Alexander Pruss has a great question in mind.
"Suppose I have a transtemporal communicator. In the morning I come across a note from the future: "Alex: Send George a check for $100 per the promise of February 16, 2043. Best wishes, Alex". Maybe I really would be bound?"
I reprint it here without its preceding context because I feel like it stands alone fairly well. A simple question without a simple answer. Essentially, if you had the ability to communicate with your future self, are you bound to the promises that your future self makes?
I've spoken before about change - specifically finding it odd that I can't remember what my goals were at 18 years old and the absurdity of sticking to an ideal made at that age. So, unsurprisingly, I am of the camp that you're not bound to the promises made by a future-you.
My reasoning: because it's a different person.
We are constantly changing. Cell death and growth, hairstyles, desires. Even our DNA is being re-written from time to time by retro-viruses. Nothing is sacred apparently. But apart from physical changes and mental changes that occur so slowly that we don't really notice - there is a drastic, noticeable difference between who were are today and who were were a year ago, who we'll be in ten years, and who will be lying on our death bed.
From our perspective, time always lurches forward, but one has to question whether it exists at all or whether it's really "moving in one direction". And if the directionality of it is actually neutral, you'd be just as bound to fulfill a promise you made in the future as one that you made in the past.
I propose this complication, though:
Since we change so much throughout the course of a lifetime, it's possible that the Scott Of the Future (SOF) might become immoral! He might join a gang, a cult, start selling drugs, become a contract killer, or a Republican. Who knows what life events could set SOF down this path, but it's possible.
So let's say that Scott of the Future calls me on the time-phone and tells me that he (we, us, I?) owes $1,000 to a local gang leader who will use the money to buy weapons that he'll then use to murder several rival gang members. Am I ethically bound to the promises I make? Or to the general ethics of not funding murder?
Pruss's original post with the question is here. He uses the situation to question the asymmetry or symmetry of time, and I'm afraid I'm looking at it more morally. Go figure.
I suppose there are a ton of good questions that arise from being able to communicate with your future-self - could you avoid disasters? change the course of time with information? - but I think an important one just to wonder what it would be like to sit down with yourself at 50 to see the person you've become.
What would you tell yourself? What if you got to meet yourself at 16? How hard would you slap some sense into them? Would it be like meeting a stranger?
I feel like this fits perfectly into my recent mindset of questioning what we are owed. What we should expect to get out of life and out of our friends. What we owe ourselves is just an interesting twist on that idea. But it's an important one. And one I haven't quite figured out yet.
3 comments:
Some of these moral questions arise equally with regard to promises from the past. Let's say I am 60 years old, and I find, buried at the back of a drawer, a note from myself: "On May 1, 2008, send George a check for $100, per the promise of February 16, 1966." I don't remember what promise I made back when I was 18 (I hope the arithmetic works out), and why I made it, but I have no reason to doubt the genuineness of the note. It seems that then I am still bound by the promise, even if my character has since changed significantly, unless I have reason to think that there are good defeaters for the promise (I am obliged not to keep a promise to do something bad).
If one weren't bound by promises that spanned a character change, then one could tell the credit card company: "That $100,000 debt, it's not mine. I have no obligation to pay it. The debt was incurred by a past self who was immoral, imprudent and completely different from me. In fact, a sign of that past self's difference from me was that he took out such a debt, which is something I would never do."
Not only would the credit card company not care about the change of character--that's no surprise--but I think they would be right not to care about it. The debt is one's own, whether one has changed in character or not. No?
@Alex
Instead of living in the thought-experiment mode, I will try to rack up a significant debt and then try to argue with Visa that I don't really owe it using your arguments. We'll see how it goes.
Of course, you're right.
There is something counterintuitive (and something ethically provable) about such a refutation.
But there is also something counterintuitive about you being "the same person" throughout life. Of course we're pointing out a thousands-of-years-old question.
I also feel I would be in the right to respond to my future-self by saying, "I decline to make good on the promise at this time, hoping that you will be able to do so in your near-future." Besides, he (I) have the same obligation to fulfill that promise as I do. Isn't it ethically acceptable to procrastinate if space-time is neutral?
Post a Comment