Downloaded from http://jme.bmj.com/ on November 16, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Author meets critics: response
What makes death bad for us? Ingmar Persson I’m in sympathy with almost all of David DeGrazia’s insightful and comprehensive book Creation Ethics.1 But such is the nature of my present undertaking that I have to kick up some disagreement. So, I’m going to critically examine one component of the ‘tripartite framework for understanding prenatal moral status’ ( p. 17) that he defends in Chapter 2. This framework consists of the following three components: (1) a view about our numerical identity, essence, and origins; (2) an account of the relevance of sentience to moral status; (3) a version of ‘the time-relative interests account’ of the harm of death ( pp. 17–8).
My discussion will focus on (3), his version of the time-relative interests account (TRIA), an account which he takes over, in a somewhat modified form, from Jeff McMahan. This is because my objections on this score impact significantly on prenatal moral status (and this is after all an ethics journal). With respect to (1), DeGrazia defends the biological view that we are identical to our human organisms. However, he holds this view to be only slightly more plausible than a psychological view to the effect that we are identical to the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses ( p. 20). For my own part, I accept an ‘error-theory’ which, so to speak, slices itself in between these views.2 According to this theory, we are identical to our bodies on the assumption that they are the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses. The problem is that this assumption is erroneous. As a matter of fact, it’s rather our brains, or certain areas of them that, strictly speaking, or underivatively, are the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses. Our (whole) bodies are only derivatively the subjects or owners in virtue of having these (areas of ) brains as parts. Consequently, when our bodies and these proper subjects of our psychology part ways, as in brain-transplant cases, our intuitions are pulled in opposite directions. We may respond to such conflicts by trying to revise the notion of our identity either Correspondence to Dr Ingmar Persson, Department of Philosophy, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden; ingmar.persson@filosofi.gu.se
420
in a biologist or in psychologist manner, but the result can’t be intuitively wholly satisfactory. This is, in brief, my explanation of why there’s a philosophical controversy about our identity. However, this issue of our identity is irrelevant to prenatal moral status if one takes it, as does DeGrazia (p. 31), that the view that potentiality for sentience is sufficient for moral status is plausible enough for one to proceed on its truth. Then, regardless whether a normal pre-sentient human foetus—indisputably, a human organism or animal—is identical to one of us, as the biological view implies, or not, as the psychological view has it, it will have moral status in virtue of its potentiality for sentience. Suppose, instead, that the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral status is sound; then the biological view, but not the psychological view, implies that we exist for a while as pre-sentient foetuses (and embryos) without moral status. But, like DeGrazia, I’m prepared to go along with the potentiality view. With respect to TRIA, however, there’s a morally significant disagreement between us. Consider how he introduces this account. He writes that it ‘steers a plausible middle course between two polar positions’, namely ‘a desire-satisfaction account of the harm of death’ to the effect that ‘one is harmed by death only if one desires to remain alive’, and ‘a view that construes the harm of death in terms of lost opportunities for valuable future experiences’ (pp. 32–33). Both these positions are implausible, he maintains: the desire-satisfaction account because it implies ‘that normal human infants are not harmed by death’, and the value of possible future experiences account because it ‘implies that death typically harms an infant more than a child, adolescent, or young adult’ ( pp. 32–33), for the reason that the infant typically loses more years of valuable life. I agree that these implications are implausible, but don’t regard TRIA as a ‘reasonable’ (p. 43) remedy. TRIA might seem an obvious remedy because it: holds that an evaluation of the harm of death must take into account not only (1) the value of the future life lost by the individual who dies, but also (2) the degree of psychological relatedness between the individual just before dying
and the later individual who otherwise would have lived ( p. 6).
