Love and nonexistence

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 266-288

  Velleman, J David ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 52949091921     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2008.00139_3.x     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. This case is discussed by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chap. 16.
2. McMahan makes the same point, on p. 155.
3. On the role of perception in love, seemy "Love as a Moral Emotion," Ethics 109 (1999): 338-74
4. reprinted in Self to Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 70-109
5. and "Beyond Price," Ethics 118 (2008): 191-212.
6. Thus, an expectant mother who says that she already loves her future child may not be speaking the truth, in philosophical strictness. She may be imagining how she will love the child, mentally simulating what it will be like to love the child, or having fantasies of loving it. But until she becomes acquainted with it, her emotion cannot be love. When does a prospective mother become acquainted with her child? I would say that she becomes acquainted with it when she first perceives it. And when does she first perceive her child? I would say that she perceives the child at the point traditionally called quickening, when the fetus begins to make movements that she can feel. Thus, the tradition that interpreted quickening to be a morally relevant threshold was not just a superstition, in my view; it drew what may indeed be a morally relevant distinction.
7. This dissolution of the problem would be unnecessary if our emotions led us to judgments positing distinct and incomparable values. If we judged merely that the girl's initial decision was imprudent, whereas the baby is beautiful, then we could interpret our judgments as descriptions satisfiable in the one and only actual world, on the grounds that beauty has nothing to do with prudence. Pluralism about values could thus spare us from resorting to antirealism. But I am imagining us as drawing - as I think we do draw - all-things-considered conclusions about whether a baby, or this baby, should have been brought into existence. And I amimagining that, whereaswe still think that the girl shouldn't have had the baby she did, we think otherwise about this baby's having been had. Pluralism about value won't render these judgments compatible. Parfit considers other ways of dealing with the conflict, but none strikes me as satisfactory. For example, Parfit claims that, were he the child of a birth that was unfortunate when viewed prospectively, he would agree in retrospect that he shouldn't have been born. I think that he might indeed hold this judgment, but I think that he would also be glad to have been born, so that the former judgment doesn't settle the issue. I also prefer this solution to the one favored byMcMahan, according to which we change our minds about the girl's decision to have a baby. McMahan considers a solution like mine, when discussing the evaluative import of "attachments to particulars," but he ultimately drops the solution in favor of one based on a change of mind.
8. See Matthew Hanser, "Harming Future People," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 47-70, at p. 61.
9. I do not accept Allan Gibbard's conception of value judgments as hypothetical plans for what to do if in the relevant agent's circumstances (Thinking How to Live [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003]). Plans are not evaluative, and evaluations are not plans. When the girl decided to have a baby, the natural expression of her plan would have been "I'm going to have a baby" - not "Having a baby is the thing for me to do." And if she had said, "Having a baby is the thing forme to do," a natural rejoinder would have been "So are you going to have one?" - which would have been an inquiry as to her plan.
10. Some think that a life is definitely not worth continuing if the benefits of each additional moment are less than the burdens. I do not believe that the value of continuing a life can be reduced to a balance of these momentary values. See my "Well-Being and Time," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991): 48-77
11. reprinted in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56-84.
12. See Bernard Williams's discussion of "categorical desires" in "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality," in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 82-100.
13. Seep. 487: "[Aperson]might... decide thathewas gladabout or regretted what lay behind him. He might decide that, at some point in the past, if he had known what lay before him, he would or would not have wanted to live the rest of his life. He might thus conclude that these parts of his life were better or worse than nothing. If such claims can apply to parts of a life, they can apply, I believe, to whole lives." In my view, Parfit here misinterprets the comparison that is made by someone who regrets having continued to live after some point in the past. According to Parfit, the person is judging his life since that point to have been "worse than nothing" - worse, that is, than nonexistence. I would say that the person is judging his life with its recent continuation to be worse than the life he would have had without it.
14. For this point, and its application to the non-identity problem, see Rahul Kumar, "Who Can Be Wronged?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 99-118.
