Derek Parfit and Your Future Self

Josh Landy
Twenty years from now, will you still be the same person you are today?

Ray Briggs
Will you still have the memories and personality that make you you?

Josh Landy
And why do we think our future selves are so important?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Derek Parfit and Your Future Self.

Josh Landy
Oh, Derek Parfit… He was such an interesting thinker. He had that really interesting thought experiment about the transporter.

Ray Briggs
Oh yeah, I love that too. You’re on your daily commute to Mars, you’re about to get beamed up. But then something goes wrong. The transporter makes a copy of you on Mars like it’s supposed to, but then it forgets to vaporize you back home. So now there are two of you.

Josh Landy
Right, and if there are two of you, the question is which one’s the real you: the you on Earth, or the you on Mars?

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s obvious. It’s the original, the you on Earth.

Josh Landy
Obvious? That doesn’t sound obvious to me.

Ray Briggs
Well, imagine if the transporter malfunction in a different way, and it didn’t create a copy of you on Mars. You’d just be happily going about your business down here.

Josh Landy
Okay, but look when the transport is functioning normally, you disappear down here, and you materialize on Mars. So clearly the Mars view is the real you.

Ray Briggs
Hmm, couldn’t they both be the real you?

Josh Landy
Well, not according to Parfit. Let’s say your Mars self sets up, like, I don’t know an oxygen factory and marries the boss of the Thunderdome. And meanwhile, your Earth self is hanging out a surf shop on Bondi Beach. These two people are living completely different lives. How can they possibly be the same person?

Ray Briggs
Okay, fine. One of them is you and one of them isn’t. But why does it matter?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe you wouldn’t care that much in that scenario. But imagine this scenario: the Earth version of you only has one day to live, while the Mars version of you is gonna live long and prosper. I mean, in that case, you better hope that the Mars version is the real you.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay. I definitely want to know whether I’m in for a long happy life or certain death. But it seems like there’s just no way of knowing. I mean, it’s not like you can just ask them. Noth of them would claim to be the real Ray Briggs. Both of them would look like me and remember my childhood, right?

Josh Landy
And it would probably be pretty confusing for your family and friends too, like, which Ray am I going to do this radio show with?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, those are all cool questions. But Parfit ends up saying something even more interesting. He thinks it doesn’t even matter who the real you is. His slogan was, “Identity is not what matters.”

Josh Landy
I don’t get it, Ray. Why shouldn’t identity matter? Like, okay, I was very different at age 20. But I still feel responsible for the dumb stuff I did then because I’m still the same person. And I really care about what’s going to happen to me and old age because that’s gonna be me to.

Ray Briggs
Parfit thinks you’re right to care about your past and your future, but not because you’re literally the same person.

Josh Landy
But aren’t I literally the same person? I’ve got the same name, I’ve been dragging this body around the whole time, I’ve always hated cilantro.

Ray Briggs
Fine. But that’s not the thing that matters. What matters is that you can remember the stuff that your 20 year old self did, and you can count on your 60 year old self to carry out some of your plans. Plus, you have a lot in common with those guys. You like a lot of the same music. You have similar personalities. Heck you even look related.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but I have some of those things in common with people who aren’t me.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and Parfit says you should care about them, too. That’s exactly what’s so powerful about this way of thinking. Suddenly, you stop being so self-centered, and start seeing yourself as just another thread in the tapestry of human life.

Josh Landy
I do love that, Ray. And I love the idea that it also makes us less afraid of death. I’m just not quite sure I can believe it.

Ray Briggs
Well, I bet our guest can convince you. It’s David Edmonds, author of a new philosophical biography of Derek Parfit. He also studied with Parfit back in the day.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I can’t wait to hear what Dave thinks about all this identity stuff—assuming that it is the real Dave and not his replica from Mars.

Ray Briggs
We didn’t have the budget to send our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, all the way to Mars. So we sent her to speak with some writers and readers contemplating future selves. She files this report.

Holly McDede
In the novel, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu, the narrator says “Today is the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning.” He has killed his future self and is going back to his past to do it all over again. This all sounds very trippy, but it’s also par for the course in science fiction. That’s why I decided to ask science fiction writers what the future self means to them. Starting with author Charlie Jane Anders.

