Me: *pours water on Holden’s head*
Holden: WTF??!
Me, 1 second later: It wasn’t me!
Holden, considers:
“Yeah it was! I saw you!”; or
“Fair enough.”
WS Campbell
Karma: 1
Let’s say is Holden at time T.
Plausible Moral Rule (PMR): People cannot be morally blameworthy for actions that occurred before they existed.
By the PMR, for instance, cannot be blameworthy for a murder committed by Ted Bundy.
Now suppose that committed murder on national television.
According to the view of personhood laid out in this post, plus the PMR, it seems like is not blameworthy for the murder committed by .
That seems whacky.
I think that seems whacky for precisely the reason that and are the same person.
(Quick note: seems blameworthy for ’s murder in a way that’s fundamentally different than the way we might say Holden’s parents are blameworthy, even if is a minor.)
Thanks for your thoughts, Holden! Fun to engage.
re: The Pragmatic View of Blameworthiness/Responsibility
I’m compelled against your “pragmatic” view of moral blame by something like Moore’s open-question argument. It seems like we could first decide whether or not someone is blameworthy and then ask a further, separate question about whether they should be punished. For instance, imagine that Jack was involved in a car accident that resulted in Jill’s death. Each of the following questions seems independently sensible to me:
(a) Is Jack morally responsible (i.e., blameworthy) for Jill’s death?
(b) Assuming yes, is it morally right to punish Jack? (Set aside legal considerations for our purposes.)
If the pragmatic view about blameworthiness is correct, asking this second question (b) is as incoherent, vacuous, or nonsensical as saying, “I know there’s water in this glass, but is it H2O that’s in there?” But if determining that (a) Jack is blameworthy for Jill’s death still leaves open (b) the question of whether or not to punish Jack, then blameworthiness and punishment-worthiness are not identical (cf., the pragmatic view).[1]
re: Focus of the Piece was Death, not Moral Blame
I understood that the purpose of your post was to consider the implications of a certain view about personal identity continuity (PIC) for our conception of death. But I was trying to show that this particular view of PIC was incompatible with a commonsense view about moral blame. If they are in fact incompatible, and if the commonsense view about moral blame is right, then we have reason to reject this view of PIC (then don’t need to ask what its implications are for our notions of death).
So is that view of moral blame wrong?
It seems prima facie correct to me that Jack cannot be blameworthy for an action that occurred before Jack existed.
But it seems like you reject this idea. I’ll think harder about whether or not that view of blameworthiness is correct or not. For now:
I see how HT−1 can be (causally, morally) responsible for something that HT does, but I don’t see how HT can be responsible for something HT−1 does unless HT and HT−1 are the same person. For HT to be responsible for something HT−1 does, assuming they’re 2 different people, it seems like you’d have to have a concept of responsibility that is fully independent of causality (assuming no backwards-causation). I’m curious what view that would be.
As an aside, your Footnote 3 seems like a reason HT−1 might have for caring about the interests and wellbeing of HT, but it doesn’t seem like a reason why HT is in fact responsible for that other dude, HT−1 (if they’re 2 different people).
Thanks for your thoughts!
P.S. I’m new to all of this, so if anything about my comments is counter-normative, I’d be thrilled for some feedback!
We can further think about the separability of these two questions by asking (b) irrespective of (a). For instance, there might be pragmatic reasons to punish a car passenger for drinking alcohol even if there’s nothing blameworthy about a passenger drinking alcohol per se.