Fission and anticipating having an experience
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Fission and anticipating having an experience Douglas Ehring1 Received: 22 June 2020 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract According to Parfit’s assessment of fission, the fissioner can have prudential concern for each of the post-fission people and that concern will be rational in virtue of some relation he bears to those post-fission people. Parfit suggests that it is plausible that the relation that grounds rational prudential concern is not identity, but some other relation. This argument can be challenged by reference to Velleman’s account of anticipating having an experience on the reasonable assumption that prudential concern with respect to a person P consists, in part, in the ability to anticipate having certain experiences of P. According to Velleman, the fissioner cannot anticipate having the experiences of the fission products. In this paper, I suggest, first, that even if we accept Velleman’s account of anticipating having an experience, there are variants of fission in which his account is satisfied and, second, that his account may have the implication that prudential concern does not require anticipatory concern. Keywords Fission · Velleman · Parfit · Anticipation Parfit argues that personal identity is not what matters in survival. One of his arguments is focused on fission. Fission Argument: Each hemisphere of Mr. Fissiony is transplanted into a new body, a different body for each hemisphere. Each of the post-fission people, Righty and Lefty, is equally psychologically continuous/connected to the prefission person and each has some of the brain of Mr. Fissiony. Mr. Fissiony gets what matters in survival with respect to Lefty and Righty—he has a reason for prudential concern with respect to Lefty and Righty. However, it is not true that Mr. Fissiony is identical to either fission product according to Parfit. So it is false that what matters in survival is identity (based on Parfit 1993: p. 30). This argument requires that Mr. Fissiony can have prudential concern for Lefty and Righty. However, if having prudential concern for P consists, in part, in the ability
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Douglas Ehring [email protected] Philosophy Department, SMU, Dallas, TX 75214, USA
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to anticipate having experiences of P, then one might claim that Mr. Fissiony cannot anticipate having the experiences of Lefty and Righty, and, so, cannot have prudential concern for them. For example, if it is a conceptual truth that you can only anticipate your own experiences then such a challenge can be raised. However, there is another way to ground this no-anticipation-in-fission challenge that is suggested by Velleman. In this paper, I will argue that Velleman’s no-anticipation-in-fission claim, which is based on his account of what it is to anticipate having an experience, can be resisted.
1 Anticipating having an experience What matters in survival does not require identity, according to Velleman, but does require a certain kind of first-personal access to a future person, including the ability to ant
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