Charlie Jane Anders
I think that the future self is sort of a mythological figure that we conjure in order to in order to motivate ourselves in the present, in order to justify ourselves or make sense of our lives. And oftentimes, if you’re thinking too much about your future self, it means that either you’re facing a huge choice or a huge challenge of the present, or your present really sucks. And like, it’s actually an indicator that present you is getting shortchanged in the name of of some future version of you that’s actually a mirage. One of my first short stories that I wrote, which was nobody’s ever read, really was about someone having lunch with their future self. And their future self has become a supervillain. And it’s just, you know, because their future self as a supervillain, they’re eating all the most cruel foods, They’re eating veal, and they’re like, you know, it’s like, that’s how, you know, your future self has become a super villain because they’re eating really whatever the opposite of cruelty free foods are, they’re eating those. And so it’s just why did why did I become a supervillain in the future?

Holly McDede
The future self reminds science fiction author, Tobias Buckell, of a thought experiment: the Ship of Theseus.

Tobias Buckell
We think of ourselves as like a coherent being that travels from one point to another. But the truth is, I often think about the fact that we’re constantly shedding, you know, our cells and our our being. And the idea of Theseus ship is that, you know, if you replace all the planks in a ship as it’s still on the original ship or is it not?

Holly McDede
Science fiction gives us a chance to imagine all kinds of futures, some of which may not be so far off from what actually happens.

Tobias Buckell
It’s not like we can predict them as science fiction writers, right? But just getting like, you know, group of 10 to 15 science fiction writers gets you like that shotgun blast, where between 15 of us like, we’re gonna give you a wide range of scenarios, probably one of those might end up being, you know, close to what happens. It’s kind of like, maybe you should have a team of people that sits there and thinks, how horribly can this go wrong?

Holly McDede
And maybe scientists should be asking the same questio science fiction writers love to ponder: how terribly wrong things can go. Take it from Daniel H. Wilson, a writer and robotics engineer.

Daniel H. Wilson
I started out as a scientist and I was extremely optimistic about all of this stuff. And as and I mean, a lot of times as a scientist, you’re just making it possible, but you’re not really thinking about exactly how it’s going to be applied. I mean, the purpose of the imagination is to to think of a different version of yourself without having to become that version. You know, you think about what would it be like if I tried to jump over? You know that gap? Would I make it? Would I not? And so I think that having all of this technology that can simulate humanity and that can really act like us and come to the human party with us, I think it gives us this opportunity to imagine a better version of ourselves in the future.

Holly McDede
A better version of ourselves…At the end of Charles Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,”it turns out the narrator is okay. Or at least, it seems that way. The last page in the novel is left “intentionally blank.” For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that transporting report, Holly, I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Derek Parfit and Your future self.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by David Edmonds. He’s a senior research associate at Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He’s also co-producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast, and the author of “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.” Dave, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

David Edmonds
It’s very good to be here. I’m the same person I was when I was last here.

Josh Landy
That’s what you say. So Dave, you have this really great new book about Parfit. But you this isn’t the first time you written about Parfit. How did it go when you wrote an article about him?

David Edmonds
Well, it was a strange experience. I wrote about his marriage to Janet Radcliffe Richards, who’s another philosopher. And it was a very long article. I was very proud of it. And I sent it to Derek because I wanted to fact check it. And I’d been at his house with Janet. I’d be making lots of notes on my laptop. And I got this email back from Derrick saying, Dave, thanks very much. But you’re not going to like this. But I’m afraid you can’t publish that article. And there was an attachment with it. And I was aware, I rushed home, I open the attachment. And there was a long list of mistakes that I’d made. And I went through it. And I was very sort of anxious and nervous about this. And then it turned to puzzlement, because it turned out the first mistake wasn’t in my article, nor that second mistake or the third mistake. And it finally dawned on me what had happened. I’d sent him the wrong file, I’d sent him my notes that I’d been making in his house and not the article. And what was so weird about it was that nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, but Derek could possibly have thought that that was the article, it was full of these half written sentences. It didn’t have a beginning, it didn’t have a middle, it didn’t have an end. But I told him, it was the article. So he was very literal minded. He believed it was the article, it had a happy ending, I realized what the mistake was, I sent him the article, and he was very happy.

Ray Briggs
Wow, he sounds like quite an original. So I want to ask about another original contribution of his which is his slogan, “identity is not what matters.” Can you explain that slogan to us?

David Edmonds
Yeah. So there’s a puzzle in philosophy, which goes back really two and a half, 1000 years, which is what is identity. And Heraclitus says we can never walk into the same river twice. And people wonder, you know what it is that makes the same chair the same chair over time. And within that big subject of identity, there’s a kind of subcategory which is personal identity, what it is, that makes me the same person. I was if it was me, kind of 30 years ago, and which makes me the same person that I will be in 30 years time. And whatever the answer to that question, perfect for it wasn’t the central question. The central question was, what should I care about in terms of survival? And what I should care about is not identity, it’s something else.

