Monday, March 13, 2006 PHL105Y

1. Monday, March 13, 2006PHL105Y • For Wednesday’s class, finish reading Nozick’s “Defense of Libertarianism”, pages 409-423 in the Pojman. • For Friday’s tutorial, answer one of the following questions: • 1. Explain Nozick’s distinction between historical principles of justice and end-result principles of justice. • 2. What is a patterned principle of distribution, and why does Nozick think that patterns and liberty conflict?

2. Derek Parfit “Personal Identity” (1971)

3. Parfit on successive selves • When would it make sense to say, ‘It was not I who did that, but an earlier self’? • Parfit: we should recognize that we are psychologically much more connected to the stages of ourselves close to us in time; if the person you were ten years ago had very different plans for the future, different values, etc., then you can distance yourself from ‘that person’; psychological connectedness is a matter of degree (unlike identity, which is all-or-nothing)

4. Parfit on successive selves • On Parfit’s model, you can think of a human life as involving a series of selves; ‘there is no underlying person’ who is the 10-year-old and the 70-year old. • So, caring about what happens to your future self is not radically different from caring about what happens to others

5. Egoism • Suppose Parfit’s model of the self is correct. Does it really show that the principle of egoism has no special force?

6. Egoism • Suppose Parfit’s model of the self is correct. Does it really show that the principle of egoism has no special force? • One might be concerned that it really shows that you should only worry about yourself here and now (e.g. don’t save for your retirement, because that $$ will be enjoyed by another person)

7. Egoism • Suppose Parfit’s model of the self is correct. Does it really show that the principle of egoism has no special force? • One might be concerned that it really shows that you should only worry about yourself here and now (e.g. don’t save for your retirement, because that $$ will be enjoyed by another person) • Then again, if that egoism-of-the-present-moment looks problematic or irrational, then maybe this should convince us that regular egoism is also problematic

8. The fear of death • How is Parfit’s model of human existence supposed to allay the fear of one’s own distant death? • Does it? • Is he right that this is not a natural fear but one generated by questionable philosophical considerations?

9. Robert Nozick “The Experience Machine” (From Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974)

10. What matters in human life? • According to hedonism all that matters is happiness

11. What matters in human life? • According to hedonism all that matters is happiness • According to (crude) subjectivism, all that matters is subjective experience

12. What matters in human life? • Subjectivism is a broader position; you could be a subjectivist while valuing only pleasure, or happiness, or pain, or the enjoyment of great art, or a stimulating mixture of pleasure and pain, or the satisfaction of earlier desires, or a stimulating mixture of the satisfaction and frustration of earlier desires, or the feeling of writing great poetry… or… • The key characteristic of subjectivism is that how well things are going for a subject is assessed from within that subject’s perspective. Things the subject couldn’t know about do not affect how well her life is going.

13. The Experience Machine • Suppose you could get a machine to deliver you any sort of experience. • You get to choose in advance what sorts of experiences you will receive. • While you are in the machine you won’t be aware that you are in a machine

14. The Experience Machine • Suppose you could get a machine to deliver you any sort of experience. • You get to choose in advance what sorts of experiences you will receive. • While you are in the machine you won’t be aware that you are in a machine (unless of course you’ve pre-selected the option of being aware of this)

15. The Experience Machine • Notice that you don’t have to choose blandly pleasant experiences • You could choose to experience a life of struggle and conflict; you could choose to experience the inner life of a great artist, war hero, diplomat, inventor, surgeon, scientist, actor…

16. The Experience Machine • Would you plug in? • ‘What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?’

17. What is missing in the machine? • Nozick: • 1. We want to do certain things, not just feel that we are doing them. (Is that rational of us?) • 2. We want to be a certain sort of person. (Is that rational? And is it right that the guy plugged into the machine isn’t any type of person? Why does Nozick think you can’t say the machine-stimulated ‘war hero’ is brave?)

18. What is missing in the machine? • Nozick: • 3. Contact with a deeper reality. What is wrong with being restricted to a man-made virtual reality? Why does contact with something more matter to us (if it does)?

19. Other machines • What about a ‘transformation machine’ that could turn you into a braver or more artistically talented person? • Do you feel that it would be OK to use such a device? How is this different from the experience machine?

20. What matters? • What matters for people other than their own experiences? • Why? • What do we discover about ourselves thinking through these experiments?