In other words, TRIA might seem to be an obvious remedy because it encompasses both the factor to which the desiresatisfaction account appeals and the factor to which the value of future life account appeals. (Henceforth, I will speak as though the ‘psychological relatedness’ which TRIA features consisted entirely in having desires as regards future life, though this is a simplification.) Now it is indeed an improvement to include both these factors in an account of the badness of death for us, but the crux is how they are to be combined. According to TRIA, the factor of lacking desires or plans for the future has the function of discounting or detracting from the value of future existence, such that the badness of death will be less than the value lost, while having such desires or plans at most makes it equal the value for you of the future life you’ve lost. On the account I favour, having such conative connections to your future is, instead, something that amplifies or adds to the badness of your death, making it worse for you than the value of the future lost. Thus, even when you were an infant with no desires with respect to your future, but a great life in store, death would have harmed you greatly. But it would be even worse when you had unfulfilled plans for your future, and its worseness would be still greater, the more elaborate and important to you your plans were. To flesh out my ‘amplification’ account a bit. I believe there are two elements to what makes life intrinsically good (or bad) for us, or things going well for us. First, and least controversially, there’s an experiential of element consisting, on the positive side, in the having of various kinds of experiences that we like for their own sakes, pleasant and joyful experiences (and on the negative side, experiences that we dislike having, painful, unpleasant and boring experiences). Second, and more controversially, there’s a trans-experiential element consisting, on the positive side, in the actual fulfilment of rational and informed desires concerning various personal matters going beyond our current experiences. Thus, if you have a desire that your friends don’t slander you behind your back, or to create an artistic masterpiece, then your life goes better for you if these desires are fulfilled, though you never realise, with feelings of pleasure, that they are fulfilled. Things can go well J Med Ethics May 2015 Vol 41 No 5
Downloaded from http://jme.bmj.com/ on November 16, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Author meets critics: response for all sentient beings in the experiential way, but for things to go well in the transexperiential way, more sophisticated mental faculties are requisite, those which are the privilege of so-called persons.i This amplification account doesn’t have the implausible implication that a human infant can’t be harmed by dying, since it recognises that it can thereby, unwittingly, be deprived of a host of intrinsically valuable future experiences. But it also avoids the implausible implication that death will normally be worse for it than for an adolescent, or young adult, by recognising the likely amplifying effect of the—perhaps non-experiential—frustration of the latter’s future-oriented desires. However, TRIA also avoids these implausible implications, so why do I find the amplification account decidedly more reasonable? There are three reasons for this. First, TRIA isn’t what one might call ‘normatively constant’: what’s the right thing to do, according to it, depends on what one in fact does.3 Imagine that the woman rightly concludes that the rather trivial benefits that an abortion would bring her outweigh the heavily discounted benefits of the future life of her foetus. In other words, an abortion promotes her interests more than it harms her foetus’s interests, for although the foetus loses considerably more future value, its conative connection to its future is very weak or non-existent. However, she can’t bring herself to abort, so she gives birth to her foetus, and it goes on to live a life whose value for it will no longer be discounted because it proceeds to
DeGrazia and I agree that ‘the best possible subjective theory is more plausible than any objective theory’ ( p. 112) of what makes things go well for us, or our well-being, but we may differ over what the best subjective theory is. In opposition to what I hold, he claims: ‘If the satisfaction of an informed desire does not give us any felt satisfaction, it is unclear why it should count as valuable on a subjective account’ ( p. 110). On the other hand, he insists: ‘A person’s happiness makes her well-off only if it based on a more or less accurate understanding of her circumstances’ ( p. 114). But why, when it’s having this basis clearly isn’t anything felt? So, the precise difference between our views eludes me. It may in part have to do with the fact that I take the relevant notion to be ‘what makes things go well/have intrinsic value for us’ which I take to be broader than the experientially-tinged ‘our well-being’, whereas he seems guided by the latter notion.
i
J Med Ethics May 2015 Vol 41 No 5
acquire future-oriented desires. Thus, subsequent history proves that her failure to abort was the right thing to do, since the non-discounted benefits that the foetus enjoys as an adult outweigh the benefits the woman would have derived from abortion. That is, in this situation, TRIA implies that whatever the woman does, she does the right thing because the rightness of what she does depends on what she does. This is an intolerable result, since it shows that TRIA provides no normative guide in these situations. Furthermore, TRIA seems to me to undervalue the interests of foetuses and infants in their future both in relation to their current interests and to the future interests they will have when their minds are more developed. To illustrate the first type of undervaluation, imagine that a neonate is engaging in some activity that is giving it immense pleasure of considerable duration, but which will also cause it to die when it eventually falls asleep exhausted. According to TRIA, it may well be justifiable to let the neonate continue engaging in this pleasurable activity, since the value of its further future is heavily discounted by the neonate’s weak (or non-existent) conative links to it, whereas it may have a strong desire that its current pleasure continues in the imminent future. But this judgement seems to me preposterous. Turn now to the other sort of undervaluation of the interests of those weakly linked to their future. Towards the end of 1975 Tour de France, the Belgian star-cyclist Eddy Merckx had a bad crash. He broke his cheekbone, but completed the Tour, though he could take only liquid food. Suppose that he had instead died in that crash, aged 30. At that time, he had already accomplished more than enough to be recognised by most as the greatest cyclist of all times and, indeed, as one of the greatest athletes in all categories. After the unhappy 1975 Tour, Merckx won little, and he quit cycling a few years later. A main reason for Merckx’s astonishing winning record— 525 wins in little more than 10 years—was that he apparently loved cycling and racing more than anything else, and did it virtually nonstop all year round. It appears to me that, looking back on his life, Merckx could quite reasonably hold that it would have been much worse for him to have died in infancy than in that 1975 crash. His reason could be that death in infancy would have eclipsed his