Ray Briggs
But wait, if I want to survive, don’t I just want the same person me to keep living into the future?

David Edmonds
Well, that’s one way of surviving. But it’s not the only way. So you were talking about the thought experiment where he imagines going to Planet Mars, and he has a transport a bit like in Star Trek, although it turns out he’d never seen Star Trek. And it also turns out that in Star Trek, it’s not clear quite what happens. So some Trekkies think that what happens is that you’re physically kind of decomposed and you’re reconstituted on Planet Mars, and others believe that no, what happens is a copy is made of you. Now, as far as part of the concert is concerned, that doesn’t really matter whether you’re cut up into a zillion different pieces and transported or whether a copy is made of you. What really matters is that that person on planet Mars is psychologically continuous with you. That’s the key question, whether there’s a connectedness with the person that was on planet Earth.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let’s get into that, because I can understand the idea. Look, if you get transported, what you care about is that you’re sort of whatever lands on the other side is the same person or, or if you fell asleep, and you woke up in an identical body, not your body, but a replica, that will be okay. Right? You wouldn’t barely notice the difference. But what exactly do we mean by being the same? What do we mean by psychological continuity? What is it? It’s so it’s not my body? That that matters? It’s not this sort of numerical identity. I’m exactly that person. But what do I need? Do I need my memories? Do I need my loves and likes and dislikes? Do I need my ambitions? What do I need in there?

David Edmonds
Yeah so John Locke, and Parfit is in a kind of Lockean tradition, John Locke emphasizes memory. But really, what matters is memory. Derek’s got a much more expansive view of what matters. So it’s not just memory, it’s inclinations, its personality, its dispositions, its hobbies, it’s passions, it’s all those things that make you who you are, make you interesting. It’s not your body. Your body is sort of part of you. But scientists tell us that all the cells in our body change every seven years. You know, if a weird sort of axe murderer comes in, and chops off your little finger, you’re still the same person, your body is constantly evolving and changing. What matters the path is that we have this strong psychological connectedness. If we have that, we can say that we’re the same person. And if we don’t have that, then the personal identity is somehow lost. And the crucial thing is that there are those connections in not just memory but in all those other aspects of personality.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the life and thoughts of Derek Parfit with one of his former students, David Edmonds from Oxford University.

Ray Briggs
How concerned should you be about your future? Is it wrong to be afraid of dying? Should you really care more about yourself than about other people?

Josh Landy
Selfishness, survival and ceasing to be—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Strokes
The end is no end, the end is no end

Josh Landy
If you live on in the people who know you, is the end really the end of you? I’m Josh Landy, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is David Edmonds, and we’re thinking about the philosophy of his former teacher, Derek Parfit.

Josh Landy
Got thoughts about your future self? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Dave, you’ve been telling us that what matters to survival is that I keep a lot of like psychological stuff from my earlier self. So it matters that I have the same memories as the person who preceded me, but also sort of the same projects and the same personality traits. But it seems like I’ve got a little puzzle about that. So you know, me 20 years ago, had a lot of the same personality traits that I have now. And I remember me 20 years ago, but I’ve been changing the whole time. And I imagined that me and another 20 years will share a lot with me now. But not so much with me 20 years ago. So if I consider my 20 years ago self, like in 40 years, Will I really be able to say that I have survived? If I’ve gradually changed over time?

David Edmonds
Well, some bits of you would have survived, and some bits will be lost. I mean, your question is very relevant for all sorts of matters, like responsibility, and whether we’re just as responsible for things that happened when we were kids. As to things that happened a few days ago. And I think most of us believe that actually, responsibility is slightly attenuated in the way that those connections are also attenuated those psychological connection so that, you know, if we were found guilty of shoplifting 40 years ago, well, that’s enough of an insignificant crime for us maybe to dismiss it as of anything important and and certainly wouldn’t justify punishment. Whereas if it happened yesterday, if we were caught shoplifting yesterday, well, we’re sufficiently close to that person yesterday, to think well, you should I should be held responsible for it. So I think there is a over time, a weakening of our connectedness, and that is relevant for things like responsibility. It’s also relevant for things like whether we should plan for the future, whether that person in 40 years time is as close to me as that person tomorrow. So I think on parfaits view, there is a weakening, you shouldn’t think that that person 30 years ago, is as close to you is that person yesterday.

