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Ethics and the generous ontology

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Abstract

According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us.

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Notes

  1. Those advocating a strong version include Quine, Lewis, Armstrong, and Sider. For what it’s worth, I don’t myself accept any version.

  2. Insofar as I begin or end gradually, the generous ontology is likely to supply many beings, with precise temporal boundaries, that are ideal candidates for personhood, and thus for being me. But their differences may be slight enough for ethicists to ignore.

  3. A few generous ontologists, e.g., Shoemaker [6], argue that such beings would have no mental properties; but this is a minority view.

  4. I am assuming for the sake of argument that there is only one “mattering” relation, and thus (on the Parfitian proposal) only one species of moral person. Otherwise the connection between moral and linguistic personhood will be even looser.

References

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  2. Lewis, David. 1976. Survival and identity. In The identities of persons, ed. Amélie Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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  3. Locke, John. 1976. An essay concerning human understanding. Ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  4. Noonan, Harold. 1998. Animalism versus Lockeanism: A current controversy. Philosophical Quarterly 48: 302–318.

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  5. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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  6. Shoemaker, Sidney. 1999. Self, body, and coincidence. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol. 73:287–306.

  7. Sider, Theodore. 2001. Four-dimensionalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Acknowledgments

I thank David Shoemaker, Fiona Woollard, an anonymous referee, and especially David Hershenov for their help.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S3 7QB, UK

    Eric T. Olson

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  1. Eric T. Olson
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Correspondence to Eric T. Olson.

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Olson, E.T. Ethics and the generous ontology. Theor Med Bioeth 31, 259–270 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9148-7

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