unparalleled achievements in cycling which he could reasonably regard as the peak of his life. Death immediately after such a peak could plausibly be less bad for you than death in infancy which deprives you of this peak. Compare with a similar crash Merckx had in 1969. If he had died then, it seems to me that his death then would have been worse for him than dying as an infant, since in 1969 he had just begun to actualise his enormous potential as a cyclist, and had many unfulfilled, but fulfillable, cycling ambitions. This isn’t the place to work out a fuller account of what makes death bad for us, but I would like to emphasise two points in conclusion: (1) TRIA’s discounting in proportion to psychological connectedness leads to an undervaluing of the interests of infants and conscious foetuses to survive, as well as to a violation of the desideratum of normative constancy; (2) the frustration of plans for future life actually amplifies the badness of death, so that it becomes greater than the future value lost, and in the case of plans especially dear to one, it will greatly amplify the badness of death. Acknowledgements I’m grateful to Roger Crisp for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
To cite Persson I. J Med Ethics 2015;41:420–421. Received 12 March 2014 Accepted 3 April 2014 Published Online First 23 April 2014
▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101917 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101956 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101957 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2014-102048 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2014-102531
J Med Ethics 2015;41:420–421. doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101958
REFERENCES 1 2 3
DeGrazia D. Creation ethics: reproduction, genetics, and quality of life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Persson I. The retreat of reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005:295–7. Bradley B. Well-being & death. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009:142.
421
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What makes death bad for us? Ingmar Persson J Med Ethics 2015 41: 420-421 originally published online April 23, 2014
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2013-101958 Updated information and services can be found at: http://jme.bmj.com/content/41/5/420
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To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
Author meets critics: response
What makes death bad for us? Ingmar Persson I’m in sympathy with almost all of David DeGrazia’s insightful and comprehensive book Creation Ethics.1 But such is the nature of my present undertaking that I have to kick up some disagreement. So, I’m going to critically examine one component of the ‘tripartite framework for understanding prenatal moral status’ ( p. 17) that he defends in Chapter 2. This framework consists of the following three components: (1) a view about our numerical identity, essence, and origins; (2) an account of the relevance of sentience to moral status; (3) a version of ‘the time-relative interests account’ of the harm of death ( pp. 17–8).
My discussion will focus on (3), his version of the time-relative interests account (TRIA), an account which he takes over, in a somewhat modified form, from Jeff McMahan. This is because my objections on this score impact significantly on prenatal moral status (and this is after all an ethics journal). With respect to (1), DeGrazia defends the biological view that we are identical to our human organisms. However, he holds this view to be only slightly more plausible than a psychological view to the effect that we are identical to the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses ( p. 20). For my own part, I accept an ‘error-theory’ which, so to speak, slices itself in between these views.2 According to this theory, we are identical to our bodies on the assumption that they are the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses. The problem is that this assumption is erroneous. As a matter of fact, it’s rather our brains, or certain areas of them that, strictly speaking, or underivatively, are the subjects or owners of our minds or consciousnesses. Our (whole) bodies are only derivatively the subjects or owners in virtue of having these (areas of ) brains as parts. Consequently, when our bodies and these proper subjects of our psychology part ways, as in brain-transplant cases, our intuitions are pulled in opposite directions. We may respond to such conflicts by trying to revise the notion of our identity either Correspondence to Dr Ingmar Persson, Department of Philosophy, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden; ingmar.persson@filosofi.gu.se
420
in a biologist or in psychologist manner, but the result can’t be intuitively wholly satisfactory. This is, in brief, my explanation of why there’s a philosophical controversy about our identity. However, this issue of our identity is irrelevant to prenatal moral status if one takes it, as does DeGrazia (p. 31), that the view that potentiality for sentience is sufficient for moral status is plausible enough for one to proceed on its truth. Then, regardless whether a normal pre-sentient human foetus—indisputably, a human organism or animal—is identical to one of us, as the biological view implies, or not, as the psychological view has it, it will have moral status in virtue of its potentiality for sentience. Suppose, instead, that the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral status is sound; then the biological view, but not the psychological view, implies that we exist for a while as pre-sentient foetuses (and embryos) without moral status. But, like DeGrazia, I’m prepared to go along with the potentiality view. With respect to TRIA, however, there’s a morally significant disagreement between us. Consider how he introduces this account. He writes that it ‘steers a plausible middle course between two polar positions’, namely ‘a desire-satisfaction account of the harm of death’ to the effect that ‘one is harmed by death only if one desires to remain alive’, and ‘a view that construes the harm of death in terms of lost opportunities for valuable future experiences’ (pp. 32–33). Both these positions are implausible, he maintains: the desire-satisfaction account because it implies ‘that normal human infants are not harmed by death’, and the value of possible future experiences account because it ‘implies that death typically harms an infant more than a child, adolescent, or young adult’ ( pp. 32–33), for the reason that the infant typically loses more years of valuable life. I agree that these implications are implausible, but don’t regard TRIA as a ‘reasonable’ (p. 43) remedy. TRIA might seem an obvious remedy because it: holds that an evaluation of the harm of death must take into account not only (1) the value of the future life lost by the individual who dies, but also (2) the degree of psychological relatedness between the individual just before dying
and the later individual who otherwise would have lived ( p. 6).