Josh Landy
And that’s a really interesting aspects of the Prophet’s philosophy, this idea that it’s sort of a matter of degree, right? It’s not just, I am the same person, as that person that Josh Landy, 20 years ago, I’m a different person from Ray Briggs, it’s, well I’m I’m more like that all Josh Landy, then I’m like Ray Briggs, and then all these consequences for like you say, there’s an attenuation of responsibility for the past, there’s a different relationship to the future. There’s a different relationship to death. I mean, that’s a really important consequence that Parfitt wants to draw of it. He says, you know, my death seems to me less bad. Why? How does he get there? How does he get to less of a fear of death from his is different picture of personal identity.

David Edmonds
So a crucial thing about Parfit’s concept of personal identity is that he’s what’s called a reductionist, which means he thinks we’re nothing more than our minds and our bodies. So one way to illustrate that is to think of something like a chess club. And you imagine that there’s a chess club, it’s got a set of rules it meets on a Friday night. There’s tea and coffee served at eight o’clock people play chess within the rules of the game. Then if somebody says, Well, what is the essence of the chess club? The answer parfaits answer is there’s nothing over and above the rules of how the chess club meets what time it meets, what day it meets, there’s no essence of the chess club. And that’s the same with us. There’s no essence of us. We’re just these minds and these bodies constantly. Show Changing sometimes in small ways, sometimes in very dramatic ways. Now, if there’s no essence of us is, if there’s no, like, he doesn’t believe in a soul, if there’s no unchanging essence of us, in a way, when we have to look at it, it is what I mean, this is a little depressing way of looking at it. But we’re dying a little every day, you know, we’re moving towards the end, we’re dying a little bit every day. But the endpoint, when we’re sort of biologically dead, is not such a dramatic endpoint anymore, because we’re constantly changing, we’re constantly moving towards that end. And so we’re not as it were falling off the cliff. And one of the things you mentioned is that, because the future me is no longer, exactly like me, because we’re constantly changing our relationship to our future and our past also becomes weaker, we feel a slightly weaker attachment to our future selves and our past selves. And in the same way, we feel a stronger relationship to other people, because the difference between us and other people now also seems weaker. Under the old model, we had this essence, your RE has an essence, Josh has an essence, were these very different creatures in the PUFFiT, your model, were all constantly changing, there’s no essence of us, my future me is different from my current me, and you cease to be so radically different to me as it earlier seemed.

Josh Landy
So that’s really important, because that gets us some of the diminishing of fear of death, because presumably, you know, it’s a matter of degree, some people in the world who aren’t me have some degree of connection to me, and the Prophet talks about the people that we are in contact with, and maybe the people who remember us, and maybe the people who were in, you know, in profits case, we’re inspired by his work. And in addition to giving us that kind of, well, okay, you know, it’s some thing of me will survive, after I’m gone. There’s also the moral aspect, right, I should be better towards other people, I should, I should not be so self centered, I should understand myself as sort of, you know, just part of a web of connectedness in the world. Do you think that’s a, that’s a sort of good argument for, for being good, and in particular, for getting us to the utilitarian position that that Prophet seems to have embraced,

David Edmonds
I find it a very compelling argument. It has a few paradoxes, which he doesn’t draw out extremely well. But one of them is this, we tend to think that it’s wrong to harm other people. But it’s fine to harm ourselves if that’s what we want to do. So for example, I’m allowed to go mountaineering, it’s a very risky hobby, but I’m permitted to harm myself because I’m sovereign over my life. And unless there’s a good reason, you can’t stop me doing what I want to do. Now, the paradox is that if the future self, if my future self is not identical to my current self, if we’re constantly changing in the way we’ve been discussing, then it’s not clear that I have the right to harm my future self because my future self suddenly feels feels a bit different. From my current self, it feels a bit more like somebody else. So the question is, well, if that future self is not exactly like me, since I’m not allowed to harm you, how is it that I should be allowed to harm my future self? And if I’m not allowed to harm my future self? What are the implications for that in how I behave today?

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the philosopher Derek Parfit, with one of his former students David Edmonds, author of a new biography of Parfit. Dave, we’ve got an email from Tim in Portland, Tim writes, Parfitt believed that morality was threatened by skepticism and moral nihilism and a need to saving. He sees morality as at least in part irreducible, and moral language as a hook to hang a foundation for objective moral truth and rational ethics. To put down the skeptics and nihilism. Do you think that that’s an accurate summation of profits project?

