Thanks. This is a great post. I’d like to read (and write) more posts like this—an enganging summary of a long and complex debate. I read The Afterlife and listened to the book Why worry… I believe your remarks are accurate, and can’t detect anything worth correcting.
But I do have some remarks; I’m gonna post one comment for each one, for the sake of readability:
1) Scheffler on value & acquaintance
2.4 Valuing involves attachment, attachment requires acquaintance, and non-existence makes the relevant form of acquaintance impossible
I’m not sure I follow this; in my interpretation, it’s either wrong or useless.
I know there’s a lot of people who value more than anything else something I believe doesn’t exist (e.g., God(s)).
And I sort of value their beliefs and rituals concerning it, even though I’m not acquainted with this sort of value—because I know it’s important for them.
Maybe one could say that, at least from my POV, what they really value is not “god itself”, but its “very idea”. I’d be ok with that, but … if I accept someone can mostly value something that’s totally absent, and if I can value their valuing, so why can’t I also value the welfare of future generations that may value something totally distinct from my personal values?
Thus, I believe this conjunction is not true: “attachment requires acquaintance, and non-existence makes the relevant form of acquaintance impossible”.
Perhaps there’s a catch here that I’m kinda surprised no one points out in this discussion: it’s knowing that something does not exist that prevents attachment—not non-existence per se. I believe this is important, e.g., for “the afterlife conjuncture”: some philosophers have replied to Scheffler that, given any positive probability p that we’ll go extinct, we could not say that our present values depend on the existence of future generations—because we know (so they say) that at some point there’ll be none. Call this Alvy Singer’s nihilism. I believe this reply is wrong because our situation is analogue to an iterated prisoner’s dilemma: all we need for Scheffler’s argument to work (along this line, of course—there are other objections) is that, for each present generation, they have a high credence they’ll have successors—so they can’t use some sort of backward induction reasoning to conclude any sort of thing they value (that depends on the future) is worthless. (I would like to see someone analysing this debate as a possible instance of a paradox of backward induction)
Thanks. This is a great post. I’d like to read (and write) more posts like this—an enganging summary of a long and complex debate. I read The Afterlife and listened to the book Why worry… I believe your remarks are accurate, and can’t detect anything worth correcting.
But I do have some remarks; I’m gonna post one comment for each one, for the sake of readability:
1) Scheffler on value & acquaintance
I’m not sure I follow this; in my interpretation, it’s either wrong or useless.
I know there’s a lot of people who value more than anything else something I believe doesn’t exist (e.g., God(s)).
And I sort of value their beliefs and rituals concerning it, even though I’m not acquainted with this sort of value—because I know it’s important for them.
Maybe one could say that, at least from my POV, what they really value is not “god itself”, but its “very idea”. I’d be ok with that, but … if I accept someone can mostly value something that’s totally absent, and if I can value their valuing, so why can’t I also value the welfare of future generations that may value something totally distinct from my personal values?
Thus, I believe this conjunction is not true: “attachment requires acquaintance, and non-existence makes the relevant form of acquaintance impossible”.
Perhaps there’s a catch here that I’m kinda surprised no one points out in this discussion: it’s knowing that something does not exist that prevents attachment—not non-existence per se. I believe this is important, e.g., for “the afterlife conjuncture”: some philosophers have replied to Scheffler that, given any positive probability p that we’ll go extinct, we could not say that our present values depend on the existence of future generations—because we know (so they say) that at some point there’ll be none. Call this Alvy Singer’s nihilism. I believe this reply is wrong because our situation is analogue to an iterated prisoner’s dilemma: all we need for Scheffler’s argument to work (along this line, of course—there are other objections) is that, for each present generation, they have a high credence they’ll have successors—so they can’t use some sort of backward induction reasoning to conclude any sort of thing they value (that depends on the future) is worthless.
(I would like to see someone analysing this debate as a possible instance of a paradox of backward induction)