In other words, TRIA might seem to be an obvious remedy because it encompasses both the factor to which the desiresatisfaction account appeals and the factor to which the value of future life account appeals. (Henceforth, I will speak as though the ‘psychological relatedness’ which TRIA features consisted entirely in having desires as regards future life, though this is a simplification.) Now it is indeed an improvement to include both these factors in an account of the badness of death for us, but the crux is how they are to be combined. According to TRIA, the factor of lacking desires or plans for the future has the function of discounting or detracting from the value of future existence, such that the badness of death will be less than the value lost, while having such desires or plans at most makes it equal the value for you of the future life you’ve lost. On the account I favour, having such conative connections to your future is, instead, something that amplifies or adds to the badness of your death, making it worse for you than the value of the future lost. Thus, even when you were an infant with no desires with respect to your future, but a great life in store, death would have harmed you greatly. But it would be even worse when you had unfulfilled plans for your future, and its worseness would be still greater, the more elaborate and important to you your plans were. To flesh out my ‘amplification’ account a bit. I believe there are two elements to what makes life intrinsically good (or bad) for us, or things going well for us. First, and least controversially, there’s an experiential of element consisting, on the positive side, in the having of various kinds of experiences that we like for their own sakes, pleasant and joyful experiences (and on the negative side, experiences that we dislike having, painful, unpleasant and boring experiences). Second, and more controversially, there’s a trans-experiential element consisting, on the positive side, in the actual fulfilment of rational and informed desires concerning various personal matters going beyond our current experiences. Thus, if you have a desire that your friends don’t slander you behind your back, or to create an artistic masterpiece, then your life goes better for you if these desires are fulfilled, though you never realise, with feelings of pleasure, that they are fulfilled. Things can go well J Med Ethics May 2015 Vol 41 No 5
Downloaded from http://jme.bmj.com/ on November 16, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
Author meets critics: response for all sentient beings in the experiential way, but for things to go well in the transexperiential way, more sophisticated mental faculties are requisite, those which are the privilege of so-called persons.i This amplification account doesn’t have the implausible implication that a human infant can’t be harmed by dying, since it recognises that it can thereby, unwittingly, be deprived of a host of intrinsically valuable future experiences. But it also avoids the implausible implication that death will normally be worse for it than for an adolescent, or young adult, by recognising the likely amplifying effect of the—perhaps non-experiential—frustration of the latter’s future-oriented desires. However, TRIA also avoids these implausible implications, so why do I find the amplification account decidedly more reasonable? There are three reasons for this. First, TRIA isn’t what one might call ‘normatively constant’: what’s the right thing to do, according to it, depends on what one in fact does.3 Imagine that the woman rightly concludes that the rather trivial benefits that an abortion would bring her outweigh the heavily discounted benefits of the future life of her foetus. In other words, an abortion promotes her interests more than it harms her foetus’s interests, for although the foetus loses considerably more future value, its conative connection to its future is very weak or non-existent. However, she can’t bring herself to abort, so she gives birth to her foetus, and it goes on to live a life whose value for it will no longer be discounted because it proceeds to
DeGrazia and I agree that ‘the best possible subjective theory is more plausible than any objective theory’ ( p. 112) of what makes things go well for us, or our well-being, but we may differ over what the best subjective theory is. In opposition to what I hold, he claims: ‘If the satisfaction of an informed desire does not give us any felt satisfaction, it is unclear why it should count as valuable on a subjective account’ ( p. 110). On the other hand, he insists: ‘A person’s happiness makes her well-off only if it based on a more or less accurate understanding of her circumstances’ ( p. 114). But why, when it’s having this basis clearly isn’t anything felt? So, the precise difference between our views eludes me. It may in part have to do with the fact that I take the relevant notion to be ‘what makes things go well/have intrinsic value for us’ which I take to be broader than the experientially-tinged ‘our well-being’, whereas he seems guided by the latter notion.