David Edmonds
Yes, I’m amazed. You’ve got some listeners who’ve read three volumes of “On What Matters,” which are 1900 pages are extremely impressed by the quality of your listeners. Indeed, that is the case. He spent the last 25 years of his life obsessed, really with a single question, which is, is morality objective? And partly what he means by that is, are there moral facts? So when I say it’s wrong to kill innocent children, is that a fact? And if you insist that you want to kill innocent children and you think it’s fine to kill innocent children? Are you making a mistake? Well, Parfit wanted to believe that you were making a mistake, that it was wrong to kill innocent children. And he thought that if that was not the case, then indeed, morality was relative life was meaningless. And our lives collapsed into a kind of nihilism. And he spent the last, as I say, quarter of a century, trying to demonstrate that morality was objective and trying to convince all the important philosophers in the world that this was the case he got extremely upset, in particular with English philosopher called Bernard Williams, who wasn’t convinced by path its arguments, and it would bring Parfit to tears, that he couldn’t convince people that the caliber of Bernard Williams that morality was not objective.

Ray Briggs
So I’m a little bit more on Bernard Williams side, I think. And I guess my question is, what if morality isn’t objective? Like, why does it have to be objective? So it seems like if morality is objective, but there are plenty of people who just don’t care about what’s doing, doing what’s objectively, morally right, convincing them that morality is objective, won’t help and convincing yourself won’t help. And if morality isn’t objective, like, couldn’t you still care about doing what was morally right?

David Edmonds
I think part of it is extrapolating from himself. So I think you’re what most people don’t think about this question. Most of us just live our lives, we actually probably do assume that morality is objective, we are instinctive. Objectivists, we think that there is a right and wrong. And if a philosopher comes along and says, I’m afraid you’ve got you’ve made you made an error, morality is relative, it probably wouldn’t make a difference to most of our lives would carry on living our lives in exactly the same way, in the same way that if a philosopher came along and said, There’s no such thing as free will, there’s this thing called determinism, we’re all part of a causal chain, you’re not deeply morally responsible for your actions, well would carry on living our lives would carry on holding other people responsible, morally responsible for their actions. I think you’re right. In the vast majority of cases, it wouldn’t make any difference, I think, Prophet who had such a kind of cerebral relationship to philosophy in the sense that he lived his philosophy. I think he felt that if he believed that morality wasn’t objective, he would feel completely at liberty to behave in any way he wanted. I don’t think most people are like that. But Parfitt genuinely believed that he was like that. And he thought other people were like that, too.

Josh Landy
I want to get back to the question of you know, whether the best way to get there is through what we started with, which is this new picture of personal identity, or whatever personal connectedness, we should say, right? I’m not literally the same person as it was 20 years ago, but I’m more psychologically connected to that person than I am to some other people. And that’s what matters. One of the things that perplexes me is why perfect, really thinks we would get both an increased sense of goodness, or an increased goodness out of it, and also an increased degree of calm out of it, you know, that sort of resignation to our mortality. I mean, you know, I think of that old line, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying. And I wonder whether the idea of sort of my spirit somehow living on in, you know, my descendants or students or something like that is really, really, you know, paly it’s the fear of death. And the other thing on morality as opposed to mortality? Well, maybe it’s gonna make me care about people who are connected to me. Right? So I care about them, because they’re not that different from me. But well, doesn’t that mean, I’m going to care less about somebody I’ve never met someone who, you know, lives far away, and so on? Why would that be the best way of getting us to a more moral way of being?

David Edmonds
Well, on your latter point? I think it gets us half the way there, doesn’t it? I mean, most people objections to consequentialism is precisely because it’s too impartial. You know, that the consequentialist will say, the fact that so and so is my neighbor, makes no difference, moly, to whether or not I should help them compared to somebody on the other side of the world. I mean, it might be practically more easy to help a neighbor than to help somebody on the other side of the world, that my neighbor is not morally more significant than the person on the other side of the world. And most people say that’s ridiculous. You should care a lot more about your friends and family than you care about strangers. Well, puff, it’s got a kind of, in a way, it’s a halfway house, the way you express it, because obviously, we should care about our friends and family more because they’re more psychologically connected to us they carry our memories and so on. So that’s a perfect as a reason why we should care about our friends and family and those who knew us perhaps more than we care about other people precisely because of this cycle. logical connectedness. So it’s sort of halfway between a strict consequentialist approach. And the strict Kantian approach. It says that we should care a bit less about ourselves a bit more about other people. But it’s understandable because of the psychological connectedness, that we would care about our children more than we care about ourselves because they’re more psychologically connected to us.

Ray Briggs
I also want to know about this suppose a lack of difference between me and other people. So you said earlier, if perfect is right, maybe it’s just as wrong for me to take myself mountaineering, as it would be to like force some other random person into mountaineering and risking their life. But I don’t know if this just affects my relationship with myself. Because it seems like here’s another thing that’s okay for me to do to ask my friend who is an adult and capable of consenting, if they would like to come mountaineering with me and to listen to their answer. Can I capture that anymore in a party and framework that their choices about their own life should matter morally to me in a way that just like trying to patronizingly benefit or avoid harm to them can’t capture?

