#parfit

Pain on a Tuesday

(Pictured: Sharon Street, a metaethics specialist and proponent a moral philosophy of irrational attitudes. Street borrowed Derek Parfit’s ‘Future Tuesday Indifference’ for a 2009 paper in which she defends Humean constructivism, a brand of antirealism named after David Hume wherein moral facts start within us.)

Indy is arranging his next dentist appointment with a booking clerk.

Indy asks for Tuesday: the day on which he prefers his agony. He doesn’t want to experience pain; he reasons this much. However, he is indifferent to pain which occurs on this day. What does this say about us?

Indy is aware that anaesthetic will only be available from Wednesday, for which there is an available slot. But he isn’t keen: his attitude is such that he wants Tuesday. Thus he can be considered irrational because there is no strong reason to prefer more pain on Tuesday. He doesn’t try to rationalise it, though, only call it an ‘odd’ preference which relieves him of anaesthetic-free horror.

But Sharon Street says we shouldn’t be dismissive. While Derek Parfit saw a ‘bright line’ between rational hedonic reasons (to do with pain) and irrational meta-hedonic reasons (not to do with pain), Street argues that, generally, they are of the same species in our complex motivational structures, born in our rich evolutionary history.

Street then asks us to consider attitude-dependent conceptions of value in morality. Attitudes do matter, she says, even though they give rise to absurdities. We could, for example, live under a moral obligation to cabbages (I do, especially when braised) but there would be nothing alarming about this kind of relativism. Reasons and attitudes align; and in the rare case they don’t:

‘[T]he substantive content of a given agent’s reasons is a function of his or her particular, contingently given, evaluative starting points . . . [Consequently] truth and falsity in the normative domain must always be relativized to a particular practical point of view.’ (Street 2008, 2010)

Hence ‘Hitler was morally depraved’ is a true claim because ‘valuing genocide’ was amongst Hitler’s evaluative attitudes. Conversely, moral realists claim that Hitler was morally depraved regardless of his and our stances towards genocide. 

So our attitudes matter. Thus what does your attitude towards today say about you? 

References

Sharon Street, 2008, ‘Constructivism about Reasons’. 

—, 2009, ‘In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference Ideally Coherent Eccentrics and the Contingency of What Matters’. 

—, 2010, ‘What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics’.

‘This potion might paralyse me, might make me forget why I'm here, might cause me so much pain I beg for relief. You are not to indulge these requests. It's your job, Harry, to make sure I keep on drinking this potion, even if you have to force it down my throat.’ — Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) 

Like Dumbledore, we make promises which we go on to contradict, creating fascinating ethical dilemmas for those around us. 

We are divided within ourselves (metaphysically split?). Am I one single set of interests? I do not know.

Then how can you help me? How, even, can I claim today that I can help myself tomorrow?

There was a single philosophical question that occupied the philosopher Derek Parfit. Was morality objective? Parfit was desperate to believe that it was. But many philosophers believed that it was not, at least not in the sense that Parfit meant. Read more from author David Edmonds and join the discussion.