Philosophy 290-6

What role does time play in our ethical theorizing? This seminar will survey recent work in normative ethics on various aspects of this question.

We will begin by looking at the relationship of moral agents to their own future actions. Consider the debate between actualists and possibilists about moral rightness. Do facts about what I will do affect what I ought to do? Suppose it is Professor Procrastinate’s turn to serve as department chair. Procrastinate, however, can foresee that, if he agrees to become Chair, he will skimp on his duties, with highly detrimental consequences for the department. Is it therefore right for Procrastinate to refuse to become Chair – despite the fact that it is entirely possible for Procrastinate to accept the position and to do a good job?

More generally: Under what conditions is it morally appropriate for an agent to treat her future actions as ‘given’ – to take a purely ‘predictive’ rather than a ‘deliberative’ stance towards her own agency? Could Professor Procrastinate justify his refusal to become Chair to others by appealing to his future laziness? When is treating one’s future behavior as given a problematic form of evasion? Are there situations where it is, by contrast, the responsible thing to do?

What of the future behavior of other agents? Consider the problem of intervening agency: I can foresee that if I perform some action A that would normally be permissible or even morally optimific, another agent will perform some voluntary action B that seriously harms an innocent third party. If, knowing this, I do A, am I morally responsible for the harm that the intervening agent inflicts? How do the consequences of another person’s future actions affect my own reasons for action? Relatedly, to what extent am I required to pick up the slack for other people’s predictable failure to live up to their responsibilities?

We will spend some time thinking about the morality of threats and deterrence. When threats are morally wrong, what makes them wrong? Can it be morally permissible to make threats, in order to deter others from aggression or wrongdoing, that it would be impermissible to carry out?

Next, we will consider a set of questions about a person’s moral power to alter the ways in which he is free to act in the future and the ways in which others may permissibly act towards him. I can seek to constrain my future actions, either morally, by making promises or entering into binding agreements with others, or causally, by closing off certain future options. What are the limits on this power? Are there certain promises that fail to bind my future self? Are there some ways of causally constraining my future actions that ‘wrong’ my future self? Relatedly, I have the moral power to make it permissible for others to treat me in ways that would otherwise have been morally wrong – by signing an advance directive, for instance, or by alienating certain future rights of mine, e.g. through entering into a non-disclosure agreement. Again, what are the limits on this moral power? Are some of my rights inalienable? Are there some ways of treating me that I can consent to contemporaneously, but not in advance or in retrospect?

The second half of this course will focus on changes in our attitudes over time, and their normative significance:

(1) Our pre-theoretical attitudes towards our own wellbeing are often temporally asymmetric. All else equal, we would prefer our pleasures to lie in the future and our sufferings in the past, even at the price of experiencing less pleasure and more suffering over the course of our lifetimes. (Suppose you awake in a hospital bed, groggy and confused. You’re unsure what exactly has happened. What you know is that today is either (i) the day *after *a very painful operation or (ii) the day before a moderately painful operation. Which would you hope is the case, (i) or (ii)? Many answer (i), although this way their life will have contained more pain overall, all else equal). Are such temporal asymmetries of self-concern rationally justified, or are they a rationally indefensible form of time-bias? Does our answer change when we shift from the first-personal to the third-personal case?

(2) In what way do a person’s future attitudes, such as satisfaction or regret, bear on the normative evaluation of her present actions, and vice versa? Is the fact that in the future she will be glad that she did action A always a sound consideration in favor of choosing A? If not, why not? Similarly, is the claim that an agent acted wrongly by doing action B compatible with the claim that, in the future, it will be reasonable for her not to regret, indeed to affirm, having done B?

(3) Can our own agency affect the balance of reasons between two courses of action? Are there ‘voluntarist reasons’, i.e. considerations that become reasons for actions only through an act of will, such that we sometimes make it true, through an act of will, that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another? Are there transformative choices which alter, in some fundamental choice, ‘who we are’? Can such choices be rational?