David Edmonds
That’s a very interesting question. It raises all sorts of puzzles about to what extent we can commit our future selves. So many of us write wills, we grant, our husbands and our wives the ability to make decisions over our lives, we’ve got the power of attorney if we fall, ill, and so on. The puzzle that the PUFFiT in picture raises is to what extent our current self is able to bind our future selves. And you talk about whether somebody else’s promise can be binding, I think that is a genuine puzzle. And I think it looks like according to the PUFFiT Ian, approach to personal identity, that there wouldn’t be a reason to override that commitment in the future, that it might be reasonable in some cases to say, that person who asked us to act in a certain way, asked us to do that 30 years ago, and now it’s a different kind of person. And we shouldn’t be a feel bound by that. I think the perfect input probably does weaken the commitments that we can make to our future selves, precisely because we’re changing over time.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Derek Parfit and your future self with David Edmonds, author of “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.”

Ray Briggs
How much should we care about people who haven’t even been born yet? What about people who won’t exist for 1000s of years? Do merely possible people matter more than the here and now?

Josh Landy
Back to the future—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Flight of the Conchords
Finally, robotic beings rule the world. The humans are dead!

Josh Landy
Does the distant future even matter if the humans are dead? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Derek Parfit, and your future self with David Edmonds, the author of “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.”

Josh Landy
Dave, you claim in your book that Parfit is the originator of longtermism, which is an idea that’s been in the news a lot lately. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David Edmonds
The basic idea is that future people matter as much as count people. So the fact that these people are not yet born yet, doesn’t make them any less morally significant than people who are currently alive. And the very simple thought experiment is to imagine that you drop a piece of glass in a word. And the next day, a young child steps on it, and cuts themselves and bleeds. That’s a bad thing, right? Now imagine that the piece of glass lies under some branches and leaves and stays there for 100 years. And in 100 years time, another kid comes along, and the steps on the piece of glass. That’s just as bad. The fact that that kid who steps on the glass in 100 years time is not alive yet. Makes no mole difference. It’s as bad that that kid steps on the glass as that that kid tomorrow steps on the glass. That’s the basic thought.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so in that example, whether the kid is walking through the woods, and whether the kid exists to walk through the woods doesn’t depend at all on whether I dropped the piece of glass, but it seems more complicated in cases Where my decisions affect, say how many people are born, or which people are born? How do I decide on the behalf of future people, if I don’t even know who they are, and my decision might affect who they are?

David Edmonds
Well, the fact that you don’t know their identity is not per se irrelevant, just as the fact that if there’s an earthquake on the other side of the world, you don’t know the identity of the victims, that doesn’t give you a reason not to help them. path, it discovers a puzzle in the issues surrounding future people. And it’s what it’s called the non identity problem. So normally, when we think about morality, we think that if I’ve done something wrong, I’ve done something wrong to a particular person. So you know, we’re not in the same room. But Well, Josh, if you were with me, and I punched you on the nose, that’s a bad thing to do. Because you would get hurt. Okay, perfect spot something, which is that sometimes you can do a bad thing, even though it’s bad for nobody? And shall I just explain how that works?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, how can there be a victimless crime like that?

David Edmonds
So he starts off by talking about a 14 year old girl, who is thinking of having a child. And obviously, that would be bad for the 14 year old girl. But we normally think, well, that’s bad for the child, the child will get a bad start in life, it would be better if they 14 year old girl postpone that decision for another 10 years or whatever. But then Parfitt points out? Well, if the girl does that, the child that will then be born 10 years later, will be a different human being. Obviously, we’re all a unique combination of a particular sperm and a particular egg. And if the 14 year old girl goes ahead and has a child, so long as that child’s life is better than nothing, we can assume it would be, that child hasn’t been harmed by that girl’s decision, because in the alternative world in which he postponed her decision, that child would not exist. And what path it points out is that many of our moral dilemmas have this kind of structure. And many of the policies that we think about to do with climate change, and so on, have this kind of structure, because we can change the identity of the people who are born.

Josh Landy
So that’s a really interesting puzzles and other interesting puzzle around future generations that profit brings up which has to do with how many, just how many future people there are going to be. So if you think every life has to count equally, as a good utilitarian, and so we shouldn’t privilege me over somebody else. And we shouldn’t privilege this country of another country. Well, we should also shouldn’t privilege now over the future. But there’s going to be trillions of future people. And profit ends up landing in what he calls the repugnant conclusion, right, which is that, you know, if we really took the consequences, seriously of this way of thinking, we could imagine ourselves wanting a world packed to the gills with human beings. But you could barely move because there was no space. And we’re barely subsisting. Because if you sort of multiply up, you know, all of the heat ons all of the moments of satisfaction that these barely subsisting human beings have, that sum is greater than the sum of heat ons of smaller number of people living in the world. So how does perfect get himself out of this particular problem?