i
J Med Ethics May 2015 Vol 41 No 5
acquire future-oriented desires. Thus, subsequent history proves that her failure to abort was the right thing to do, since the non-discounted benefits that the foetus enjoys as an adult outweigh the benefits the woman would have derived from abortion. That is, in this situation, TRIA implies that whatever the woman does, she does the right thing because the rightness of what she does depends on what she does. This is an intolerable result, since it shows that TRIA provides no normative guide in these situations. Furthermore, TRIA seems to me to undervalue the interests of foetuses and infants in their future both in relation to their current interests and to the future interests they will have when their minds are more developed. To illustrate the first type of undervaluation, imagine that a neonate is engaging in some activity that is giving it immense pleasure of considerable duration, but which will also cause it to die when it eventually falls asleep exhausted. According to TRIA, it may well be justifiable to let the neonate continue engaging in this pleasurable activity, since the value of its further future is heavily discounted by the neonate’s weak (or non-existent) conative links to it, whereas it may have a strong desire that its current pleasure continues in the imminent future. But this judgement seems to me preposterous. Turn now to the other sort of undervaluation of the interests of those weakly linked to their future. Towards the end of 1975 Tour de France, the Belgian star-cyclist Eddy Merckx had a bad crash. He broke his cheekbone, but completed the Tour, though he could take only liquid food. Suppose that he had instead died in that crash, aged 30. At that time, he had already accomplished more than enough to be recognised by most as the greatest cyclist of all times and, indeed, as one of the greatest athletes in all categories. After the unhappy 1975 Tour, Merckx won little, and he quit cycling a few years later. A main reason for Merckx’s astonishing winning record— 525 wins in little more than 10 years—was that he apparently loved cycling and racing more than anything else, and did it virtually nonstop all year round. It appears to me that, looking back on his life, Merckx could quite reasonably hold that it would have been much worse for him to have died in infancy than in that 1975 crash. His reason could be that death in infancy would have eclipsed his
unparalleled achievements in cycling which he could reasonably regard as the peak of his life. Death immediately after such a peak could plausibly be less bad for you than death in infancy which deprives you of this peak. Compare with a similar crash Merckx had in 1969. If he had died then, it seems to me that his death then would have been worse for him than dying as an infant, since in 1969 he had just begun to actualise his enormous potential as a cyclist, and had many unfulfilled, but fulfillable, cycling ambitions. This isn’t the place to work out a fuller account of what makes death bad for us, but I would like to emphasise two points in conclusion: (1) TRIA’s discounting in proportion to psychological connectedness leads to an undervaluing of the interests of infants and conscious foetuses to survive, as well as to a violation of the desideratum of normative constancy; (2) the frustration of plans for future life actually amplifies the badness of death, so that it becomes greater than the future value lost, and in the case of plans especially dear to one, it will greatly amplify the badness of death. Acknowledgements I’m grateful to Roger Crisp for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
To cite Persson I. J Med Ethics 2015;41:420–421. Received 12 March 2014 Accepted 3 April 2014 Published Online First 23 April 2014
▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101917 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101956 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2013-101957 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2014-102048 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2014-102531
J Med Ethics 2015;41:420–421. doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101958
REFERENCES 1 2 3
DeGrazia D. Creation ethics: reproduction, genetics, and quality of life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Persson I. The retreat of reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005:295–7. Bradley B. Well-being & death. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009:142.
421
Downloaded from http://jme.bmj.com/ on November 16, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
What makes death bad for us? Ingmar Persson J Med Ethics 2015 41: 420-421 originally published online April 23, 2014
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2013-101958 Updated information and services can be found at: http://jme.bmj.com/content/41/5/420
These include:
Email alerting service
Topic Collections
Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections JME Author meets critics (37) Psychology and medicine (213)
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
