Animal Interrupted, or Why Accepting Pascal's Wager Might Be the Last Thing You Ever Do

Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):109-133 (2014)
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Abstract

According to conventionalist accounts of personal identity, persons are constituted in part by practices and attitudes of certain sorts of care. In this paper, we concentrate on the most well-developed and defended version of conventionalism currently on offer (namely, that proposed by David Braddon-Mitchell, Caroline West, and Kristie Miller) and discuss how the conventionalist appears forced either (1) to accept arbitrariness concerning from which perspective to judge one's survival or (2) to maintain egalitarianism at the cost of making “transfiguring” decisions such as Pascal's Wager rationally intractable. We consider three ways the egalitarian conventionalist could make these choices tractable and show that each one comes at significant cost to the view. We end the paper by considering whether accepting arbitrariness would be a better move for the conventionalist and conclude that, even here, she runs the risk of transfiguring choices being rationally intractable

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Author Profiles

Christina VanDyke
Barnard College
Sam Baron
University of Melbourne

Citations of this work

Response to “Animal Interrupted”.Neil A. Manson - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):134-139.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.
Survival and identity.David Lewis - 1976 - In Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons. University of California Press. pp. 17-40.
What are we?Eric T. Olson - 2007 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5-6):37-55.
Identity, Consciousness, and Value.Peter K. Unger - 1990 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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