David Edmonds
Well, he doesn’t. But let me separate two issues. One issue is you call it long term ism. In the future, there’s going to be trillions of lives on planet Earth, providing we don’t blow ourselves up. And maybe in the future, when we colonize planets, there’ll be trillions of lives on Planet Mars and other planets in other galaxies. If that’s the case, it may be the case that the future is more important than the present. So that if there’s a conflict between the present and the future, we should care more about the future than the present, because there are many more people in the future than the present. That’s one issue. The second issue is what you call the repugnant conclusion, which is a different issue altogether. So path it says, imagine a world in which there’s 8 billion high quality lives so in our current world do about 8 billion lives, but they’re not all high quality. Imagine our world was better than it currently is. There’s 8 billion very good lives. path. It has a whole bunch of arguments, which point in a single direction, which is the claim that compared to that world, there must be a world which has trillions and trillions and trillions and three Millions of lives in it lives that are barely worth living, but White lives that are worth living but only just worth living. And that that world is better than the world in which there are 8 billion high quality lives. And he calls that the repugnant conclusion. And he spends years and years trying to show how the repugnant conclusion doesn’t follow from his arguments and he can’t, he ends up leaving the logic of the arguments prove that that world in which there are trillions of lives barely worth living is better than the world in which to 8 billion very high quality lives.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about lives worth living and judging whether others lives are worth living. So Parfit is from one particular social background, and, you know, has a lot of judgments about like whether the child of a 14 year old mother’s life is worth living, and also about like whether various disabled lives are worth living, that you might think, ought to be enriched with some more perspectives. Like I don’t think that the formal structure of any of these problems turns on that. But how good are we at judging whose lives are worth living? And how good do we have to be to make these kinds of decisions?

David Edmonds
Well, I think he has quite a low bar. Remember, he doesn’t say that the child of the 14 year old girl is not worth living. The whole point of the puzzle is to claim that the child of the 14 year old girl is worth living, but nonetheless, is not quite as well live well worth living as another life, which has a much better start. So he’s not claiming that the child a 14 year old girl is not worth living, he probably has a very low bar for what counts as worth living, as you say the logic of the argument is not affected by where the cutoff point is. But wherever the baseline lies, it’s still possible for Parfitt to claim that there is a better world where there are trillions and trillions of lives, which kind of just meet that bar, wherever that bar is, which is a better universe than a universe where there’s many small number of lives with very, very rich quality of life.

Josh Landy
So this is a fascinating body of philosophy, leading to all kinds of different places really interesting places. And it’s, you know, so it’s, it’s met with a lot of fans, I think, including you, Dave, and also some criticisms. So there are folks like Elizabeth Kambou, and Ted cider, who think Well, it’s kind of bloodless, would I really be able to feel my full range of emotions if I didn’t feel like I was the same person? Amia Srinivasan saying it’s going to cost me the strength of my personal attachments that people whose whose particularity matters. Another kind of objection I’d love to ask you about is the fact that it’s sort of based on science fiction, which of course, you know, as a literature person, I sort of love but but I have this worry, you know, along with people like to mark Adler and Paul Ricca, you know, that he’s basic, perfect seems to be basing his argument on things like a transporter, or, you know, being able to divide a brain into two and put it in two bodies and things like that. And, you know, Gendler says, like, if this kind of thing were possible, so much would have changed, right, so much about the world would have changed so much about our way of thinking would have changed, Can we really trust our intuitions that come out of thinking about these wild science fiction experiments?

David Edmonds
So the fission example, is based on kind of real cases where they treat people with epilepsy, and they cut the cord between the two hemispheres of their brain. And sometimes they’ve had very strange responses. So people will count that they’ve got two spheres of consciousness. And I think there was one case where somebody said, on on the left hand stream of consciousness, they were religious on on the right hand, they were an atheist. So it is grounded in real experiments. Now, I’ve written in the past about the famous trolley problem where there’s a out of control trolley, and it’s going to kill five people, and you have the option of turning the trolley. So it just kills one. Philosophy is founded on thought experiments, in almost every aspect of philosophy. It’s built on these thought experiments. And you’re right. Many people criticize these thought experiments, because they say they’re unreliable. I mean, the defense against these thought experiments is that what you’re doing is behaving a bit like a kind of scientist, you’re trying to isolate all the factors that matters, and only the factors that matter so that when you test your intuition that you know your intuition is responding just to those factors that you’re trying to think about. Some people say Yeah, the intuitions are sort of very unreliable. I think one can’t generalize about all the thought experiments. I think some of them are very useful. I love most of the puppets thought experiments, I think most of one’s intuitions about Parfitt thought experiments are reliable, but I wouldn’t generalize to all thought experiments. I’m suspicious of some of them as well.

