Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Derek Parfit and Sydney Shoemaker have famously argued that, even if you dread the ordinary prospect of an ordinary death, you have no good reason similarly to dread the prospect of your not surviving past midnight in the unusual event that someone else just like you who bears certain causal relations to you will come into being after midnight and take up your life where you’ve left off. In defending this claim, they appeal to the fact that if, at midnight, you split, amoeba-like, into two beings just like you, then you will not survive past midnight. Rather, you will simply cease to exist, and two new persons will come into existence. Yet we have excellent reason to believe that you should not dread the prospect of your amoeba-like fission as you would dread the ordinary prospect of an ordinary death. Rather, the prospect of fission is about as good as the prospect of ordinary survival. More controversially, Parfit and Shoemaker also maintain that you should not dread the prospect of your instantaneous and painless vaporization at midnight, assuming that you know that you will immediately be replaced by at least one replica that is modeled on you.  In this talk, I shall concur with Parfit and Shoemaker that you should not dread the prospect of your amoeba-like fission but reject their claim that you should be as sanguine regarding the prospect of your vaporization and replication. Rather, I think there is good reason to believe that the prospect of your vaporization and replication is just about as bad as the prospect of ordinary death without subsequent replication. In defending this position, I shall offer a different explanation from Parfit’s and Shoemaker’s of why you have good reason to anticipate the experiences of your post-fission successors. This explanation appeals to the following difference between fission and replication: in the former (fission) case, you become somebody else, whereas, in the latter (replication) case, you are merely replaced by somebody else.