B is not worse than A with respect to pleasure, so B is better than A, therefore it is better for X not to come into existence.

Illness analogy (Benetar)

Person S is prone to illness, but has C that makes it so he recovers quickly. Person H is impervious to illness, but lacks C. It is not bad H lacks C because H isn’t deprived of anything. This is analogous to experiencing pleasure: it’s only good relative to the circumstances of existence.

→ C is instrumentally good for S, and the thing it is instrumental to H already has, So of course it’s not bad for H to not have C. Pains/pleasures are instrinsically good/bad, so this is dis-analogous.

Harm/benefit asymmetry (Shiffrin)

Harms and benefits cannot fall on a single scale of moral comparison. This is because…

1) There isn’t anything wrong with failing to give someone $10, but there does seem to be something wrong with taking $10 from them.

2) If you torture someone and give them $1 as compensation, you haven’t meaningfully benefited them, but if you give someone $10,000 and then prick them with a pin, there does seem to be a meaningful sense that you harmed them.

3) It doesn’t seem ok to impose harms on people for their benefit without their consent.

Car crash rescuer case (Shiffrin)

Feinberg’s presents that it is ok to break someone’s arm in an effort to get them out of car wreckage. So he argues you can impose harms on others for their own benefit. Feinberg states that this is analogous to bringing people into existence.

→Shiffrin argues that this case is only ok because you imposed a harm to prevent a greater harm, not because there is an overall benefit. And that bringing people into existence does not prevent a greater harm because even if there were a harm there is no one to experience it. So this case is dis-analogous to brining people into existence.

Gold block case (Shiffrin)

Wealthy drops a gold block on Unlucky, breaking his arm. Unlucky benefits overall, but Wealthy did something morally wrong and owes compensation, unlike the rescuer.

Hypothetical consent (Shiffrin)

A response to the gold block case in which opponents argue that the difference in the moral status of the rescuer and of the gold dropper is due to hypothetical consent. The rescued would consent to the rescuer’s actions, but the targets of the gold dropping wouldn’t (or it is at the very least questionable).

→ Surgeons are OK amputating even if a very small amount of patients wouldn’t consent but not if amputating would secure money or intellect for their patients even if a very small amount wouldn’t consent. Therefore, Hypothetical consent works when it comes to imposing harms to prevent harms, not whet it comes to imposing harms to provide benefits.

The “equivocal view” on procreation (“soft” anti-natalism) (Shiffrin)

Procreation is intrinsically and not just epistemically a morally hard case. It involves serious moral hazards. It faces difficult justificatory hurdles because it involves imposing serious harms and risks on someone who is not in danger of suffering greater harm if one does not act. Procreators must bear the results of the imposed risks they place on their children by bringing them into existence.