Josh Landy
Well, my intuition is unfortunately, we’re out of time. But thank you so much, Dave for being fantastic guests and for not punching us on the nose.

David Edmonds
Wait to the tape recorders turned off.

Josh Landy
Our guest today has been David Edmonds, co-producer of the Philosophy Bites podcast and author of “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I would definitely recommend that our readers go check out this biography. Not only was Parfit full of interesting philosophical ideas, like we’ve been discussing on this show, but he was also a really strange and fascinating person.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And Dave really brings out an interesting way the connections between the life and the thought as though confirming Nietzsche’s point that every philosophy is an involuntary memoir. But we’ll put links to everything we mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man so fast he is his future self—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… When I was edging towards six, I was in the family car, a cute blue Ford that my Father adored, standing up in the front seat. My grandmother who happened to be with us, visiting, was in the back, and she said, “You won’t always be able to do that, you know.” Though I remained standing, defiantly, my head still quite far from the roof, I had been cruelly schooled. I would become larger, which I had never fully realized until that moment. What growth there had been had been in increments, accompanied by tooth loss, shirts with cowboys on them, toys and cake, so I didn’t think of the passage of time as a tragic consequence of being alive. Standing up in the front seat was a perq of childhood that would always be mine to treasure. All was shiny and new. Washing machines, chest freezers. Everything gleaming, like the glint in Uncle Sam’s eye. We didn’t feel safe, we felt invincible. Not threatening, just ready, and as up to nastiness as any bandito, we would discover, which we all should have known just from family situations. Keep in mind my mother was sitting next to me on the vast front seat. I was standing between her and my father, who always drove. Pregnant with my sister at the time, Mother was nevertheless ready to snake her arm out should a sudden stop otherwise send me into the dashboard, or worse, through the windshield. I was unaware of the danger I was in, or rather I was immune, like one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders running up San Juan Hill in the face of heavy fire. With Mom’s arm there to snake out and shield me. What knew I of the future? Of seat belts? Portable kid seats. No smoking. My Dad liked the occasional unfiltered Camel as he cruised to the hardware store, window open, radio tuned to farm reports, rock and roll not even around the corner. Front and back seats were big as a bed. Babies were conceived at drive-ins across the land, as westerns unreeled in the darkness beyond, unwatched. But bucket seats were in the air. Small cars would weasel their way into the world of high octane. Unleaded gasoline was coming. Plummeting pollution and death tolls. I knew none of this. But even if I grew did that mean I couldn’t stand up in the front seat any more? That’s crazy. I might have to hunch a bit, wear a crash helmet. As cars got faster and more powerful, maybe I’d have to gear up like a football player, like an astronaut, or leather up like the bandits in Road Warrior. Still make Dad drive, though, like a taxi driver, or an Uber, free for the family. I didn’t see morality enter into it, except maybe the moral issue of cracking my head open and making somebody else clean up the mess. Probably have insurance for that. My family was big on insurance. So I was envisioning this future of very tall children standing up in the front seats of cars that looked like the cockpit of a bomber, only with a plate glass window in front, like a display window for Woolworth’s, or the living room window at the Mayor’s house, which we would often cruise by on a Sunday drive. Grandmother ruined everything. She was in the back seat with Grampa, who’d learned never say anything to Grandma in the presence of others. And he’d learned always to keep a window cracked when he smoked his cigar. You’d think that he would have smelled like stale tobacco, but no, he smelled like gun oil and Turtle Wax. You won’t always be able to do that you know. I won’t be able to do this when I am 21, so I should not do it now. That was the message I was getting. But she was not concerned with my well being, just making sure that I not fully enjoy whatever experience I have in life. Like families have done through the ages. It’s hard to think about, but at that time Grandmother and Grandfather were younger than I am now. And I have a hunch that SHE wanted to be in the front seat, which is where she usually sat when driving with Grampa, so she could tell him where to turn and when. Bringing up age and height just to ruin the simple pleasures of others. All because she forgot to yell “Shotgun” when we were getting in the car. I tell you, it still stings, a lifetime later. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

A Christmas Story
You’ll shoot your eye out, kid. Merry Christmas.