Abstract
In a recent article, I criticized Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s influential argument—appealing to the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes towards past and future pleasures—against the Lucretian claim that death and prenatal non-existence are relevantly similar. Brueckner and Fischer have replied, however, that my critique involves an unjustified shift in temporal perspectives. In this paper, I respond to this charge and also argue that even if it were correct, it would fail to defend Brueckner and Fischer’s proposal against my critique.
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Notes
In their reply to me, Brueckner and Fischer agree with me that the principle they proposed in their reply to Feldman, BF*(dd) (Brueckner and Fischer 2013a: 787), needs adjustment for the same technical reason as Feldman’s formulation. As they point out, BF*(dd)* takes care of that difficulty. See Brueckner and Fischer (2013b: §II) and Johansson (2013: 63n.). The distinction between BF*(dd) and BF*(dd)* does not matter for the purposes of this paper, so for ease of exposition I shall slide over it in what follows.
Of course, the first word in BF*(dd)*, “When,” may sound temporal—as synonymous with “At a time at which.” But I take it that it here means merely “In a case in which”—to distinguish it from cases in which the person’s death is not bad for her (on the deprivation approach, there are plenty of cases of both sorts).
References
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Johansson, J. Actual and Counterfactual Attitudes: Reply to Brueckner and Fischer. J Ethics 18, 11–18 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9156-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9156-8