Abstract
There has been a growing worry (raised in some form or another by Dean Zimmerman, Eric Olson, A.P. Taylor, Mark Johnston and Alex Kaiserman) that perdurantism—and similarly ontologically abundant views—is morally untenable. For perdurantism posits that, coinciding with persons, are person-like objects, and giving them their moral due seems to require giving up prudentially driven self-sacrifice. One way to avoid this charge is to adopt consequentialism. But Mark Johnston has argued that the marriage of consequentialism and perdurantism is in moral trouble. For, depending on the nature of time, consequentialist perdurantists either are unable to do more than one good act or they are morally obliged to adopt a repugnant form of ageism. I argue both that perdurantist consequentialism doesn’t have the latter implication, and that there’s at least one plausible form of consequentialism that perdurantists can adopt to avoid the former implication.
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Notes
That is, the object overlaps only and every part that S overlaps at t1.
Kaiserman gives Magidor’s (2016) ‘liberalist endurantism’ as an example. He also argues that Johnston’s argument that personites have moral status fails if we adopt stage theory.
See also Longenecker (forthcoming) for a non-consequentialist response to the personite problem.
Johnston (2017, 638).
This isn’t entirely accurate. Bostrom (ibid., 11) argues for the following epistemic claim: even if the world is canonically finite, so long as we cannot epistemically assume that it is finite in that way, then the paralysis problem still arises. If this epistemic claim is correct, then this blunts Johnston’s criticism of perdurantism. For in canonically finite worlds, even non-perdurantist consequentialists are stuck in the paralysis problem (so long as they can’t assume it’s canonically finite). So adding perdurantism in such a case wouldn’t make things any worse.
And this problem will arise no matter how short of a duration we choose, so long as a person has wellbeing at each of the infinite number of moments within the duration.
Of course, the consequentialist could instead try defending the extensionalist or hyperreal number approaches that Bostrom criticizes. But whatever success those approaches have, it seems that they would straightforwardly work to help the perdurantist avoid Johnston’s problem.
If, as I suggest in the next section, there are crosspersons, then we may need to take locations into consideration as well. For instance, suppose there are exactly two persons, S1 and S2, and they exist for exactly two seconds. Let’s say personal set S* is the set that includes all and only S1 at t2 and all of S1’s coinciding personites at t2. S* will then include not only personites that coincided with S1 at t1, but also crosspersons that coincided with S2 at t1. Thus we can take the subset of members of S* that came into existence at t1, and further subdivide the members into sets based on their location of origin and have the resulting sets be of equal measure. Basing measures on locations may be problematic in canonically infinite worlds. But, again, the problem Johnston presents only concerns canonically finite worlds.
If there's an infinite number of objects in the universe, there will also be an infinite amount of four-dimensional objects coinciding each of P1 and P2.
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Many thanks to Timothy Perrine for helpful discussion on this topic.
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Longenecker, M.TS. Is consequentialist perdurantism in moral trouble?. Synthese 198, 10979–10990 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02764-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02764-3