15. Ordinarily, the prospect of waiving a right arises in the context of three possible outcomes. We can (1) retain the right in order to ensure either (a) that it will be fulfilled or (b) that we will have legitimate grounds to protest its nonfulfillment; or we can (2)waive the right. Entertaining all three outcomes, we may prefer to retain the right, even though we would prefer to waive it if outcome (1)(a) were excluded. That is, we may think that retaining the right for the sake of possibly having it fulfilled would be sensible, but that retaining it merely for the sake of having grounds for protest would be petty and foolish. Given our preferences, the party against whom we hold the right can induce us to waive it if he can manage to take outcome (1)(a) off the table. But surely a waiver obtained by such means would not be normatively valid. He cannot gain release from fulfilling our right by confronting us with the fact that he isn't going to fulfill it, so that our only alternative to waiving the right is to retain it for the petty purpose of lodging a protest. To be sure, the child of a fourteen-year-old mother cannot exactly claim that she has taken outcome (1)(a) off the table: It was never on the table for this particular child. And yet the child may still waive his birthright because his only alternative is to complain that it cannot be fulfilled. And such a waiver is granted less voluntarily, because it is granted in the presence of fewer relevant alternatives, than the waiver of a right that can still be fulfilled. Its validity is therefore questionable.
16. This conception of value is defended at greater length in "A Theory of Value," Ethics 118 (2008): 410-36
17. and in Lecture 2 of How We Get Along (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
18. When I speak of action, I mean specifically human action. I agree with Harry Frankfurt that the concept of human action may be "a special case of another concept whose range is much wider," in that it encompasses action on the part of nonhuman organisms ("The Problem of Action," American Philosophical Quarterly 15 [1978]: 69-79
19. reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], pp. 69-79, at p. 79). As Frankfurt explains, the generic concept is that of behavior controlled by the organism, not just one of its constituent subsystems or parts.
20. On this subject, see my "What Happens When Someone Acts?" Mind 101 (1992): 461-81
21. reprinted in The Possibility of Practical Reason, pp. 123-43
22. and "Identification and Identity," in The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes From Harry Frankfurt, ed. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 91-123
23. reprinted in Self to Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 330-60.
24. See also "The Way of the Wanton," in Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, ed. Kim Atkins and Catriona MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2007).
25. Here I am ignoring the case of acting or responding for bad reasons, which do not actually make the action or response appropriate. The case of bad reasons must be analyzed in terms of good ones, which must therefore be analyzed first.
26. Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron, "Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30 (1974): 510-17.
27. I review related research in "From Self-Psychology to Moral Philosophy," Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000): 349-77
28. reprinted in Self to Self, pp. 224-52. Among my claims in that paper is that various disagreements among researchers in this field - which I am glossing over here - are based on misunderstandings that obscure broad areas of agreement.
29. S. E. Brodt and P. G. Zimbardo, "Modifying Shyness-Related Social Behavior Through Symptom Misattribution," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41 (1981): 437-49.
30. See J. D. Laird, "The Real Role of Facial Responses in Experience of Emotion: A Reply to Tourangeau and Ellsworth, and Others," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47 (1984): 909-17
31. S. E. Duclos, J. D. Laird, E. Schneider, M. Sexter, L. Stern, and O. Van Lighten, "Emotion-Specific Effects of Facial Expressions and Postures on Emotional Experience," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 100-108.
32. For an insightful description of this process as it may take place in child development, see Barbara Herman, Moral Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 13-18.
33. In "The Authority of Affect," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2001): 181-214, Mark Johnston argues that the positive or negative affect involved in a desire can render its motivational force intelligible by presenting its object as "appealing" or "repellent." I am not speaking of intelligibility in this sense; I am speaking instead of the psychological-explanatory intelligibility of a response, in light of its role in a person's mental economy.
34. I don't mean to deny the possibility of sick and offensive humor. But these forms of humor usually work by testing the limits of the disgusting or offensive; they fall flat as soon as they cause genuine disgust or offense.We laugh partly out of surprise at what we can see or hear without becoming sick or angry; beyond that point, the laughing stops.
35. On a particular occasion, of course, the relevant similarity may not be an intrinsic quality of the joke itself: What makes it intelligible for me to laugh on this occasion may be that I'm drunk or nervous, which would make it intelligible for me to laugh at just about anything. Yet I amalso under rational pressure to identify kinds of jokes that regularly tend to amuse me by themselves, so that I can comprehend my responses to jokes more generally, without reference to the circumstances. And a joke that's amusing for me on this occasion because I'm drunk or nervous may not be intrinsically amusing for me - not "really" amusing, I might say - because it is not the kind of joke that generally makes it intelligible for me to laugh. This notion of what is "really" amusing (or desirable or admirable or whatever) solves a problem raised by Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson in "The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65-90.